Mayor Cara Spencer’s staff says her controversial new recycling program is working and that they have the data to prove it.
“The theory was that we’re committed to recycling; we think we can do it better with this model,” says the city’s Chief Operating Officer Ben Jonsson. “The theory has been playing out as we hoped it would.”
Prior to August, about 80 percent of the city recycled via shared blue bins in their alleys. In August, Mayor Cara Spencer took away alley pickups, meaning that if those residents wanted to recycle, they had to haul their recyclables to one of 44 drop sites across the city. Spencer’s rationale was that under the status quo, only about half of material put in the blue alley bins was being recycled. The rest ended up in a landfill because it was too contaminated with unrecyclable trash…