Mayor Cara Spencer鈥檚 staff says her controversial new recycling program is working and that they have the data to prove it. 鈥淭he theory was that we鈥檙e committed to recycling; we think we can do it better with this model,鈥� says the city鈥檚 Chief Operating Officer Ben Jonsson. 鈥淭he theory has been playing out as we hoped it would.鈥�
Prior to August, about 80 percent of the city recycled via shared blue bins in their alleys. In August, Mayor Cara Spencer took away alley pickups, meaning that if those residents wanted to recycle, they had to haul their recyclables to one of 44 drop sites across the city. Spencer鈥檚 rationale was that under the status quo, only about half of material put in the blue alley bins was being recycled. The rest ended up in a landfill because it was too contaminated with unrecyclable trash.
Spencer鈥檚 move drew significant pushback, with many taking particular umbrage because Spencer had run on a promise of providing better basic city services, not taking them away.聽However, Jonsson says he has the numbers to show the new program has been a success. Over a recent one-month period, the city recycled 80 percent of the volume it did over the same period last month, but paid only one-third of the cost. This saved St. Louis about $100,000 over 30 days. The city鈥檚 contamination rate in that period dropped from 67 percent to 24 percent.