While it isn’t necessarily rocket science, selecting containers for solid waste or recyclables requires close attention to detail, an accurate assessment of who will be using them, and a clear idea of what you want to accomplish.

By Penelope Grenoble O’Malley

Introducing New Containers
Replacing Existing Containers
Cost-Effective Service and Attention to Goals Are Key
Recycling Containers for Manual Pickup

When it comes to selecting containers for refuse and recycling, Joan Hicken, recycling coordinator for the City of Glendale, AZ, thinks basic parameters must be recognized–"universal truths" as she calls them–but effective decision-making requires an accurate assessment of the individual system in which the containers will be used.

Whether you’re replacing old containers or introducing something new, the best advice is to make an in-depth assessment of what is unique about the circumstances in which the containers will be used. This requires being clear on what you want to accomplish (customer participation, percent of wastestream diversion), what the advantages and liabilities of your current collection equipment are (and should you stick with what you have, modify, or invest in something new?), your customer base (old, young, affluent, poor, educated?) and what changes you anticipate in the future. Other variables to factor in include weather and climate conditions (temperature, precipitation, sunlight, pollutants, wind); geography (street layout, utility placement, landscaping); staff experience and expectations regarding handling, service, and repair; and finally price and the resources you have available for planning, purchasing, and implementation, which includes customer education and outreach. While the experiences of the municipalities sampled vary, Hicken’s advice remains sound: Know the basics and then adapt.

Introducing New Containers

"A lot of people get into this kind of a system based on financial considerations," says Ed Marr, director of refuse and recycling for the City of Buffalo, NY, which recently implemented semiautomated collection to replace a manual system where residents used their own containers. "We looked at it from a more holistic approach. In Buffalo the decision to go semiautomated was about litter control, rodent control, and the ability to charge variable rates." The city collects both refuse and recyclables for the 85,000 residential and commercial accounts it serves and does its own transfer and hauling. Marketing of recyclables is handled through a contract with BFI.

Situated at the eastern end of Lake Erie, Buffalo is windy. Allowing residents to use their own containers resulted in blowing trash can lids, litter, and rodents. To get control of the situation, the city first introduced a new billing system. "In the past, our services were paid for in the tax package, based on the assessed value of a property," Marr explains. "This determined how much of an individual’s tax dollar was allocated to refuse collection and disposal. To generate income outside the tax base, we implemented a user fee based on an average weight of refuse collected per type of household. We did a sampling of single, double, and triple residential units and then used an engineering firm to provide us with industry standards for the different types of commercial properties we service."

Although the city considered going directly to automation, it chose semiautomated collection, using tippers on rear-collection vehicles, as a compromise with the city’s layout-narrow streets, onstreet parking, power lines, overhanging trees and curbside piles of snow in winter. "Fully automated would be difficult in parts of the city," says Marr, although he maintains that automated collection hasn’t been ruled out completely. "Our plan is to implement semiautomated in the first phase and look later at doing fully automated in some parts of the city." Once collection was agreed on, Marr presented options for wheeled carts to an advisory committee of representatives from among elected city officials, residents, and the MSW industry. Eventually the decision came to go with 35-, 65-, and 95-gal. containers from Schaefer Systems.

Marr suggests that this kind of community input is critical when contemplating a substantial change in service because it can help pinpoint demographics and identify user-friendly considerations that will influence how well a system is implemented, as well as providing an extra measure of support for staff recommendations if decision-making gets bogged down in politics. Buffalo’s decision on container size was based in part on committee input. "A large part of our population is either elderly or poor," says Marr. "We wanted to give the elderly the opportunity for a smaller container that they could move easily, and we wanted to give people on a budget the opportunity to reduce how much they throw away by recycling or composting." With the decision came a pilot study. Six hundred containers were distributed to residents in different parts of the city. "We weren’t interested in how the containers worked in Virginia or Michigan," notes Marr. "We wanted to determine the pros and cons of how they performed on the streets of Buffalo." Once they knew the containers would work as expected, the city purchased 95,000 of the 95-gal. carts and bought the 65- and 35-gal. containers in clusters of 5,000, which resulted in a better price break than if a gradual expansion of the pilot program had been chosen.

