The city’s overall recycling rate or diversion rate remains at historic lows. Recycling and trash outside a home in Queen Village Maxine Mayer for Billy Penn and Green Philly Recycling rates drop to nearly half vs. On Bernstein’s block, he noticed the Streets Department resuming regular recycling pickup in April, but he remains skeptical of the city’s will and ability to properly handle waste.Īs a taxpayer, Bernstein said, he felt like he was being defrauded. Several survey respondents also said they’d started paying a private contractor for the service. They were annoyed to look out the window last fall to see city sanitation workers tossing the family’s recyclables into a garbage truck along with the trash, which would all ultimately end up in a landfill or incinerator.īernstein signed up with private company Rabbit Recycling, which picks up a portion of his recyclables once a month. We’re going to a lot of effort to wash and sort and separate.” “We’re washing out our containers and we’re breaking down our boxes. We have a young child, another in kindergarten, and you know, it’s a delivery world right now,” said Bernstein, a real estate agent. He and his wife Tegan are enthusiastic recyclers. Tweet from family goes through enough cardboard boxes, glass bottles, and plastic containers to fill three blue recycling bins a week. “When in fact the trash men are not recycling.” When city officials say, ‘Trust the fact that we do recycle’… it all just seems lip service to feel like they’re a green city,” said Germantown resident Joseph Bernstein. Residents who see differences with their own eyes find that line hard to swallow. This spring both city recycling director Kyle Lewis and sanitation workers union president Charles Carrington said separate recycling collection was the norm (although they acknowledged some unauthorized mixing may still occasionally occur).īy mid-April, Streets had been running separate pickups “for a number of weeks now, if not months,” Lewis said during an interview on WHYY’s Radio Times. More recently, Streets has pointed to weather and contamination as reasons for combining.
In 2019, China stopped accepting contaminated recyclables from the U.S., sending the cost of recycling soaring and leading the city to temporarily send at least half of its recyclables to an incinerator. The Philadelphia Streets Department has instructed workers to put recyclables in the trash several times over the last few years. Some frustrated residents pay for private recycling pickup Nearly half of those said it happened at least five times during that period.
GARBAGE TRUCK JOBS NEAR ME ZIP
More than 80% of respondents - who represented 47 of the city’s 48 ZIP codes - said they’d seen mixing occur between November of last year and this spring. Over a third of respondents in an online survey of 930 people reported the same experience as Kulick, saying they’d seen mixing of trash and recycling in March or April of this year. “We’ll see if it’s a one-off thing,” he added, “or if that is their new norm again after ‘fixing it’ for a few weeks.” After his most complaint in February, Streets initially seemed to have resolved the problem, but at the end of March he noticed sanitation workers were mixing materials again. Kulick has submitted 311 reports about mixing twice in the last couple years, he said. “On my block at least, both trash and recycling got collected in the same truck.” This results in greater productivity from the laborers on each truck, who no longer are idle while their vehicles are off to dump the loads.Ĭhicago's municipal garbage trucks bring their refuse to Sorting Centers.Tweet from back to throwing everything together,” East Kensington resident Nicholas Kulick said in April.
Parked fully loaded at the end of the day, they are then shuttled to their dump sites by specially assigned second-shift drivers. Now, the truck crews skip their last dumping and remain longer on their routes. Previously, the garbage trucks needed to leave their alleys in time to dump their loads and return to their assigned yards by the end of each shift. The average number of living units collected daily by each garbage truck has been increased, in part due to the creation of a "night shuttle" program. Pick-ups are weekly, Mondays through Fridays. Residential Garbage produced from 600,000 households in single-family homes or apartment buildings of four units or less (others must arrange for private garbage collection).Ĭhicago collects approximately 1.1 million tons of residential garbage and recyclables annually.
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