Mayor Bill Peduto wants to dedicate half a million dollars next year to buying blue recycling bins for residents.
Mr. Peduto is seeking “to improve the quality of recycling in Pittsburgh and to boost efforts to meet zero waste goals,” according to a release sent by his office Wednesday.
The need for higher-quality recycling is evidenced by the city’s plummeting recycling revenue — a problem not unique to Pittsburgh as global market forces, namely China’s stricter importing policies, have sent recycling in the Western world into a tailspin.
Single-stream recycling — meaning putting all materials into one bin or bag — used to be profitable for cities. But China, historically the world’s biggest importer of recyclables, no longer accepts bales of plastics or paper contaminated with broken glass, greasy pizza boxes, coffee lids and other general trash.
The city is now in the midst of an education campaign to teach residents what should go in a recycling bin, and what should stay out. Glass or plastic bottles with lids removed? Yes. Plastic clamshell strawberry containers? No. The list goes on.
Single-use plastic bags that city residents have been trained to put recyclables in are also a contaminant to the system. In fact, workers at the city’s recycling sorting facility, Recycle Source in Hazelwood, rip the bags open to sort their contents and keep the bags from wrapping around the sorting machinery.
The hope is that residents could place only recyclable materials into a 35-gallon blue bin, bypassing the plastic bag.
“By delivering higher-quality recyclables the bins could generate more revenue for the city and other efficiencies for the Environmental Services Bureau, which would offset bin costs,” Mr. Peduto said in a release Wednesday.
The city received $350,000 in state grant money this year to purchase and distribute roughly 13,000 bins over the next two years. In a separate program, the nonprofit Pennsylvania Resources Council distributed 5,200 bins to North Side residents.
Council must approve the mayor’s $500,000 proposal for the 2020 budget.
Mr. Peduto proposes phasing in the bin purchases in the coming years. Residents could be alerted about the availability of bins as early as next year, the release said, though they “may also buy their own blue bins for usage at any time,” the release said.
Ashley Murray: 412-263-1750, amurray@post-gazette.com or on Twitter @Ashley__Murray
First Published: June 26, 2019, 8:44 p.m.