ST. LOUIS — Two weeks after city officials announced the resumption of regular collection of recyclables from alley dumpsters, members of an aldermanic committee on Thursday questioned if that’s spurring less pickup of refuse in some areas.
“If you’re doing recycling and you’re picking up trash less often, that’s not a good tradeoff,” Streets Committee chairwoman Sharon Tyus told Streets Director Betherny Williams.
Tyus also reiterated her allegation that residents of her 1st Ward and some other parts of largely Black north St. Louis have had substandard refuse pickup for some time, not just since citywide collection of recyclables began again last week.
Agreeing was Alderman Pam Boyd, who represents another north side ward, the 27th.
“North St. Louis was already behind the eight ball,” Boyd said.
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Cardboard pokes out of a recycling dumpster, next to a trash bin in an alley in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood on June 9, 2022.
Meanwhile, Alderman Joe Vaccaro said he has gotten numerous complaints about the trash not being picked up often enough from alley dumpsters in his largely white 23rd Ward in the southwest part of the city.
“We’re literally having to put trash in the car and drive through the neighborhoods” to find empty dumpsters to use, Vaccaro said.
Williams denied that trash pickup was being cut in some areas due to the resumption of recyclable collections. “At no given time did we or the mayor’s office or anyone else say stop picking up trash to start recycling,” she said.
Williams also said that she and her department understand that “trash is the No. 1 priority.”
She said the city is picking up trash and recycling at least once a week citywide.
Meanwhile, Randy Breitenfeld, the deputy refuse commissioner, told the committee that “this is the absolute worst time to start recycling back up when our trash is the heaviest it is throughout the whole year.”
A recycling dumpster awaits pickup in an alley in the Southampton neighborhood on June 9, 2022. In May, the City of St. Louis said its refuse crews would resume weekly collection of recycled items in areas with alley dumpsters — a service suspended in 2021 amid a shortage of truck operators. Photo by Jack Myer, jmyer@post-dispatch.com
While officials in late May had said the city had made some strides in reducing driver and mechanic vacancies, Williams and Breitenfeld said Thursday that it remains a problem.
As a result, Breitenfeld said, every day the refuse division falls short about 12 to 15 routes. Williams said there are roughly 105 routes served overall every week.
Collection of recyclables in areas with alley dumpsters, about 80% of the city, had been suspended last July due to employee shortages. Recyclable collection continued in other areas where rollcarts are used.
In announcing the resumption of recycling pickup, Williams and others in Mayor Tishaura O. Jones’ administration also said the city refuse division had begun an ongoing geographic information system analysis to determine which areas generate the most and least amounts of trash.
That would be used in the future to tweak collection routes on an ongoing basis, they said. It’s possible, Williams said then, that some routes with higher amounts of trash per dumpster would get more than the minimum once-a-week trash pickup cited on the city website.
A map delineating lower- and higher-yield areas of refuse produced in April showed that many, but not all, of the lower-yield areas to be on the north side.
That angered Tyus, who said the approach would hurt some Black neighborhoods. Every part of the city should get the same amount of pickups, she asserted, because the same $14-a-month trash and recycling collection fee is charged across St. Louis.
Williams said last month that such decisions would be based on the data and wasn’t a race or ward issue. On Thursday, she added that the data-gathering “is only a trial to see how we can work this out” and “nothing is in stone here.”
In fact, she said, later data showed about 10 of 50 areas shown on the map were “flipping” from one trash yield category to another.
Tyus, who had supported Jones’ bid for mayor in last year’s election, predicted that support for a Jones reelection bid in 2025 would drop in North Side wards if those areas aren’t treated fairly regarding trash collection.
Jones will be “another one-term Black mayor …if she continues with this trash thing,” Tyus said. The city’s two previous African American mayors, Freeman Bosley Jr. and Clarence Harmon, each served a single term and lost reelection races.
Tyus asserted that the city for many years had provided twice-weekly trash dumpster pickup.
Refuse Commissioner Todd Waelterman said last month that the city had been doing that “when we were fully staffed.”
“But we haven’t been fully staffed for years,” he said. “As the staffing was going down, we reduced that to one a week” or three times every two weeks depending on the area.
