ST. LOUIS — With its driver corps reeling from departures and retirements amid the pandemic, city officials stopped picking up alley recycling in the summer of 2021.
Now a customer wants her money back, and she’s hoping others do, too.
A lawsuit seeking class action status filed this week in circuit court says the city was wrong to keep charging the full $14-per-month collection fee when refuse workers were throwing recycling out with the trash.
“The City of ºüÀêÊÓƵ may not unilaterally suspend services indefinitely for its participation in a proprietary function,†the lawsuit reads, “yet still charge its customers monthly premiums for services it chooses not to provide.â€
The lawsuit, filed by Chesterfield resident Delia de Santiago Lizama, seeks a refund and penalties. Lizama, who says she owns property in the city, says recycling pickup has yet to fully return despite an official reintroduction in 2022, and asks a judge to order the city to make it happen.
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Attorneys for Lizama could not immediately be reached for comment Friday. Nick Dunne, a spokesman for the city, declined comment on much of the lawsuit, as is the city’s policy. He said the city has been providing recycling service since officials restarted alley collection.
If the lawsuit moves forward, it could be yet another problem for a recycling pickup operation that has struggled mightily in recent years.
The staffing shortage that hit the city’s Refuse Division in 2021 canceled recycling pickups for almost an entire year, frustrating environmentally conscious residents. Then-Alderman Joe Vaccaro, of Lindenwood Park, got to the point where he introduced a resolution demanding discounts on monthly bills until service was restored.
And when officials finally heeded calls to restore service in May 2022, the refuse division was still badly understaffed, and buckled under a seasonal surge in demand, issues with equipment and the renewed recycling mandate.
Dumpsters across the city were left untouched and overflowing for weeks. Residents flooded social media and aldermen’s voicemails with frustration.
Officials eventually added an extra shift for mechanics, and pickup drivers started working seven days a week to handle uncovered routes. But complaints from residents to the city’s Citizens’ Service Bureau about missed trash and recycling pickups remained at record rates for months. And the impact on recycling persisted well into the spring.
With the city struggling to empty the alley dumpsters twice a week as usual, officials said people were putting the extra trash into the blue recycling bins. The contamination got to the point where the city’s recycling processor was rejecting loads coming its way, forcing the city to pay extra fees to truck it to the trash dump.
Refuse Division foremen were empowered to dump recycling that looked dirty to try and keep the rest cleaner. But that prompted public frustration as people watched trash and recycling bins get emptied into the same orange trash truck.
Lizama references a report in the Riverfront Times about that mixing in the lawsuit, accusing the city of trying to “quietly continue†its move away from separate trash and recycling pickups.