After years of issues, weekly recycling resumes in Baltimore this week

Baltimore will resume weekly recycling pickup Tuesday, nearly four years after the city scaled back curbside service due to the coronavirus pandemic.

At a Monday morning news conference at the Eastern Sanitation Yard, Mayor Brandon Scott said the city would do away with biweekly pickups. Residents can expect their pickup day to remain the same, though the time of day their recyclables will be picked up may shift.

“This is an important and huge milestone for Baltimore and it took a significant amount of work to get here,” Scott said.

He touted his administration’s investment in hiring more workers, expanding its vehicle fleet, and upgrading its internal routing system from paper maps to GPS tracking, which reduced recycling stops from 2,600 a day to 1,800.

“Baltimore, you can be assured that we’ve done the hard work and are more than ready to support this team, and this return to weekly recycling, in a way that is sustainable for the future,” Scott said. The Department of Public Works now has an 8.6% vacancy rate, lower than before the pandemic, he said.

The city reduced weekly pickup in 2020 when COVID hit. It struggled to resume its routine schedule due to staffing shortages and supply chain issues delaying the arrival of much-needed trucks. During that time, recycling service became a point of contention between the City Council and the Department of Public Works. The City Council mounted a filibuster in June 2022 to protest the disrupted biweekly service; no council members appeared at Monday’s news conference.

Councilman Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer, who called for the resignation of the previous public works director if significant progress was not made on resuming recycling, issued a news release Monday claiming “triumph” in the fight. Stating that Schleifer emerged “victorious,” the release called on the city to use additional American Rescue Plan Act funds to give city trash employees “significant bonuses.”

Rescue plan money is already paying for some of the additional staff needed to resume weekly recycling.

Scott said the city has received 20 of the 80 trucks it ordered, with “dozens more” on the way. The load packers that have arrived are slim enough to traverse city alleyways, which constitute 60% of recycling pickups, according to interim Department of Public Works Director Richard Luna.

In conjunction with Monday’s announcement, the city is launching a marketing program encouraging residents to clean their recyclables, put them into a container, and ensure they’re on the curb to be picked up.

Recycling has also become a flashpoint in the mayoral race between Scott, a Democrat who is seeking a second term, and Sheila Dixon, who left office amid a corruption scandal in 2010.

In a campaign announcement published last fall in The Baltimore Sun, Dixon touted her record introducing the city’s single-stream recycling program, which allows residents to put all recyclable cans, bottles, paper and cardboard into one container instead of separating them and being picked up on different days.

Dixon, a Democrat, served as mayor from 2007 to 2010 before resigning.

Baltimore Sun reporter Emily Opilo contributed to this article.

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