Fire in BigBelly

Do Center City’s new trash cans herald a change in the city’s attitude toward recycling?

by Anthony Campisi

If everyone were like Kait Privita, Philly wouldn’t have such a low recycling rate.

On a Wednesday afternoon in Rittenhouse Square, Privita, a twentysomething woman with earrings going up the cartilage on both ears, is finishing lunch with friends. Though she’s enjoying sipping her Nantucket Nectar, Privita complains there’s nowhere to recycle the glass bottle it comes in.

Instead of throwing her bottle away in one of the trash bins that line the square, Privita will instead carry the bottle in her bag until she gets home, where she can drop it in her recycling bin.

“I don’t feel comfortable throwing it away,” she explains.

But for those who aren’t quite that dedicated, the Nutter administration has an answer. The Streets Department is rolling out an initiative in the next few months aimed both at reducing litter and allowing people the chance to recycle on the go.

While it isn’t expected to drastically increase Philly’s recycling rate, officials hope the plan will help ingrain recycling as a citywide habit.

Though still in its preliminary stages, the plan hinges on the three BigBelly trash bins the Center City District unveiled last month. BigBelly Solar, the company that produces the cans, was scheduled to meet with the Streets Department Aug. 20 to propose deploying them throughout Center City and other areas with high pedestrian traffic.

Carlton Willams, the deputy Streets commissioner in charge of recycling, explains the attraction: BigBellies compact the garbage that’s thrown in them, thereby reducing the number of garbage pickups needed. And it doesn’t hurt that they come with a recycling-bin attachment.

Williams says that, if all goes according to plan, we can expect to see BigBellies throughout Center City, along the 52nd Street business district near the El, and along Broad Street—though at this point, he doesn’t know when that will happen.

Rick Gaudette, a vice president at BigBelly, said the cans have already been deployed on North Allegheny in Kensington by a local nonprofit, as well as in about 25 public housing projects for the Philadelphia Housing Authority and on Drexel’s campus. He hopes the city will end up purchasing several hundred more.

Compared with the amount of residential waste produced in the city, the number of garbage collected from the city’s 2,300 sidewalk bins is miniscule. Only about 1.4 percent of the 730,000 tons of waste the city produces each year comes from pedestrian waste.

And unlike the money the city stands to make from residential recycling, the small amount of street waste the Streets Department expects to recycle won’t really amount to much.

“It doesn’t have a great economic benefit,” Williams says, adding that the city is interested in pedestrian recycling more for the message it sends than the actual amount of waste that’ll be recycled.

Steve Cohen, executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, agrees with that motivation. Pedestrian recycling is “a form of public education. You want to get people in the habit of sorting their garbage,” he says.

That’s also how other cities that have introduced pedestrian recycling programs see it.

Pat Kaufman, Seattle’s recycling chief, says his city has gone forward with it despite the costs to the city’s bottom line and the large amount of garbage that gets tossed in the recycling bins along with bottles and cans.

Contamination like this was such a big problem in Portland, Ore., the city scaled back its pedestrian recycling program several years ago. “It’s often really challenging to get really clear material,” says Jennifer Porter of Portland’s Office of Sustainable Development.

Though Portland is looking to expand its program again, right now the city focuses on recycling at public events, something that Philly began doing earlier this year—most notably at the July 4 fireworks on the Parkway. Williams, of the Streets Department, admits the city will have to train people to recycle their street waste with advertisements like the ones that currently plaster SEPTA buses and subway stations encouraging household recycling.

“Recycling is going to be habit-forming,” he says.