How Denver’s trash, recycling and compost system works: They’d rather teach you than fine you ...Middle East

Sean Brown has lived in cities where the trash and recycling police had extremely itchy pen fingers when it came to writing violations. 

Couple of paper bakery bags mixed in with the vegetable peel compost? Useless loose plastic wrap tossed into the recyclables with the valuable aluminum cans? 

That’ll be 100 bucks, and don’t bother complaining at City Hall. 

“They were very quick to say, ‘Hey, absolutely not. You cannot do this.’ We are a little bit slower,” said Brown, manager of the diversion and education program for Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. 

“We are not fining anyone right now, and we have basically multiple touch points built into this whole process,” Brown said, describing how Denver is handling public education and correction after a massive expansion of composting and the switch to pay-as-you-go trash cart sizes. Unless what you’re doing is an immediate safety hazard to drivers and sorters, Brown said, “You’ll get upwards of 20 to 25 opportunities and notices before anything happens.” 

The most common recycling and composting contamination by consumers is rarely intentional, Brown likes to say. His own Chicago mistake is something he sees in Denver all the time — consumers putting their mixed recyclables inside a plastic bag and tying the top, before they toss it in the purple recycling bin. That’s a no-no — most flimsy plastic film, like garbage bags are not recyclable, and if they don’t get blown by air puffs out of the sorting lines, they can tie up the machinery. 

Composting mistakes are usually just catching up with new directives from compost handlers in the last couple of years. That means no paper napkins, cardboard, paper plates or greasy pizza boxes thrown in with the potato peels on the assumption it will all “break down.” 

If a series of warning notes from the haulers doesn’t change behavior, carts can be confiscated, Brown said. The city will return them once they’ve heard a convincing argument that the consumer is ready to get it right, he added. 

Denver officials say they are still in the education and encouragement phase of their waste stream overhaul of the past few years. The city switched from free trash and recycling pickup, and $9 a month for a compost cart, to a new pay-as-you-throw model. The trash cart now costs up to $21 a month based on size, while the recycling cart is free, and the green compost carts are free but must be requested. 

In the spring, Denver decided to speed up its neighborhood-by-neighborhood rollout of the compost offering, and now has that service available all across the city. During the latest push, 30,000 to 40,000 households signed up, bringing all composting to about 70,000 carts citywide, Brown said. The city serves about 180,000 households overall, while apartment buildings and commercial businesses must contract with private services.

Improving on Colorado’s overall waste-diversion rates of about 15% requires changes up and down the toss-collect-sort system. One of the reasons Denver moved away from its alley-dumpster trash system years ago was contamination, Brown said. Neighbors or rogue dumpers would put anything and everything into the enormous, opaque containers, spoiling chances to divert and reuse and endangering haulers. 

Once composting expanded, other forms of contamination were an issue. The composting company Denver used initially was taking paper products in the compost carts, but eventually called a timeout, saying loads were too full of paper plates and broken glass and other contaminants that made for poor compost and broken machines. (Once it’s culled for contaminants, the organic composed materials are set out in large windrows under the hot sun to bake out the bad microbes and employ the good microbes to create a soil base.) 

Denver’s current recycling and composting sorter, Waste Management, wants the green bins limited to obvious organic materials like garden trimmings, vegetable and fruit peels and loose household food leftovers. Even film materials marked as “compostable” bags must be part of an approved manufacturing list sanctioned by state law. 

Helping neighborhoods keep up with these changing rules requires a big initial education push, Brown and other recycling advocates say. Denver’s city haulers carry around preprinted pads of recycling do’s and don’ts in cartoonish pictures, which they can circle or cross out, and add notations to leave on individual carts. 

“It’s an all-hands-on-deck attempt to slowly change the culture and the habits of Denverites regarding their recycling and compost carts,” Brown said. 

Denver officials and their sorting company are pleased with the compliance so far, with contamination rates of just over 1% for the green compost carts based on spot sampling, Brown said. Denver’s contract with the sorter puts a contamination cap of 10% on processed materials. 

Denver’s codes allow for fines to the homeowner, but Brown is so studiously avoiding that method for now that he’s not even clear on how much they could ticket for. Current enforcement and education includes teams of employees walking alleys, checking for contamination levels and leaving notes; haulers watching what falls from the carts into their hoppers; and Brown and others getting on the phone with frequent violators telling them they’re in danger of losing their carts. 

“Imagine that you sped down your local neighborhood road every day, you’re going 40 in a 20, and there’s been no cops catching you there a couple years,” Brown said. “So all of a sudden there’s a cop there, and he’s radar-ing people. You might slow down, a quick brake, try and get out of that situation. And you might go back to 40 in a 20 if he’s not there the next day. But if that cop is there every day or every week monitoring you, all of a sudden, your driving action is corrected. You’re going the speed limit, you’re not wanting to get pulled over.”

The city’s most common problem now is yanking three to five compost carts a week for repeated violations and no response to the education effort. 

“What we see in the report is that the compost cart is completely full of trash,” Brown said. “They never intended it to be a compost cart. They just wanted a second trash cart.” 

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