Two weeks ago, the City of Philadelphia began giving a large swath of Center City and South Philly a second trash collection day. In online chat rooms and block-based convos, residents met the rollout of Mayor Parker’s latest Clean and Green pilot — a one-year program that will cost the City $11 million — with a mix of wary optimism and it’ll-never-work skepticism.
Some welcomed the second trash (not recycling) day as an opportunity to empty cans and keep homes cleaner — and to reduce the household trash that gets illegally dumped in City trash cans. (As the former Parks and Recreation Sustainability manager, I can attest that household dumping in park trash cans alone is a major problem.)
But as someone who has seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of the City’s waste system, I also fear that adding a second round of trash trucks each week will only increase litter. It’s an observable phenomenon that in most neighborhoods, the dirtiest day of the week is trash day, when garbage blows out of bags and cans and trucks often spill out refuse, mysterious liquids and broken glass onto streets.
An investment of $11 million dollars could go much farther than the twice-a-week trash pickup pilot to meet Mayor Parker’s goals of a “cleaner, greener and safer Philadelphia with economic opportunity for all.”
I also worry that since the extra trash day does not come with an accompanying recycling pickup, the pilot will result in greater amounts of waste going to landfills and to the incinerator in Chester, exacerbating that city’s residents’ already alarmingly high rates of asthma.
How else to spend $11 million
A second trash day cannot possibly be the best and highest use of taxpayer dollars. After all, several Philadelphia businesses already offer private services with proven records of reducing waste before it becomes landfill, litter or polluted air. What if, instead of putting $11 million towards a program that’s just more of the same ol’ waste management, Philly spent that hard-earned coin on expanding local services to households that may not otherwise be able to afford them? Or even expanding those services to entire neighborhoods, just to see how it goes?
Such out-of-the-box actions would not just be transformational or equitable: They could actually take a giant step toward solving Philadelphia’s waste and litter crisis. Here, four ways the City of Philadelphia could much more wisely invest in truly cleaner and greener neighborhoods:
1. Compost
According to Streets Department data, about 25 percent of Philadelphia’s household waste are food scraps from our kitchens. This food waste is a major contributor to household pests and odors — and a serious contributor to global methane, a potent and harmful greenhouse gas that fuels climate change. (Globally, organic waste in landfills — which includes food scraps but also lawn clippings and the like — causes 7 percent of methane emissions.)
To help combat these problems and emissions, about 8,000 Philadelphia households that can afford it currently pay for weekly compost pickups (of food scraps, paper products) from the private companies Bennett Compost and Circle Compost. Such services cost on average about $25 per month.
How much would it take to bring this service to more Philadelphians? According to Bennett Compost founder Tim Bennett’s back-of-the-envelope math, about $3 million to serve 15,000 households citywide for one year — netting a potential 375,000 pounds of waste.
2. On-demand recycling
Also in Philly, some households utilize paid, on-demand services like Rabbit Recycling for hard-to-recycle material pickups of lightbulbs, batteries, Styrofoam and materials that may have the chasing arrows symbol, but are not recyclable in Philly’s system.
As a Rabbit Recycling user myself, I keep an 18-gallon container in my pantry that I fill up once a quarter for an average charge of about $26 per pickup. If the City offered the same level of service to the approximately 130,000 households living under the poverty line in Philly, it would cost $13.5 million dollars a year. That’s not much more than the twice a week trash pilot that only serves two areas of the City.
There are other services, too. Retrievr collects textiles and electronics for recycling in Philadelphia at $12 per pickup. If the City wanted to put all its pilot money toward Retrievr only, it could pay for 916,666 pickups of items that take even longer to biodegrade than organic waste.
3. Smarter recycling
Because Philadelphia practices single-stream recycling, glass that mixes with aluminum, paper, plastic, etc. becomes too contaminated for the City’s Waste Management facility to use for anything but landfill cover — to the tun of 50 tons of glass yearly.
What if the City instead let residents opt into a program like Bottle Underground, a nonprofit that offers household glass pickup for $15 a month (with a $25 setup fee). Bottle Underground partners with recyclers and re-users like Remark Glass (maker of modern vases and glassware), and Olin Labs (which turns it into horticultural sand). Last year, the nonprofit recycled 300,000 pounds of glass that way.
Right now, the City is paying Waste Management to process this glass because it’s lost all value, and it’s still ending up in the landfill. Why not invest in Bottle Underground so the glass can actually be recycled?
4. Trash day street cleanups
The Philadelphia Citizen may be somewhat of a broken record on this, but what if, instead of adding a second trash collection day, the City employed a service that came to your street to clean up soon after the sanitation and recycling trucks left? Glitter is proven to work in neighborhoods that can spring for the service themselves, and in sections of the city where leaders have found funding to pay for the service.
Currently, Glitter charges $200 per block per month. This means if the City spent all $11 million on Glitter alone, 4,583 blocks would get cleaned every week — that’s about a quarter of the blocks in the entire city.
As a fellow business owner, I have to give tons of credit to the aforementioned businesses for keeping prices in a range that even working-class families can afford. But for our lower-income residents who can barely afford anything beyond the essentials, these services are out of reach. An investment of $11 million dollars could go much farther than the twice-a-week trash pickup pilot to meet Mayor Parker’s goals of a “cleaner, greener and safer Philadelphia with economic opportunity for all.” Let’s not throw away that opportunity by simply picking up more trash.
