For years, when city of St. Louis residents put recycling in an alley blue bin, it has been pretty much a coin flip if that material gets recycled or not.
That’s because the material in those bins was so contaminated with nonrecyclable trash, when it arrived at Republic Services, it was as often as not sent to the recycling facility as the landfill. The city’s rejection rate has hovered around 50 percent, says Ben Jonsson, the city’s chief operating officer.
Get a fresh take on the day’s top news
Subscribe to the St. Louis Daily newsletter for a smart, succinct guide to local news from award-winning journalists Sarah Fenske and Ryan Krull.
Jonsson unveiled a new recycling plan yesterday to the Aldermanic Public Utilities and Infrastructure committee. It would see alley recycling done away with in order to devote those resources to better trash pickup across the city. The 80 percent of city residents who used to have alley recycling will now have to take their recyclables to community drop sites.
Jonsson began his presentation to the committee with “a strong caveat up front that we are very open to getting this right for the residents of St. Louis; we don’t have a final solution. We’re on a journey.”
Jonsson readily admits the new system might not be entirely welcome among residents who must now take recyclables to a community drop site. Starting now, the blue alley bins will function the same as the brown ones, meant for landfill-bound refuse.
Jonsson tells SLM that this change is a sensible one because, due to the high contamination rate of alley bins, the city is essentially paying recycling prices for landfill service. The city pays $191 a ton for recycling. It costs $42 a ton to send trash to a landfill. But half the time the city was paying the $191 price, the material was going to a landfill anyway. This adds up to about $812,000 a year. “That’s money we’re not getting back any return on,” he says. “You’re just paying five times as much to put it in the landfill.”
Recycling will continue for the one-fifth of city households that use roll out bins—the smaller blue bins specific to a single house, which the city generally picks up on streets that don’t have alleys. Their contamination rate is much, much lower, around 20 percent.
“There’s something about a shared Dumpster that’s so accessible, and so close to the brown Dumpsters, that has resulted in it being so highly contaminated,” Jonsson says.
Jonsson, who retired from the U.S. Air Force after 26 years before coming to City Hall, developed the new plan after spending a significant amount of time working morning shifts and running routes with the city’s trash collectors. (“I may have gone down your alley, as a matter of fact,” he tells an SLM reporter after hearing where he lives.)
He said that in his experience as an Air Force colonel who helped coordinate aircraft moving cargo across the world was really helpful to fixing the city’s trash woes. “I’m a cargo pilot and used to being a part of a big fleet, a big operation, doing work that in some respects is not that dissimilar from in operation like refuse,” he says.
Last week, the mayor’s office met with a group of environmentalists to get their feedback on the plan, including people from EarthDay365 and the Missouri Botanical Garden.
Colonel Ben Jonsson.
Dan Guenther, the mayor’s liaison to the Board of Aldermen (as well as, some would say, the administration’s resident tree hugger) describes the meeting as positive. “This will help with overall refuse issues in the city of St. Louis,” Guenther says.
EarthDay365 Executive Director Jessica Watson testified at the hearing yesterday, saying that the city’s transparency was admirable, but that she was concerned that she didn’t see a way to return to alley recycling. “I think that that needs to be in place,” she said. She suggested the creation of a task force. She noted that community drop sites can be difficult for the elderly or disabled to access.
Chey Lovellette, the director of operations for EarthDay365, said that she also wanted to see the creation of a task force comprised of citizens with receiving know-how. She added that removing alley recycling seemed to run counter to Mayor Cara Spencer’s promise to boost city services.
A handful of other people spoke at the hearing, most pushing back against the plan.
Bevo Mill resident Lindsay Bendell said that the situation right now is absolutely not working in her neck of the woods. “Right now, as we speak, there’s a couch and a full size chair next to our Dumpster and the yard waste bin is so overfilled, it has created a mountain of yard debris which has a potential of catching fire at the cigarette or spark lands nearby,” she said. She said that her car’s access to the alley is so frequently blocked that she has started a segment on her Instagram account called, “What trash is in Lindsay’s driveway today?”
Guenther tells SLM that after the blue bins are marked for trash via new signage, city Refuse crews will be able to run pick-ups in alleys more frequently—from roughly once a week to twice a week—because separate trucks won’t have to handle trash and recycling. The capacity for trash will also essentially double in alleys in the city, hopefully leading to fewer overflows.
Residents currently on the alley system will still be able to recycle via community drop sites. Right now there are about 25 of those. The city plans to get that number to around 38, so that everyone in the city will live within one mile of one.
Prior to Jonsson’s remarks yesterday, legislative aides Kaitlyn Smith and Christian Bishop gave a thorough review of recycling around the country and internationally. They suggested allowing for “on demand” rather than scheduled bulk pick-up as well as adding a requirement that businesses with liquor licenses have a system to recycle bottles and cans.
