Pittsburgh’s recycling efforts lag behind

Acity recycling bin outside the North Side T station invites passersby to drop bottles and cans through its little round holes — whereupon they’ll clank or crash to the pavement.

Yeah, there hasn’t been a bin there to catch the cans in at least a month. That’s a fitting metaphor for the city’s recycling efforts these days. It talks a good game, but its execution is lacking.

Cities such as Johnstown, Harrisburg and Reading are doing more than Pittsburgh, where problematic plastic bags still muck up the single-stream recycling system and yard waste gets picked up only twice a year.

That fall-and-spring pickup of leaves and sticks is the state minimum, by the way. Act 101 of 1988 requires communities of 5,000 or more to collect leaf waste at least once per month. The Department of Environmental Protection drops that to twice a year if a community maintains convenient drop-off centers, which is the loophole that Pittsburgh drives its trucks through. But how many of us have been carting our bagged leaves for miles rather than leaving them at the curb with the garbage?

I wouldn’t be asking if Mayor Bill Peduto hadn’t put himself in the forefront of forestalling climate change. He even flew to Poland in December to speak for U.S. mayors at a U.N. climate conference. But as the city has begun offering remedial workshops to show citizens what they should put in — and leave out — of recycling bins and bags, it seems worthwhile to look at Pennsylvania cities doing more on

their end of this chore.

Reading, which squeezes more than 87,000 people into 10 square miles, still manages to find plenty of yard waste to turn into compost. Any resident can call the city, or use an app, to ask for the curbside pickup of yard waste, properly bagged in paper leaf bags. (Reading doesn’t pick up grass clippings; mowers are better off letting that fall, decompose and act as a natural organic fertilizer anyway.)

Last year, Reading took more than 1,900 pickup requests and hauled away 28,000 bags of leaves, hedge trimmings and small sticks. Kevin Lugo, the city’s sustainability and solid waste manager, estimates that amounted to 212 tons of material that a private company shredded and hauled away for composting. Reading picked up 5,000 bags in April and 3,300 in May, Mr. Lugo said. It also collects electronics and tires on a call-in basis (which Pittsburgh does not) to stem illegal dumping.

Johnstown, a city of 20,000 across six square miles, has a motor oil drop-off that keeps gallons of that gook out of Pennsylvania streams, and a call-in service for pickup of yard debris. Last year, the city picked up 4,800 bags of leaves at 1,203 stops, some of those at the same address. Plants keeps growing, they understand.

Harrisburg has weekly recycling, and uses vacuum and dump trucks to pick up yard waste in front of homes on street cleaning days. It collected 145 tons for composting last year. It also has 10 dropoff locations in its 12 square miles dedicated to recycling glass bottles and jars. The city pulled in 199 tons of them in 2018.

Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse took office in 2014 with the city near bankruptcy from an incinerator that burned through both trash and money. He brought in John Rarig as recycling supervisor, invested $1.5 million in recycling bins for residents and began avoiding some of the highest disposal fees in the country through recycling. Harrisburg saves tens of thousands of dollars each year on glass alone, having convenient drop-off points in every neighborhood.

In Pittsburgh’s 55 square miles, there are just six drop-off sites and it’s doubtful how much glass actually is recycled. The city has picked up glass, cardboard and all the other items that do-gooders dutifully (and futilely) sorted, and smashed it all together in its trucks before hauling it away. A dedicated glass pickup won’t begin until new oversized glass-only bins are placed at Construction Junction in Point Breeze and other locations this summer.

In some sense, these comparisons are apples and oranges (both compostable). None of these cities is even a third Pittsburgh’s size and all have separate charges for trash pickup. (Reading charges a total of $22.76 a month for trash and recycling pickup, for instance.) But because these cities provide recycling bins to residents, the stuff in them is far more likely to be recycled than what Pittsburghers leave curbside in blue plastic bags.

(One should realize that Pittsburgh charges for garbage and recycling pickup, too. Those costs, however, are hidden in property taxes. Pulling them out for examination is about as easy as separating broken glass from a crushed blue bag.)

Pittsburghers do all this sorting in our kitchens hoping it matters somehow at the curb. Making new stuff out of old stuff produces fewer greenhouses gases than manufacturing plastic or metal from scratch. Making mulch beats burying plants in landfills and producing methane. The Earth has been heating up from all that and more, and if you don’t believe that, tell the Navy. It’s plenty worried about what Russia and China have been doing up in the warming Arctic since the polar ice cap receded.

Mayor Peduto, who says cities must take the lead in addressing climate change, needs to do a better job to ensure what we do on the homefront amounts to more than empty exercise. His office emailed yesterday that he’s working on a five-year strategy to finance recycling bins for all residents, but he’s sticking to twice-a-year yard waste pickups. E-waste and hazardous waste home pickups are coming “soon,” he promises.

Plans are nice. But until they’re implemented, Mr. Peduto should shut up about how Pittsburgh is leading the way to zero waste.