St. Paul says it has tackled recycling problems

After a rough start last winter, St. Paul says it has put its recycling problems behind it and is ready to tackle its next challenge: organized garbage collection.

The new city-wide recycling initiative, All In, got off to a tough start. The switch from curbside to alley recycling, mechanized pickup and wheeled carts proved a challenge, and hundreds of residents reported missed pickups and recyclables left scattered on the ground. Complaints flooded the phones at Eureka, the Minneapolis company that won the recycling contract.

But city officials say the program is working much better a year in.

"We had a 13 percent increase in tons city wide," said Kris Hageman, environmental coordinator for the city's public works department. "But the better news there is that we saw a 15 to 25 percent increase in our neighborhoods that had historically been underperforming."

Places like the East Side, the North End and Frogtown hadn't been participating in St. Paul's longstanding curbside program as much as other parts of the city.

"It couldn't have gone much worse than the initial roll out last year," said Tim Santiago, who lives just off Hamline Avenue on a steep alley. Even with a private plowing service, snow and ice cling stubbornly to his narrow alley, shaded by garages.

The bin behind his house didn't get picked up for six weeks. His family of four stockpiled their cardboard and cans in the garage. Some of his neighbors just stopped recycling altogether. Eureka told them their alley was too slippery and steep to drive through safely.

"It has improved but they are still missing weeks, and weeks that I'll say that our garbage collectors haven't failed to pick up," said Santiago. "So it's not impossible to get through our alley."

His neighbor, Jean Davis, said she's actually seen the effort to get better behind her house.

"The driver personally walked down the icy alley and dragged the bins up to his truck to empty them out," said Davis, who's retired. "So it feels so much better that they're just trying a lot harder. But our alley is a pain."

The city credits residents with working harder to make the program work. Hageman said residents have figured out how to get their carts out where they're accessible to the automated equipment, learned the recycling schedules and kept the pressure on Eureka to get it right.

A clause in the city contract kicked in financial penalties for persistent missed pickups last spring, and initially cost Eureka thousands of dollars. But Hageman says penalties dropped off precipitously by January, with only six that month for a total of $300.

Still, the experience has left residents hesitant about the city's next big initiative — a complete overhaul of the residential garbage collection system. Rather than residents contracting separately with individual trash haulers, one hauler would be assigned to different regions in the city. Organized collection is expected to start in October.

Russ Stark, the city's chief resilience officer, led the effort when he was on the city council. He said residents will start hearing about preparations for the program in detail soon, probably by May.

"People are going to be asked to choose a cart size, so that we can actually order the carts and make sure we've got the right sizes coming in, and then just a lot of troubleshooting what some of those issues might be with the startup of the program," said Stark.

But the city learned one key lesson from the recycling program.

"We will not be rolling out carts in the winter," Hageman said.