Bay Counties Waste Services (BCWS), doing business as Specialty Solid Waste and Recycling, and City Staff are presently working on the replacement of Bay County’s curbside recycling collection vehicles. Vehicles are scheduled to be purchased in Fiscal Year 2001/2002. This project provides the opportunity to make improvements to the City’s curbside recycling program. Several options have been evaluated and BCWS and City staff have elected to change the existing three crate recycling program to one that collects an expanded list of materials, using a split cart to do so. This change will help increase recycling participation, reduce worker injury, simplify the program for the residents, reduce program cost, and allow the expansion of the program to accept all plastic bottles for recycling. In addition, BCWS and the City are using this opportunity to investigate options for purchasing alternative fuel engines for these new recycling trucks to reduce the impact of recycling operations on local air quality.

BCWS provides curbside recycling service to approximately 28,800 single family residences and mobile homes in the City. This service is part of the BCWS refuse collection contract with the City, and evolved from the curbside recycling service operated by the City from 1982-1991.

Curbside recyclables collected from single family residences in Sunnyvale account for approximately 3 percentage points of the City’s total 52% diverted from the landfill. Metal cans, glass bottles and jars, PET plastic bottles, newspapers, cardboard, oil, and oil filters are all collected as part of the curbside recycling program currently available to Sunnyvale residents. Residents set these materials out in three colored crates, yellow for cans and plastic, blue for glass, and green for newspapers. They bundle cardboard, set out motor oil (in jugs with a screw top lid), and recycle oil filters in specially provided ziplock bags. BCWS collects these materials from the curb in one truck. The driver manually picks up the crates and dumps them into various troughs on the side of the truck, sorting the glass by color. Cardboard is placed in a bin on the back of the truck and oil and oil filters are placed in a specially made box on the side. These materials are currently transported to the Sunnyvale Recycling Center where they are processed and sold to market.

The curbside recycling trucks are due for replacement during fiscal year 2001/2002 making this an opportune time to make improvements to the curbside recycling program.

After reviewing the goals of the Solid Waste and Air Quality Sub-elements (see goals and policies listed below), BCWS and City Staff set a list of objectives early in the process to guide the decision making throughout the project. These objectives are:

• Increase customer satisfaction with and participation in the residential recycling collection service.
• Purchase equipment that allows the City to maintain its current compliance with the state mandate to divert 50% of solid waste from landfill.
• Reduce cost to the ratepayers.
• Reduce injury to collection workers and related workers’ compensation expense.
• Reduce the impact on the local environment through reduced number of trucks on streets and reduced air emissions of individual trucks.

BCWS and City staff weighed these factors, while also examining what other jurisdictions were doing to improve their recycling programs. The most common trend is to move from a crate based system to a cart based system. Large jurisdictions including Sacramento, San Francisco, and San Jose, have either switched to carts or are planning to within the next few years. Taking into consideration the factors mentioned above, Sunnyvale staff feels that this direction is also appropriate for Sunnyvale.

Solid Waste Sub-element Goal 3.2B: "Reduce solid waste disposal to 50% or less of the amount generated in 1990 (as adjusted to reflect population and economic changes)."

Solid Waste Sub-element Goal 3.2F: "Maintain sound financial strategies and practices that will enable the City to provide comprehensive solid waste management services to the community while keeping refuse rates at or below countywide averages for cities using cost of service pricing.

Solid Waste Sub-element Policy 3.2B.2: "Maximize diversion of solid waste from disposal by use of demand management techniques, providing and promoting recycling programs, and encouraging private sector recycling."

Solid Waste Sub-element Action Statement 3.2A.1C: "Evaluate methods of achieving increased efficiencies in solid waste collection."

Air Quality Sub-element Goal A "Improve Sunnyvale’s air quality and reduce the exposure of its citizens to air pollutants."

The improved curbside collection program will employ a cart based collection system similar to those used for yardwaste collection and unlimited refuse collection. The recycling carts will be different in that they will be split down the middle (known in the solid waste industry as a "split cart"). One side of the cart will be used to place all containers (plastic bottles, metal cans, glass bottles and jars) and the other side will be used for fibers (newspaper and corrugated cardboard). Residents will be able to place additional materials in paper bags or bundles next to the cart.

The trucks will then transport the materials to the Sunnyvale Materials Recovery and Transfer Station (SMaRT StationÒ ) where they will dump the material in the curbside recycling processing area of the facility. The curbside recycling processing area is being designed to accept the more co-mingled materials and process them so that they are acceptable to the recycling markets. This capability does not exist at the current Sunnyvale Recycling Center.

