ST. LOUIS — The city’s top lawmaker says the recycling system here isn’t working and needs an overhaul.
Aldermanic President Megan Green said in a recent interview she’d been told by city staff that only about a third of recycling is actually getting recycled, a rate significantly worse than estimated national averages in recent years. The rest is going to the landfill.
The problem, Green said, is that people are putting so many things in the blue bins that shouldn’t be there, like plastic bags, food waste and other trash. Those materials overwhelm the truly reusable articles and spoil the whole load. That has to change, Green said.
“Even if we’re only recycling a third, it’s better than nothing,†she said. “But we definitely need to improve on the system.â€
Green’s comments were the latest on a longstanding issue that appears to have kicked into overdrive since officials reintroduced alley recycling last spring, after a 10-month hiatus, amid an ongoing shortage of Refuse Division truck drivers. The drivers struggled to pick up anything on-time and residents piled trash into whatever they could.
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Officials said late last year that contamination had gotten to the point where the city’s recycling processor was rejecting most of the loads coming its way, forcing the city to pay extra to truck it to the trash dump. Refuse Division foremen were empowered to trash recycling that looked dirty to try and keep the rest cleaner.
And last month, budget documents raised another concern: Costs are rising. The market for American recyclables has been scrambled by demands from China and other countries for less contaminated material. After years of effectively getting paid to go green, the city is now paying a higher rate to dispose of recycling than it does for regular trash. Overall waste disposal costs are expected to jump by $3.6 million, or 45%, in the new fiscal year, due in part to recycling.
Mayor Tishaura O. Jones said her team is working on it. She said the city has made progress in hiring and training new truck drivers and continues to do so.
Nick Dunne, a spokesman for Jones, said the administration also supports a proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year with money for educational mailers and new stickers for trash, recycling and yard waste dumpsters laying out what should and shouldn’t go inside.
“We’re hoping this will divert more contamination away from the recycling,†he said.
The Refuse Division has also set goals for the coming fiscal year to increase the number of drop-off recycling sites, where people are generally more conscientious, and hire enough staff to start clearing alley trash dumpsters twice per week rather than just once.
But Jones also said that her administration has inherited a lot of problems. Recycling and other city services have been “teetering on the brink for decades,†she said. And she said she’s open to new ideas.
Alderman Sharon Tyus, who until recently chaired the aldermanic committee overseeing the city’s recycling operations, said she’s been offering one for months: Stop alley recycling, and let the understaffed corps of trash truck drivers focus on trash. Residents who really want to recycle could bring their hauls to one of the drop-off sites.
“From Carondelet to Chain of Rocks Bridge, there are complaints all the time about trash,†she said. “There are very few about recycling.â€
Alderman Joe Vollmer, of the Hill, said advocates in his area have suggested making curbside recycling an opt-in program.
“It seems like people who want to recycle will,†he said. “Other people just abuse it.â€
Green, meanwhile, wants to focus on education and accountability. She said mailers and more information on dumpsters could help.
But she also said the city should look at a bigger change: moving away from the alley dumpsters that cover much of the city. Collecting recycling from multiple households in the large metal containers makes it difficult to determine who’s using the bins properly and intervene, she said.
Replacing them with roll carts — the smaller plastic containers on wheels assigned to individual households — would make it easier to hold polluters accountable, she said.
Green said she saw a similar approach work growing up in her hometown in upstate New York, which mandated the use of see-through trash bags and had collectors periodically examine the contents.
“If they saw that you were throwing away things that you could recycle, they wouldn’t pick it up,†she said.
A number of other cities have tried similar approaches with contaminated recycling, including , and . City workers look through recycling bins, and when they find contaminants, they put a tag on the bin that says what needs to go. If behavior doesn’t change, service may be suspended.
A recent campaign combining tagging efforts and educational outreach in a slice of Washington, D.C., claimed to cut contamination in the area .
The move toward roll carts alone would be a big shift in ºüÀêÊÓƵ. The vast majority of the city — about 80% — uses alley dumpsters, and has for decades.
But aldermen and the mayor’s office recently budgeted $1 million in federal pandemic aid to experiment with roll carts on certain routes.
Dunne, the mayoral spokesman, could not yet say where that program would be focused or when exactly it would start.