But your office building or favorite store or lunch spot might not do the same.
More than two decades after Philadelphia first passed ordinances听requiring businesses to recycle, there’s little evidence the city is doing much to enforce the laws or keep track of how many properties are complying with them, according to a review of records and data by the Inquirer and Daily News.
Consider:
• Nearly 40,000 business properties, or four-fifths of those operating in Philadelphia, have not filed required recycling plans with the city.
• The city’s database of those that have contains thousands of duplicate records, as well as outdated or missing property information.
• Streets officials don’t keep track of how many properties in the database have been inspected.
• One-third of the inspector positions in the Streets Department are vacant.
• The city has, on average, issued three recycling citations a day for commercial properties over the last nine years, yet collected only $108,000 in fines. By contrast, homeowners paid more than $3.7 million in fines in the same stretch, with inspectors handing out an average of 51 tickets a day.
The data also show that on average, nearly every visit to a business by an inspector has uncovered a recycling violation. But last year, Streets workers inspected only 782 businesses, which means the city could be losing out on at least tens of millions听of dollars听in revenue from fines each year.
City officials say they suspect there may be many businesses that recycle but haven’t filed plans. Data from haulers shows that听about 50 percent of the waste generated by the city’s commercial properties gets recycled.听But without the inspections or a complete database, no one really knows.
And as the Kenney administration works to fulfill a pledge to make Philadelphia听“zero-waste” by 2035, experts say commercial recycling has fallen by the wayside, potentially jeopardizing the mayor’s goal.
“Obviously, we’d like to see more businesses in compliance,” said Carlton Williams, commissioner of the Streets Department. But as with so many initiatives, Williams said, city workers lack the time and resources to fully enforce the law. The focus instead is on education over enforcement, and the 42 inspectors often simply give warnings when they spot a commercial violator.
Told about the newspapers’ findings, David Masur, executive director of PennEnvironment and chair of Kenney’s transition team on the environment and sustainability, said he wasn’t surprised. He said many buildings don’t recycle and others seem to pretend to do so, collecting recyclables in blue bins but then depositing them in trash dumpsters.
“It [is] a little bit of the wild, wild West,” Masur said Thursday. “They come out with a zero-waste plan, and it’s great to do that, but… if you don’t move quickly on this commercial issue, it’s hard to envision how you get to zero.”
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