Dive Brief:
- Residents in Houston, TX are slated to receive recycling pickups services. By January, all of the customers that have trash collection services will receive a recycling bin for the co-mingled collection.
- 90,000 households will have access to recycling services and the city expects to purchase 95,000 bins for the collections. This marks the first time recycling will be available to residents in the area.
- City officials anticipate the ease of using the bins will increase Houston’s notoriously low recycling rate, which currently sits at 6%. The national average rate is around 34%.
Dive Insight:
Houston's recycling collection program is slowly expanding. Since residents aren't charged trash fees, the sanitation department has to fight for project funding from the same source as the police, fire department, parks, and libraries -- the city’s limited general fund.
The “One Bin for All” program is still a possibility for Houston residents. The project would allow households to throw waste, recycling, and -- potentiallyfood and organics into the same bin for collection. The details of the system are not ironed out, and a sorting facility would have to be constructed to separate and process the waste.
The proposed plan has been met with opposition by environmental groups, who say the plans rely on unproven technology. Although the adoption of the project is not a sure thing, the program is inching forward; in July, the city accepted five bids from haulers interested in competing for the co-mingled recycling contract.