After months of issues surrounding trash and recycling pickup across Philadelphia, the city’s system is still not fully functioning — with an unknown percentage of recycling dumped into landfills along with trash pickup each day.
Following the 2019 discovery that Philadelphia deposited at least half of its recycling in an incinerator, the city pledged to continue recycling — even as the cost increased. But the pandemic added operational challenges to the economic ones.
Scott McGrath, the city’s environmental planning director, maintains that inconsistent recycling is not a money-saving strategy and that as soon as the Streets Department has the workers to consistently separate trash from recycling, it will revert to that practice.
“We have more than sufficient funds from a budget standpoint to handle the recycling,” McGrath told the Inquirer in November. “We’re going to do everything we can to keep collecting it.”
McGrath, on Wednesday, described the Sanitation Department as still struggling to regain its footing after the one-two punch of COVID-19, in which the pandemic both created a 30% increase in trash due to residents working from home and led to a decrease in personnel as some contracted the virus.
McGrath could not estimate how much recycling is getting mixed in with trash but confirmed anecdotal reports of a citywide problem without any geographical patterns.
He emphasized that everything collected separately as recycling gets processed at the Waste Management Recycling Plan in Northeast Philadelphia, but admitted that when trash and recycling are collected together, they both get deposited to landfills.
“We have had, more recently, some situations where to get the material off the street, they’ve had to combine the trash and recycling in some areas of the city,” he said. “As we move into the spring, we’re working very diligently to increase the size of our workforce and get our trash and recycling collections back on a stable, normal schedule.”