Buffalo is in its fifth year of semiautomated collection, and Marr says things are working well, except that procedures for administering customer service weren’t as well laid out as they could have been. He is currently implementing changes in how his staff tracks service requests and sees that they’re addressed. Otherwise the key to success is to do your homework. "You know best what your needs are. You know the environment in which the containers will be used. You know your work force and your equipment." And one further point, "The cheapest answer is not necessarily best."

Replacing Existing Containers

Marr’s advise would not be wasted on Ed Sones, assistant director of the Bureau of Sanitation for the City of Los Angeles, CA. L.A. switched directly from manual to automated collection for refuse in 1991, using 60-gal. carts, and has had automated collection of commingled recyclables in 90-gal. carts for five years. Yardwaste is collected in 60-gal. carts. Peterbilt trucks make three passes through neighborhoods so collection of all materials occurs on the same day. (New trucks will use liquefied natural gas because new air-quality restrictions prohibit the purchase of diesel-powered trucks after July 1, 2001.) Solid waste goes to privately owned landfills, recyclables to three different outside contractors at six different locations, and the city operates two of its own yard-trimming disposal sites.

The current challenge is to replace 2.1 million containers purchased from five different manufacturers over the years with one uniform cart. "Twenty-five thousand of the carts now in service are going out of warranty every month," says Sones. He explains that using five different suppliers (a result of the city’s low-bid policy) led to difficulties with service and the expense of maintaining duplicate parts inventories. "We have to keep five different sets of parts on hand; our repair personnel have to know how to repair five different types of containers. We have five different manufacturers to negotiate with on warranty claims. Plus it’s also tough to get an arm that will pick up all five containers."

The plan calls for replacing one-tenth of the carts currently in service every year for 10 years. Sones explains that the city is using a request for proposal (RFP) rather than a bid process because of the range of factors it wants to consider. "We want to see what each manufacturer’s historic failure rate is. Although we have experience with the five manufacturers whose carts we are now using, we want to know where else their containers have been put in service, how long they’ve been in use and what the manufacturer’s warranty claims are. [The review process allows for extra points for a longer warranty as long as the manufacturer can substantiate that its containers will last as they say they will.] The containers will have to be compatible with the arm our trucks now use, and if not, we are requiring the manufacturer to replace the arms on all our equipment. We require a minimum of 20% but no more than 30% recycled content. The specs are broad enough that both rotational and injected-molding manufacturers can respond, but the contractor must own its own manufacturing facility. No contract molders." The manufacturer must also guarantee that its container will hold up to L.A.’s heat, sunlight, and smog.

To verify manufacturers’ claims, the city will do its own testing at an independent laboratory, which Sones hopes will provide the staff with a more solid background for its recommendations, especially if decision-making gets bogged down in politics (L.A. receives a new mayor and city council during the period when cart replacement takes place). A draft of the RFP went to the industry for comment, and a number of changes and modifications were made to open it to as many manufacturers as possible.

It was the hard realities of municipal finances that led decision-makers in Washington, DC, to replace 80,000 outdated containers with carts from a single manufacturer. Tom Henderson, administrator of the district’s Solid Waste Management Administration, explains: "We were able to get funds to replace the carts, but we have difficulty getting year-in, year-out operating money." Some of the 96-gal. carts had been in service for 19 years (collection is semiautomated using rearloaders, mostly in alleys), but Henderson lost his repair staff. The solution called for the supplier (Toter won the bid) to be responsible for in-field, on-call service. Repairs not covered by warranty will be billed to the city, which currently plans to absorb the cost rather than pass it on to its customers. "To make the system work," says Henderson, "we had to have uniform carts." The vendor will deliver the new carts and has already found a market for the old ones, which will be used to manufacture new sewer pipe.

Once this system is up and operating effectively, Henderson says the city might look at taking back some of its collection of recyclables which at present is under contract to Waste Management. "Right now it looks like we’d also do the recycling collection with a cart, the advantage being that we would be able to use the same collection equipment we use for refuse."

Cost-Effective Service and Attention to Goals Are Key

The City of San Jose, CA–200,000 single-family and 85,000 multifamily households situated in what was once an agricultural community–contracts out its automated pay-as-you-throw garbage pickup and is about to do the same with commingled recyclables. Previously, single families used a four-sort system and multifamily residences used a two-sort system that separated mixed containers from paper. San Jose awards it contracts using a competitive bid system, which the city maintains has helped build a cost-efficient variable-rate system that has tripled curbside recycling, and all decisions about collection equipment, including containers, are made by its two, soon to be three, contract haulers. "What we care about," remarks Ellen Ryan, manager of the city’s environmental services department, "is that the carts are maintained and serviced and that every household has the cart they want. What we specify is basically size and volumetrics."

