Clear bags with green-waste stickers sit by the curb near 47th Street and Joplin Avenue on Tuesday. The green-waste program would be ended under a proposal Mayor Dewey Bartlett made Wednesday. Tom Gilbert/Tulsa World
Mayor Dewey Bartlett will ask the city’s trash board next week to shut down its ailing yard-waste collection program, he said Wednesday.
“It’s very apparent to me that the whole green-waste program, however well-intended, is not working,” he said.
Bartlett wants the trash board to repurpose or sell the trucks used by its green waste collection crews and the city to close its green-waste mulching site, which takes yard waste delivered directly by residents but cannot process the bags of yard waste used in curbside collection.
Residents, instead, could fill their trash carts with as much yard waste as they want and could use any kind of plastic bag affixed with a 50-cent “extra refuse” sticker for yard waste that won’t fit in the carts, he proposed.
Under the existing program, residents are required to place extra yard waste in clear bags with a special 50-cent “green waste” sticker.
The trash board, formally known as the Tulsa Authority for the Recovery of Energy, contracted with independent hauler NeWSolutions for curbside trash and recycling pickup beginning last Oct. 1 but opted to use city crews for yard waste because it had little idea how much Tulsans would discard.
Although officials hoped to gather a year of usage data and then explore whether the city could operate a cheaper green-waste program or begin selling mulch, Bartlett said it has become apparent that residents are not using the green-waste system.
City staff members recently told the trash board that the city is on pace to collect only a third of the 1.7 million bags of yard waste it originally expected to collect in a year.
Many residents seem to favor placing yard waste in the trash cans — a method of collection that is not tracked — instead of buying “green waste” stickers, officials have said.
The Tulsa World reported Tuesday that the city has hauled all residential yard waste to the Covanta Energy trash incinerator almost since the beginning of the new trash system because the green-waste facility is not able to process the plastic bags that contain the material.
That contradicts statements by trash operators over the months that residents must use clear bags for green waste so that crews know to take them to the green-waste plant.
The city, meanwhile, has continued requiring residents to buy “green waste” stickers and still charges every trash customer a $1.09 monthly green-waste fee.
Bartlett said his proposal would take the green-waste stickers out of circulation but that canceling the green waste fee would be up to the trash board.
NeWSolutions President Jason Kannady, whose company would have to haul the extra yard waste, said he is “definitely interested” in hearing the proposal.
Covanta Energy would take over the functions of the city’s green-waste site, possibly even mulching some of the material, Bartlett said. He said that in preliminary discussions the company has shown interest in doing so.
The city-owned green-waste site at 10401 E. 56th St. North has six full-time trash board-funded employees.
The green-waste program as a whole has about 30 trash board-funded employees who operate about 10 trucks owned by the trash board, Interim Solid Waste Manager Roy Teeters said.
Bartlett said those workers would not necessarily need to be laid off and could be transferred to other duties, such as pothole repair.
He said he will formally present the proposal to the trash board at its next meeting Tuesday.
In the meantime, he said he will detail it during a City Council committee meeting Thursday in which councilors are scheduled to discuss the green-waste program.
Councilor Karen Gilbert said she requested the discussion so that she could ask trash operators to address concerns that residents still pay for green-waste service “with the expectation that the city was going to do what we were telling them — take it to the green-waste dump.”
“And we weren’t doing that,” she said. “It was just going up in flames.”
Teeters, who was appointed to his position several weeks ago but has been managing the green-waste plant for years, said city staff members already plan to present the trash board Tuesday with options to revamp the green-waste program in light of its revenue problems.
Among those options will be shutting down the green-waste program, he said.
The trash board has spent $1,427,681 on green-waste service in the last nine months, and the program is a major cause of recent projections that the board’s savings of $6.28 million will run dry in four years.
The green-waste pick-up program is suspended until the end of a debris clean-up effort stemming from last month’s windstorm.
“We’re thinking of ideas everywhere from tweaking the system just a little bit to make it better to all the way to Bartlett’s proposal,” Teeters said. “We’re opening a whole can of worms, and we’re reviewing it from top to bottom to do what is the best thing to do for the citizens of Tulsa.”
Trash
Approaching the one-year anniversary of Tulsa’s curbside recycling program, city officials say they are pleased with how residents have embraced the program even though they acknowledge that things haven’t always gone as planned.
Experts say cities nationwide have found simple and environmentally friendly ways to dispose of yard waste, but few of them would be practical in Tulsa, the city's trash operators say.
