Garbage Can Cart

New Orleans' recycling effort not a waste, but has a long way to go

During the program's first six weeks, roughly 500 tons of recyclable material was taken from city curbsides to a processing center instead of a landfill, according to Ryan Berni, a spokesman for Mayor Mitch Landrieu .

While officials are pleased with results so far, New Orleans has a long way to go before it will draw comparisons to a city such as San Francisco, named the "greenest city" in the United States and Canada in a study released last week.

In its first couple of months of recycling, New Orleans has managed to divert roughly 2 percent of its waste from the landfill. In San Francisco, by contrast, 77 percent of the material set out on curbs is recycled rather than sent to landfills, according to Mark Westlund, the spokesperson for that city's environmental department.

That huge gulf may owe in part to different attitudes toward recycling in the two cities -- New Orleans, after all, had discussed dumping its curbside program because of low participation before Hurricane Katrina killed it.

But there are some practical factors that also blur the inter-city comparison.

The biggest one is that San Francisco accepts many more materials for recycling -- in particular, glass, food scraps and plant material -- that New Orleans does not. Those materials tend to outweigh the ones New Orleans does accept. A Times-Picayune story from 1999, when New Orleans' curbside program accepted glass and all residents received bins, estimated the city was recycling 15 percent of its waste stream.

There are smaller factors that depress recycling, too -- Berni notes that Mardi Gras generates a huge amount of waste, very little of which is recycled. And New Orleans still lacks curbside recycling in the French Quarter and the Central Business District. Berni said the service will extend to those areas.

Change brings results

Darby Hoover, senior resource specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that while New Orleans' recycling rates are low, they indicate a promising start. San Francisco, she said, also started out slowly when it first implemented a curbside program in the 1980s.

San Francisco's turning point, according to Westlund, was the "co-mingled" system introduced in 2000, which allows residents to dump all recyclables in one cart, rather than sorting them out. New Orleans' new program does not require separating materials.

Also, in 2009, recycling and composting became mandatory, which raised the participation of apartment buildings in the city from 20 percent to 80 percent. Before that law, an average of 400 tons of food scraps per day was composted. Today, an average of 600 tons are composted every day in San Francisco.

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