Denver will deliver green compost bins to every solid waste customer who wants one by the end of March, city officials said in announcing an acceleration of their often-maligned rollout.
The citywide expansion of composting service had been expected to take until the end of 2025. But to hit the moved-up deadline — and limit the greenhouse gas emissions of its trucks — Denver will cut back on collecting recyclable items from customers’ purple bins. Recycling pickup will go from weekly to every other week starting Jan. 6.
The frequency of large-item pickup services will also be reduced from once every four weeks to once every nine weeks next year, the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure announced Thursday.
The coming changes won’t impact the base prices charged by the city. Pay-as-you-throw trash collection service will still be priced based on the size of the black trash bins each customer uses — ranging from $9 to $21 per month. The city has been providing $9 quarterly credits to customers who are still waiting for compost services. Those credits will end in April, according to DOTI.
The city pivoted to a fee-based trash service and weekly recycling pickups at the beginning of 2023 as it also began making compost pickup a standard free service. Based on observations since then, city officials expressed hope that the tweaks would improve reliability and help the city better meet its landfill diversion and greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.
“What we’ve learned over the years is (that) we are dramatically underusing our recycling bins each week. We are actually increasing our impact on the environment by running that much recycling (pickup) without that much demand,” Mayor Mike Johnston said in an interview. “We can use the people and the trucks to run those weekly compost routes all over the city.”
When the City Council approved the city’s transition of trash collection services to a program funded by fees on residential customers, one of the selling points was a doubling of recycling collection frequency from every other week to weekly.
But the added work put a strain an an understaffed waste collection department immediately, requiring the city to contract with a third-party hauler to provide those weekly pickups in some neighborhoods through 2026. Customers have been frustrated at times with missed pickups of different services.
In May, officials told a council committee that city collectors and contractors were completing 94% of their routes every week through that point in the year, down from 95% in 2023. That completion rate has slipped further since, according to DOTI leadership.
“These adjustments in our collection schedules will allow us to improve customer service, creating greater reliability in our collection services and improving route completion rates for trash, compost and recycling,” DOTI executive director Amy Ford said in a DOTI news release. “In other words, we pick up your solid waste the day we tell you we are going to pick it up. Today we are at 90%, and we are striving to be at 95%.”
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Source:: The Denver Post – Politics