Ryan says the two years San Jose spent developing the RFP covering the contracts it will award in 2002 exemplifies the type of assessment all municipalities should undertake. "You have to think about what you want your contractors to do as if the city itself were doing the job: What kind of service do you want to offer? How would hold yourself accountable? What would your performance measures be?"

San Jose has never maintained a civic refuse collection and disposal service but relied instead on a succession of small haulers until BFI bought out the existing contract in the 1970s. Ten years later, the city decided it wasn’t satisfied with an exclusive contract and introduced the competitive bid situation. "We were growing," recalls Ryan. "We were running out of landfill capacity, and expenses were rising." Collection and disposal were separated, and the city was divided into three service districts, with responsibility for containers handed over to the haulers who own the carts for the duration of their contract. If a contract isn’t renewed, the carts are returned to the city. "We didn’t want to face the circumstances where at the end of the contract, the hauler pulled all the carts," says Ryan. The detailed RFP is specific on reporting requirements and performance standards for contractors, including cart exchanges and replacements, administrative charges that kick in if the city’s specifications aren’t met or the called-for response time isn’t honored. (For details, check out rfp.recycleplus.org.) The city handles billing and takes customer service calls, which it forwards to the haulers.

The new contracts will give residents the choice of 32-, 64-, or 96-gal. recycling carts, 96 gal. being the default size because most residents currently use 32 gal. for garbage service (in the new contracts, haulers will be required to provide a 20-gal. container at a reduced rate). Residents will also have the option of containerized yardwaste pickup, which is now loose in the street. While the contracts specify that refuse and recyclables must be collected on the same day, the choice of collection vehicle is the haulers’, and split collection vehicles are on the docket for the new contract period.

One specification the city insists on is that containers must contain 20% postconsumer material. "I think at one time there was some concern with the integrity of a container made with recycled materials," notes Ryan. "But we’ve found that that is not an issue. And you have to practice what you preach in as many ways as you can."

Recycling Containers for Manual Pickup

While such cities as Glendale and L.A. might consider containerized recycling a logical extension of automated or semiautomatic refuse collection, many communities, either by default or design, meet state or local diversion requirements or their own recycling goals with manual pickup of small-volume recycling containers. Bloomsburg, PA, is a small college community of a little more than 12,000 that practices what it preaches to the point that, until recently, residents used standard grocery bags as their recycling containers. "That way everything we pick up we recycle," says Carol Has, the city’s environmental services administrator. And contrary to current trends toward minimizing the number of source separations residents are required to undertake, Bloomsburg requires seven sorts for its twice-monthly pickup: separation of clear, brown, and green glass, as well as steel and aluminum cans; separate bundling of newspaper; and separation of numbers one and two plastics from the glass and cans. The city recently purchased an International Harvester side dump for pickup with a hopper separated in three sections to accommodate the three kinds of glass. (Mas admits it might be difficult to find someone to bid on this kind of equipment when it comes time to replace the truck in five years.) A full-time staff of four handles the pickup and sorting.

"You have to work with what you have," states Mas. And what Bloomsburg has is a small population committed to recycling. Downtown public waste receptacles are situated in clusters of three–one each for waste, bottles, and aluminum cans–replacing the 55-gal. drums into which all waste used to be tossed. The city bought 52 of these three-container sets from Kettle Creek’s Windsor Barrel Works 10 years ago. The company made the sole bid on the contract, which specified a high percent of recycled material. The first attempt was to use reusable bags for recyclables, but the city has since opted for rigid containers as more practical and aesthetic.

This year the city took another leap forward and used grant money to pilot test three different plastic containers for residential recycling in place of the brown grocery bags. Thirty-gal. trash cans (no top) went to student areas of the city where Mas’s crews collect a large amount of glass. Rectangular curbside crates and stackable bins, both from Spectrum, were distributed in other areas, and households were asked to rate their choices. Extra crates and bins were made available on a first-come, first-served basis, and Mas says she ran out but won’t be able to apply for more until after this summer. Residents were equally divided between their preference for topless crates and bins, but Mas notes that the staff preferred the crates because they were easier to dump.