Making changes to a refuse or recycling collection system is not simple. In order to ensure a smooth transition from the old system to a new system, staff set five objectives, identified in the Background section of this report, and remained focused on these throughout the process. This focus helped identify potential positive and negative outcomes from the planned system change. For the purposes of this discussion, the five objectives can be grouped into three larger categories; Customer Satisfaction, Operational Efficiency, and Environmental Impact.

The improved curbside program is expected to lead to increased customer satisfaction and raise the percentage of participants in the program. From the customer’s perspective, the current three-crate system is labor intensive and complex to use. In order to gauge customer reaction and acceptance of a split cart, staff turned to the City of San Jose. San Jose has been running a pilot program using split carts in various areas of the city since November 1998.

In an effort to increase participation in its curbside program, San Jose worked with one of its contracted refuse haulers, Waste Management, to implement a split cart pilot in carefully selected areas of the city. The City of San Jose conducted a customer satisfaction survey in February of 1999 to assess customer response to the new system. Sunnyvale staff concluded, after a detailed review of San Jose’s pilot and survey, that the data gathered by San Jose could be used by Sunnyvale to gauge customer response and system performance, thereby saving Sunnyvale the effort and expense of doing its own pilot and survey. Some of San Jose’s customer survey responses were:

• Of 2,823 respondents, 88% indicated they would like to continue the program.
• 89% of respondents said they were satisfied with the program.
• 92% of respondents said they found the program simpler to use.
• 89% of respondents said they recycled the same or more than before.

Staff feels confident that Sunnyvale residents will react in a similar fashion, with the large majority liking the new service more than the old service. One of the benefits of the new system is that it will enable acceptance of all types of plastic bottles. The Solid Waste Program has experienced consistent requests from residents over the years to expand the program to accept more types of plastic bottles.

The selection of the split cart not only will provide customers with an easier to use and more convenient system, but will provide for increased efficiencies in the operations of the curbside recycling program.

BCWS will use "semi-automated" trucks to empty these carts, where the cart is automatically emptied by a hydraulic tipper mounted on the trucks. The cart has a butterfly lid that opens to the inside and rests on a divider on the truck during tipping. The combination of the butterfly lid and divider on the truck directs the two streams of recyclables into different compartments on the truck. Using a semi-automated system versus the current manual system will reduce worker injury and enable BCWS to service more homes with one route.

A major benefit of these changes is that they will essentially combine the multi-family recycling department with the single-family curbside recycling department. The combination can be realized through the switch from a crate based system to a cart based system. The multi-family recycling program currently serves residents of complexes that have four or more units, utilizing a two-cart system. BCWS is able to combine the two programs through a minor modification of the existing multi-family trucks to enable them to tip split carts. This will allow BCWS to reduce the total number of routes between the two systems by two, reduce the number of backup trucks from two to one, and reduce the number of new trucks needed in FY 2001/2002 from seven to four.

The purchase of new curbside recycling trucks provides an opportunity to reduce air emissions from the trucks used for recycling collections. BCWS and City staff have been investigating options for purchasing cleaner burning engines for these new recycling trucks, as well as a number of garbage and yardwaste trucks that are also due for replacement. Although it is not yet clear which engines are best suited for this heavy duty operation, the intended outcome is to reduce the impact of garbage and recycling collection operations on local air quality. Reducing the total number of recycling trucks from ten to seven will also reduce air quality impacts. The City will seek to recoup the incremental cost of purchasing these vehicles by applying for grant funds available through the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

These improvements to the recycling program are anticipated to reduce cost of curbside collection of recyclables by approximately $280,000 per year through reduction of the number of drivers and routes needed to service the City and reduced workers compensation costs. The franchise agreement allows the contractor to present to the City a cost savings proposal that it claims will result in savings through reduction in operating expenses. Following review of the proposal, the City may choose to approve the proposal as being within the scope of the Incentive Program outlined in the contract. The result is the contractor would receive half of the savings. If BCWS applies for savings under the Incentive Program, the City will realize approximately $140,000 per year in savings as a result of the changes to the curbside recycling program outlined in this report.

Prepared by:

Mark A. Bowers
Solid Waste Program Manager

Reviewed by:

Marvin A. Rose
Director, Department of Public Works

Approved by:

Robert S. LaSala
City Manager