Miami’s recycling program is a hit with residents but with the industry in turmoil city officials are struggling to justify its existence.
Like thousands of residents across Coconut Grove and the rest of Miami, Fabio Iannelli dutifully performs his twice-a-month, Earth-conscious ritual of transferring his accumulation of bottles, cans, cardboard and other recyclable material to his city-issued blue garbage bin and rolls it to the curb.
What happens next is not exactly clear.
On occasion, says Iannelli, the city’s solid waste crews cruising down Poinciana Avenue in the South Grove have mixed the contents of his blue recycling bin with garbage from his and his neighbors’ green bins. A video he captured backs up the claim.
“You take the time to separate your stuff and they end up dumping it all together,” Iannelli tells the Coconut Grove Spotlight.
Iannelli isn’t the only Grove resident who’s noticed the practice. South Grove resident Steve Dloogoff says he’s witnessed both green and blue bins near his home on Franklin Avenue being dumped into the same truck. “I am not an expert on trash, but I can tell colors,” he says. “The regular trash is green, and the recycling is blue. My gut feeling is that it’s all going to the same place.”
Dloogoff’s suspicions, the Spotlight has learned, are mostly correct.
While city officials say no policy or directive would encourage workers to commingle household waste collections – describing such reports as rare anomalies within a city of nearly half a million people – the economics of municipal waste services clearly incentivize disposal over recycling.
As a result, some officials say, as much as 95 percent of all recycled material picked up by City of Miami collection trucks is never processed for reuse.
For the city, the incentive is contractual: it costs just under $80 a ton to dispose of regular garbage (at a landfill or a waste-to-energy facility) but the city pays an outside company $115 a ton to accept the recyclable material it collects.
And for the company – in this case Texas-based Waste Connections – the incentive lies in a depressed recycling market that at times may make it more profitable to simply ship the material off to a landfill or other disposal facility.
The city does not keep track of the recyclable material it collects and unloads to its vendor. Waste Collections does not share such data.
“Once it’s delivered [to a recycling recovery facility near the border of Miami and Hialeah] they become the sole owner,” explains Katie Grate, the City of Miami’s Department of Solid Waste director of operations.
Grate declined to say how much the city has paid Waste Connections in recent years for accepting its recyclable material. The city’s Department of Solid Waste and communications office did not respond to public records requests from the Spotlight seeking the city’s contract with Waste Connections, invoices for the past three years, or other documents related to recyclable materials delivered to its facility.
Waste Connections vice president Joe Box and chief financial officer Mary Anne Whitney – both identified as spokespersons on the company website – did not respond to phone messages and emails requesting comment for this report.
The recycling conundrum has not gone unnoticed at City Hall.
Earlier this year the City Commission gave tentative approval to a $60 increase in the annual garbage fee, to $440 per household, to fill a projected deficit of $20.2 million in its solid waste budget.
But District 1 Commissioner Miguel Gabela questions the wisdom of paying a premium – about 45 percent over the cost of household garbage disposal – to collect and dispose of recyclable material that never gets recycled. “[If] 95 percent is not being recycled,” he told a commission audience in June. “Maybe we need to look at that.”
As an alternative to the fee increase, Gabela floated the possibility of cutting recycling pick-ups to once a month, or to contracting out collection to private haulers. Gabela intends to raise the issue this month during budget talks for the upcoming fiscal year.
In a phone interview, Frank Casteneda, Gabela’s chief of staff, attributes the recycling data – showing that 95 percent of Miami’s recyclable collections are never reprocessed – to the city’s Department of Solid Waste officials. Castaneda says the figures were provided orally, not through written reports. Grate declined the Spotlight’s request to verify, or dispute, the figures.
“If most of the recycling is going into the regular trash and you’re paying more because it’s in a recycling container, does that make sense?” Casteneda says. “The commissioner is upset that everybody thinks we’re saving the planet and we come to find out that stuff is going to the dump anyway.”
