Mayor Cara Spencer’s staff says her controversial new recycling program is working and that they have the data to prove it.
“The theory was that we’re committed to recycling; we think we can do it better with this model,” says the city’s Chief Operating Officer Ben Jonsson. “The theory has been playing out as we hoped it would.”
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Prior to August, about 80 percent of the city recycled via shared blue bins in their alleys. In August, Mayor Cara Spencer took away alley pickups, meaning that if those residents wanted to recycle, they had to haul their recyclables to one of 44 drop sites across the city. Spencer’s rationale was that under the status quo, only about half of material put in the blue alley bins was being recycled. The rest ended up in a landfill because it was too contaminated with unrecyclable trash.
Spencer’s move drew significant pushback, with many taking particular umbrage because Spencer had run on a promise of providing better basic city services, not taking them away.
However, Jonsson says he has the numbers to show the new program has been a success. Over a recent one-month period, the city recycled 80 percent of the volume it did over the same period last month, but paid only one-third of the cost. This saved St. Louis about $100,000 over 30 days. The city’s contamination rate in that period dropped from 67 percent to 24 percent.
A deeper dive into new numbers from the city shows that from September 15 to October 15 last year, the city collected 846 tons of recyclable material. However, 571 of those tons were deemed too contaminated to be recycled, with the material turned away either at a transfer station or a recycling facility. Only 275 tons were recycled successfully. The city still paid the recycling rate of 846 tons, meaning a bill of $161,958.
This year, over that same period under the new system, the city collected 292 tons of recycling. Of that, 222 tons were successfully recycled. The city paid $57,576. That’s a savings of around 65 percent, Jonsson notes, while only reducing the amount of material being recycled by about 20 percent.
When the new policy was announced in August, earthday365 executive director Jessica Watson said that she was hoping for the city to find a way back to alley bin recycling as well as put together a Recycling Task Force to advise on how that could be done. She says that such a task force has been created and will meet for the first time next week. She says that she’s hearing from the mayor’s office that they are open to putting more houses on a roll cart system—if it can be funded. (Currently, 20 percent of city residents, primarily those without alleys, still enjoy recycling pickups, since household roll carts also generate significantly less contamination, and with Kansas City employing such a system citywide, some have suggested St. Louis could, too.)
As for the current system’s effectiveness, Watson says, “If the city is recycling almost as much, that’s great—the Task Force will be getting the actual weights from Republic and be able to double check that soon. But it doesn’t solve the accessibility issue, which will always be a problem for anyone who is disabled, elderly, or doesn’t drive.”
Last week, KSDK reported that residents of Southwest Garden were frustrated that their communal bins were overflowing. Neighborhood association president Michelle Pona told the news station that the same day the bins were picked up, they were full again by day’s end. “It was bad enough when it was, you know, in the alleys. At least we had more of control,” she said.
Jonsson says that the drop site on Sublette Avenue has been particularly problematic because it’s getting so much use. He acknowledged that the previous plan didn’t factor in that so many people would make their recycling runs on the weekends, meaning that even if there was capacity on Friday, by Monday it would be overflowing. The city has since added a Saturday pickup at the site, one of several similar adjustments made across the city. SLM checked in yesterday on a handful of the community drop sites downtown and in South City, including the one on Sublette, finding them either with ample capacity or full but not overflowing.
Says Jonsson, “We’re still working on it, we definitely have not arrived, but we’re really, really encouraged by the results in the last 60 days.”
