How St. Louis could bring back recycling pickups—and actually make them work

Of course the city of St. Louis’ alleyway recycling dumpsters didn’t work. They had the wrong kind of feedback loops. 

We know they didn’t work because during an August hearing at the Board of Aldermen, Chief Operating Officer Ben Jonsson explained the city’s rationale for stopping recycling pickups: A sort of natural experiment had just unfolded. Officials had been looking at the three ways folks recycle—that is, via blue alley dumpsters (available to 80 percent of residents), roll carts (available to 20 percent of residents, mainly those without alleys), and drop-off centers (available to everyone)—and found that from January to May, about half of all material collected by the city ended up at the landfill because of contamination by trash. “I think we can agree nobody is happy with that,” Jonsson said. In fiscal year 2025, he pointed out, the city had spent $630,000 to recycle things that never got recycled.  

Yet when the tornado hit, Jonsson continued, the city suspended alley recycling but kept running its drop-off centers and roll-cart pickups—and saw the contamination rate drop to about 22.5 percent. So the blue dumpsters, it seemed, had been the drivers of noncompliance and, in every sense, waste. 

That finding makes intuitive sense. The city doesn’t mandate recycling, so anyone who contaminated an alleyway recycling bin with trash either (a) didn’t care about complying or (b) made a good-faith mistake. But in neither case was there any negative consequence, or any direct feedback at all, for the individual offender. 

Meanwhile, there was indeed a feedback loop for the civic-minded, says Jessica Watson, executive director of the local nonprofit earthday365. And it was a bummer. “Say you feel good about recycling,” she says. “You can take it to your alley dumpster and you see, ‘Oh, someone else just put in a tire, and somebody else put in a lot of styrofoam and plastic bags.’ That is demoralizing. And when you see that over and over and over, and there’s no way for you to know even where the contamination’s coming from or how to help address it, then of course you’re going to care less about participating in the recycling system.” 

In the short term, the city plans to add 13 more drop-off centers to the 25 already in place. Then, over the next year, it will be rethinking and tweaking its recycling system in response to an internal refuse audit and community engagement, Jonsson has said. So I asked Watson what possible changes she most hoped to see. One of her responses: a roll-cart system. “Kansas City has a really interesting model,” she says. 

Indeed it does—and its roll-cart system has a clear feedback loop. 

Kansas City distributed its lidded, 65-gallon roll carts in 2023. They’re city property, assigned to the residence, not to the resident. If you want to recycle, you place your roll cart in front of your domicile. (Kansas City doesn’t have alleys like St. Louis does.) But here’s the catch: If city workers on the truck open the lid and see noncompliant stuff on top—e.g., plastic bags, styrofoam, boxes with food—they affix a tag explaining the violation and leave the cart full. So the feedback is specific and the consequence felt by the resident. The result: About 80 percent of material sorted by the plants that receive Kansas City’s material reportedly gets recycled. Kansas City Public Works Director Michael Shaw says that 70–80 percent of residents use the service, and a resident survey published last September found that 73 percent of respondents were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with curbside recycling. 

Another clue that feedback loops work is the one that St. Louis County recently engineered and, according to Waste Diversion Supervisor Margaret Lilly, had a fruitful outcome. A team of auditors walked the streets of Ferguson on four separate weeks from August to October 2020 and inspected recycling roll-carts there. Whenever they saw noncompliant objects inside, they left an “oops tag” and explained the recycling mistake. By the fourth week, the number of carts deemed “good” (or compliant) had risen from 51 to 81 percent, Lilly reported in a slide presentation. 

How St. Louis could pay for a new roll-cart system remains to be seen. Kansas City funds its program through its earnings tax—cue the Missouri GOP’s gnashing of teeth—but it has also gotten a private boost: Entities such as The Recycling Partnership gave a combined $1.5 million to defray the municipality’s $8 million outlay for roll carts. In addition, that city’s curbside trucks don’t pick up glass, but the nonprofit glass recycler Ripple lists about 100 locations for its signature purple bins in the Kansas City area. They sit outside restaurants, hardware stores, and grocery stores. (Ripple has also been expanding its presence in St. Louis, with nearly a dozen sites around the metro and buy-in from Anheuser-Busch.) 

Roll carts have two other things going for them, Watson argues. One is that they serve folks who can’t easily drive their material to a drop-off center, whether because of age, disability, or personal bandwidth. Another is that introducing roll carts in the city may have little effect on St. Louis’ already car-clogged streets: She suggests the city could ask residents to wheel them not to the front curb but to the alley, where they could be handled by city trucks, which are used to passing through there. “It might not be as difficult logistically as we’re thinking,” she says. The difference would be that, unlike the blue-dumpster system, a cart would afford you more control over its contents; it’s not sitting out all week in a public alley where passersby can treat it like a trash can. Bring your roll-cart to the alley on the day of pickup, and odds are better that separating out your recyclables wasn’t a waste of time. 

Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, who had pushed for the August hearing to discuss the city’s recycling game plan, said during the proceedings that the city faced a handful of challenges going forward. One was a driver shortage created by the city’s paying truck drivers less than nearby communities and private haulers do. Another was that the city was charging households only $14 each quarter for waste removal. You get what you pay for, Schweitzer warned. “I am sure every one of my constituents that has emailed me asking for better service would rather spend five more dollars, 10 more dollars a year than have to email me once,” she said. As for policy preferences, Schweitzer did mention one: “Roll carts work.” True, she conceded, the city would need a lot of them, but cities with much more density have figured it out. Concluded Schweitzer: “I don’t really see why the city of St. Louis is just that different.”