Residents in Dayton, OH, were not given a choice when the city decided to purchase 48,000 20-gal. plastic crates from A-1 Plastics in 1998 and another 11,000 a year later to standardize the pickup of commingled recyclables–paper, bottles, and cans–with newspaper bundled separately. According to Gary Lucas, senior buyer in the city’s division of purchasing, the decision to go with crates included weight and fiscal considerations. Left to their own devices, residents took to using 30-gal. trash cans for recycling and holding them for pickup until they were full, which often made it difficult for city workers to lift them into rearloading collection vehicles. (In older sections of town laid out with narrow, one-way allies, refuse collection occurs with rearloaders, but in areas where there is enough curb space and no obstacles, sideloaders are put to use, and Lucas says carts for recyclables are a possibility in these areas). Other criteria included that the crates be user-friendly (an important consideration for a city just introducing recycling and trying to increase participation), that they stand up to Dayton’s weather extremes (100°F in the summer to below-freezing in winter), and that they have drainage to prevent the accumulation of liquids and rainwater. "The main thing we considered is quality and user friendliness for people using this system for the first time," Lucas points out, "keeping in mind that what we chose would be handled by young, healthy people as well as the elderly." He notes that when the city went to automated trash collection, it received complaints from older residents about the size of the carts and was forced to make a smaller 60-gal. container available. (In suburban Glendale, AZ, where Rehrig Pacific containers are used in the recently implemented automated recycling system, the fact that kids often put out the garbage influenced the city to go with a smaller container.)

So far, Philadelphia’s attempt to bring its 525,000 households into the recycling program it began almost 20 years ago has been a battle that started with 6.5-gal. buckets collected weekly. The buckets, which featured holes for drainage and to discourage other uses, worked well enough in a pilot program that included weekly pickup but turned out to be too small for the biweekly collection that was the norm in most of the city. They have since been replaced with a 19-gal. rectangular crate (no top). The current challenge, says Steve Tilne, the city’s recycling program administrator, is to make collection more efficient. "I want 100% participation in our recycling program, but that doesn’t mean everybody has to put their containers out in the street for every pickup. In fact, it’s not a good use of our personnel or equipment for crews to stop to dump a container that only has a couple of cans in it." Tilne hopes that a new education program will help inform residents how to use the containers more efficiently but worries that any education effort will be hampered by the fact that 18-25% of his target population moves in any given year. "Look at your population, evaluate the material being generated against your collection schedule," Tilne emphasizes. "Go for what you want–100% participation–but don’t necessarily think that it must be every week."

In neighboring New Jersey, 16 communities in Middlesex County resolved a number of problems associated with purchasing recycling containers for 95,000 customers by piggybacking onto the state’s contract with one container supplier. The communities use two containers: a 20-gal. lidless round container for plastic, glass, and cans available on the state contract from T.M. Fitzgerald Associates and a rectangular 14-gal. bin with lid for mixed paper. Residents can order additional of either type but have to pay extra, or they can choose their own container as long as it doesn’t exceed 32 gal. Ed Windas, recycling manager for the Middlesex County Improvement Authority, says the program is five years old and there was no recycling previously in place. The county bought the containers and required Fitzgerald to distribute them to residents (16 of the 25 eligible cities signed on). What would Windas tell someone who’s looking to introduce containers for the first time? "Look at the material, the mill thickness of the plastic; make sure the container has handles and holes in the bottom and that it’s rigid, especially if it’s going to be used for mixed paper collection like ours, which includes hardcover books and telephone books. Be clear about the warranty and be sure that whatever you chose can be used by people with a range of physical abilities." What would he do differently? "I’d look into a much smaller container for the elderly who live in places like assisted-care facilities, who might put out one can and a bottle a week."

The idea of county or regional purchasing is one that recycling coordinator Hicken endorses. It takes the onus out of decision-making for small communities that might not have the resources to thoroughly research their options, and buying in quantity is a good way to get a better price. Another piece of advice Hicken espouses is to look down the road as far as you can, to anticipate when escalating personnel costs or other factors might force you to automate (the folks at Otto contend, for example, that use of recycling carts is likely to become more widespread because they’re more user-friendly and participation rates go up). She advises to look for new trends that will likely emerge in the industry, as well as new equipment. She says to watch for the days when laws may mandate action that today is discretionary and to design a system that can accommodate itself to change and transition.

Penelope Grenoble O’Malley is a frequent contributor to environmental publications.