INVESTIGATES: Jacksonville’s decision to suspend recycling collection is adding up at the dump

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In the time between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, Americans produced about 25% more trash.

With the suspension of curbside recycling, Action News Jax Investigator Emily Turner wanted to know how much more of that extra trash ended up in the landfill versus last year when people could still push those gift boxes and wrapping paper to the curb.

It turns out when the burden of recycling drop-off falls to the taxpayer, fewer things get recycled and a lot more goes to the landfill.

Dale Shaffer, a committed recycler says he’s disappointed to see it. ”I see them rolling their recycle bins out with the yellow top and the garbage truck, he’ll collect the garbage, but he’ll also get the recycle,” he says. And all that, recyclables or not, goes to the dump.

Jason Graves with Republic Services says he’s seen the tonnage decline at his facility where they sort and bundle the city’s recyclables. He can tell from what comes in it’s the faithful who keep going.

“It is a little cleaner,” he says about the items that come to be sorted. “That helps,” he says, “it means that what’s going there, there are people doing it right.”

But there are plenty more people who aren’t. Or do it at all.

A survey from Republic shows 15% of respondents said they don’t recycle because they are too lazy. 20% say they don’t because of a lack of convenient access. Those are problems that have only gotten worse with the suspension of curbside pickup.

So it’s no surprise the landfill has become a busier place. We pulled the numbers and two holidays ago, when curbside pickup still happened, the landfill received over 37K tons of waste. This past year, without pick up, that number jumped to almost 45K.

That means the city garbage load jumped more than 77 hundred tons in just six weeks or about 500 more dump truck loads than the year before.

There’s no way to tell how much of that could have been recycled, but the difference is staggering. And with no timeline on the return to curbside pickup, those bigger numbers are likely to keep growing.

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