St. Paul City Council takes over customer service and cart replacement for Eureka Recycling

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
3 min read
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Do you need a new recycling cart, was your collection skipped or just have a question about egg cartons and pizza boxes? The city of St. Paul, instead of Eureka Recycling, is now handling cart replacements and customer service calls for St. Paul property owners, one step in an effort to improve residential recycling participation.

That’s a significant change, and others will roll out toward the end of summer. For the record, egg cartons should go in the compost, but take-out pizza boxes are ripe for recycling once any plastic items, like forks and knives, have been removed.

Since absorbing customer service operations from Eureka on May 1, St. Paul Public Works has fielded an average of 139 calls per day from property owners, with customer calls split between missed collections, requests for cart replacements and general program questions. Eureka had reported receiving 77 daily calls, on average.

“That is the best way for us to know how it’s going,” said St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw, in an interview. “Recycling is a critical city service, and people are paying us to do it. We can tell in the first three weeks of taking these calls that it’s making a difference.”

“As these carts have aged, they’re now getting to a point that a lot of them have to be replaced,” Kershaw added. “One of the biggest concerns that we’re hearing is replacement times from Eureka were taking too long.”

The hope is that a direct line of contact between residents and the city will better track challenges such as missed pick-ups and inspire more people to make an effort to differentiate between recyclables and trash.

Recycling tonnage

Despite more people working from home and generating more residential waste, the total recycling tonnage collected in St. Paul hasn’t picked up as much as expected.

If anything, it may be declining.

Eureka recycled 19,706 tons of material for the city of St. Paul last year. That’s down from 23,465 tons in 2021.

“The amount of total material we’re collecting is more, but there’s way more cardboard than cans and glass,” said Lisa Hiebert, a spokesperson for St. Paul Public Works. “The tonnage has been pretty steady.”

More changes in August

More changes are rolling down the pike come August. Eureka’s new 18-month collection contract — approved by the St. Paul City Council on Wednesday — will give residents more leeway in terms of how far from the curb or alley they can set their cart on collection day. The new distance limit is four feet, instead of two feet.

And as of Aug. 1, residents will be allowed to set extra recycling — like folded-up cardboard — next to their cart at no extra charge, instead of having to wait a week to get rid of it.

“We don’t want people to start doing that now,” Hiebert said. “We need to give Eureka time to train their drivers.”

Also by late summer, drivers will be expected to leave out more educational tags, such as a written note explaining that a collection did not take place because there were plastic bags in the mix.

In December, the city council approved a major rate increase that more than doubled the annual collection fee charged to property owners in one-to-four unit dwellings. The recycling fee went up from $60 to $129, a reflection of rising labor costs, gas prices and other challenges. The contract sets a different price structure for 5-to-11 unit dwellings and then larger apartment buildings. Eureka was the only respondent to the city’s request for proposals.

Recycling isn’t the only collection service likely undergoing changes this year. City officials have floated the possibility of also absorbing customer service, cart service and billing calls for organized residential trash collection this fall, though that decision has yet to be finalized.

The city’s five-year contract with a consortium of garbage haulers for residential trash collection expires at the end of September.

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