Serious about financial responsibility? Our waste management practices must change.
The city pays fees to export its waste to other communities for disposal of what could be composted within city limits, saving money and emissions.
As the standoff between City Hall and the union representing blue-collar municipal workers dragged on, remarks by Mayor Cherelle L. Parker focused on her priority to come to a contract that is financially responsible. In this instance, working people — many of them sanitation workers — were being asked to take responsibility for the financial stability of a city that has chosen a waste management strategy that is neither financially nor environmentally sustainable.
It is no secret that Philadelphia’s past waste management practices have been problematic for residents who are concerned about environmental sustainability.
During Mayor Jim Kenney’s tenure, residents learned that curbside recycling had been suspended during the pandemic by watching their carefully separated recycling tossed into the truck alongside the trash.
Recent citywide recycling rates for residential units are only 13%, an unimpressive number when compared with the national average of 32%. Parker’s lackluster goal is to bump it up to 14%.
Parker has made “greening” the city a top priority, but her interest ends at what happens to the litter, short dumping, or separated recycling once it is picked up. That also happens to be where the financial unsustainability of our current processes begins.
With only 10% of the Department of Streets’ budget going to the actual labor of collecting waste, it is a wonder why those concerned with financial stability are not instead concerning themselves with the greater share (14%) spent on waste disposal.
Like most major U.S. cities, Philadelphia’s trash is collected by municipal employees and disposed of by private companies. In the city’s case, contracts with Waste Management and Covanta guarantee a set tonnage of daily waste delivered to the companies for a set fee, totaling $26 million and $13 million, respectively.
These seven-year contracts, signed under the Kenney administration, locked the city into delivering a minimum annual tonnage of waste at an annually increasing cost. As a result, the city has budgeted over $12.8 million to be paid to Covanta and over $35.3 million to WM in the 2025 proposed budget.
With the structure of these contracts, there is no incentive to reduce waste for the companies paid to dispose of it; it’s up to the city to implement new strategies to reduce it itself.
As I have written here previously, instead of taking bold actions to fundamentally change Philadelphia’s waste management approach, the Parker administration is instead doubling down on collection practices that simply remove trash from sight, rather than reduce it.
This is a politically expedient approach that allows Parker to say she delivered on cleaning the city; however, it does nothing to actually make Philadelphia a more environmentally or financially sustainable city.
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Amid the work stoppage, Philadelphians suffered from piles of trash in public spaces. But they were also being forced to reckon with what and how much they discarded.
The way the current waste management system functions in this city, about a third of the material that was piled up around Philadelphia would be trucked to Covanta’s Delaware Valley facility in Chester and burned for energy in the nation’s largest trash incinerator. Activists have long raised the alarm about the environmental and health impacts of this practice.
Meanwhile, another third of the city’s trash would be trucked up I-95 to be buried in Waste Management’s Fairless Landfill in Bucks County.
About 47% of the materials the city collects are compostable, yet no citywide program exists to divert that material from the waste stream. The result? The city pays fees — by the ton — to export its waste to other communities for disposal of what could be composted within city limits, saving money and emissions.
The city’s recent five-year strategic plan mentions “a small-scale pilot” organics drop-off program, missing an opportunity to make an investment in a citywide composting program that could reduce the city’s disposed waste by almost half.
Expanding curbside pickup to twice a week allows Philadelphians to discard more, as their space for waste storage is emptied twice as often. But pay-as-you-throw plans, such as those in Seattle, Berkeley, Calif., and Austin, Texas, would work to disincentivize trash production and help residents relate their trash production to the cost the city incurs for disposal.
An even easier program to reduce waste would be to enact a limit on single-use plastic, such as New York City’s “Skip the Stuff” program, a logical extension of the plastic bag ban already in effect in Philly.
If Parker is truly concerned about fiscal responsibility surrounding the removal and disposal of Philadelphia’s waste, she and the Department of Streets should be working to implement reduction strategies that would lower the city’s amount of waste, since it is paying per ton for disposal.
Strategies such as expanding composting, increasing recycling, limiting the use of single-use plastics, and pay-as-you-throw schemes would all do more to ensure the fiscal sustainability of the city than the modest wage demand of the essential employees who do the dangerous job of removing over 600,000 tons of annual waste from Philadelphia’s streets.
Adam Bailey is an urban planner, a graduate of Philadelphia’s Citizens Planning Institute, and a former employee of New York City’s Department of Sanitation.