District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo, who represents Coconut Grove, says he’s never seen any actual data to corroborate the 95 percent figure but recognizes the myriad challenges facing the city’s recycling program. “It’s a big problem,” he says.
In a recent phone interview, Pardo said he’d like to avoid cutting back on recycling pick-ups or handing off hauling service to a private company, and to do so would be open to an increase in the garbage fee – provided it is accompanied by a campaign to inform residents that it would be the first since 2014.
But the path forward is up to residents, Pardo insists. While he suspects recycling is a priority for many within District 2, his mind remains open. “I’m not voting on anything unless we know what the pulse of community is,” he says.
To be sure, Miami is not alone in its struggle to reconcile resident priorities with the realities of the recycling industry. “Recycling is not what it used to be,” Grate explains. “Many cities are looking at what steps to take to fix recycling programs or find alternatives – not just Miami.”
Grate describes an industry in a deep state of flux: a declining global market for recyclables and an increasing expense for processing contaminated materials.
Not long ago, she says, municipalities like Miami could sell collected recyclable materials to solid waste companies which, in turn, processed it for reuse. Now cities must pay them to take it off their hands.
While Miami and other municipalities have little influence over larger market forces, what they can control is the quality of the material delivered to outside waste disposal contractors. The cleaner it is the more likely it is to be reprocessed.
Some jurisdictions are asking residents to help. In June, the Miami-Dade County Department of Solid Waste began warning property owners found with contaminated materials in their recycling bins. After the third warning, homeowners will be issued a $152 citation.
Grate says the high rate of contaminated recycling materials within the ubiquitous blue bins is high and getting higher. She cites both indifference and confusion, noting the city’s six-month suspension of all recycling pick-up during the pandemic. “I think that played a huge role in the way residents were accustomed to using their bin,” she says. “We were allowing people to use that blue bin as an additional [garbage can]. And I don’t think that we’ve actually recovered from that.”
In recent years, the city’s solid waste department has hosted community events and sent out mailers to explain the dos and don’ts of recycling, Grate adds. “We try to encourage people to really focus on cans, bottles and dry cardboard and paper. Paper is a little tougher because if you throw a can in there and a little Coke gets on the paper, it’s no longer reusable.”
With the recycling industry in a downturn, Waste Connections is among the few companies willing to accept reusable materials – albeit at a price to the municipalities, Grate explains. “There’s a lot of vendors not even renewing contracts with cities across the nation so we’re lucky to have this one.”
Waste Connections is among 11 private waste haulers that also have agreements with the city to pick up trash from condominiums, apartment buildings and commercial buildings. The firms charge the condo associations and landlords but must share 24 percent of the gross receipts with the city.
The company’s dealings with the city are not without controversy. A 2018 city audit suggested that Waste Connections under-reported its gross receipts between 2013 and 2016 and owed Miami $1.1 million in fees from its private commercial hauling contracts.
The company allegedly misclassified trash collected from some of its regular routes and discarded materials at construction sites in roll-off containers as being exempt from its gross receipts, the audit states.
Waste Connections disputed roughly $650,000 of the $1.1 million that auditors claimed was owed. After accepting $500,000 to settle the dispute the city renewed Waste Connections’ agreement in 2021 for another three years, public records show.
As for Iannelli’s and Dloogoff’s claims of commingled garbage and recycling, Grate is at a loss to explain: “Drivers of the recycling trucks are trained to only pick up the blue bins.” As for the video evidence? Useless without a date and time stamp, she says.
Coconut Grove resident Rhonwyn Ullmann, who works as a medical caregiver, recently taught two clients to correctly clean and sort materials for their blue recycling bins. Little acts, she says, strung together can make a difference in the face of ecological disaster.
“You have to get people in the habit and encourage them to be more thoughtful about what we are doing to our planet,” Ullmann said. “If there’s a reason it is not being done because of money, then we need to figure out how to make it work. My recycling [bin] is much fuller than the other one. It’s on us citizens to do the right thing.”
