In July, the City of Pensacola will restart its curbside recycling under a new fee structure, which offers a discount to those who don’t recycle.
Seventeen years ago, Pensacola and Escambia County did not have curbside recycling. A complex web of government agencies, lawsuits, and bureaucratic battles left the area without basic recycling services. The difference-maker was Leadership Pensacola, which had been revitalized because of an injection of Pensacola Young Professionals and Inweekly Rising Stars.
Complex Web
The roots of Pensacola’s recycling troubles lay in a fragmented waste management system that divided responsibilities among three separate government entities: Escambia County, the City of Pensacola, and the Emerald Coast Utility Authority (ECUA). Each agency had different priorities, different revenue streams, and different ideas about who should handle what.
The complexity was staggering. Escambia County owned the Perdido Landfill in Cantonment and charged a $31-per-ton “tipping fee” to anyone dumping garbage there. The county sold its collection services to ECUA in 1992, but retained control of the landfill and recycling operations. Meanwhile, private companies like Allied Waste Services competed for collection contracts, sometimes hauling garbage to other facilities to avoid the county’s fees.
“You really can’t do recycling without tying it to garbage,” John Tonkin, director of Santa Rosa Clean Community System, explained to us. However, in Escambia County, the agencies responsible for garbage and recycling were locked in a constant struggle over territory, revenue, and control.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the situation was that recycling services had been actively blocked by legal action. ECUA officials revealed they had wanted to offer recycling programs for years, but Escambia County had prevented them by filing a lawsuit around 1995. The county, which made money selling recyclables collected at its drop-off sites, apparently saw ECUA’s recycling ambitions as a threat to its revenue stream.
This legal battle left residents with only a patchwork of drop-off locations—17 sites scattered across the county with varying numbers of containers. The busiest site, at the Summit Boulevard Fire Station, had nine containers and drew steady traffic from residents willing to make the trip. However, recycling remained out of reach for many families, especially those without reliable transportation.
A Tale of Two Cities
The contrast with neighboring Gulf Breeze was stark and telling. The smaller city had successfully negotiated a curbside recycling program through Allied Waste, with services included in the basic franchise fee that residents paid for garbage collection. In early 2008, Gulf Breeze had even expanded its program, providing residents with larger recycling carts for bi-weekly pickup—all for just $16.50 per month.
The difference wasn’t resources or geography; it was governance. Gulf Breeze had a unified approach to waste management, while Escambia County and Pensacola were trapped in a system that pitted agencies against each other.
Elections Break Deadlock
In 2008, there were signs that the deadlock might finally be breaking. Escambia County Commissioner Grover Robinson, who said constituents asked him “almost daily” about curbside recycling, had begun pushing for the consolidation of solid waste services. Behind-the-scenes meetings between officials from all three agencies had led to tentative agreements that consolidation might be the best long-term solution.
- “The long-term goal should be for one entity to do it,” Robinson argued. “It would be a lot simpler. We’ve just got to find a way to get there.”
Leadership Pensacola’s 2008 class launched a “LiveGreen Escambia” initiative, planning to distribute thousands of free recycling toolkits to residents on Earth Day. The kits included recycling bins, energy-efficient light bulbs, reusable shopping bags, and guides to local drop-off locations.
In April 2008, the Pensacola Young Professionals and Leadership Pensacola Class of 2008 asked the ECUA board to implement curbside recycling. The three board members—Larry Walker, Elvin McCorvey and Logan Fink—voted it down. However, they voted for a compromise measure that would allow voluntary curbside recycling.
Fink would lose his re-election bid, and ECUA passed curbside recycling in October 2008, leaving the Pensacola City Council as the remaining holdout. The program began on Jan. 1, 2009.
With the election of new council members, Maren DeWeese, Megan Pratt. Diane Mack and Larry Johnson, the Pensacola City Council passed curbside recycling in March 2009. The program began on June 15, 2009.
And when the City of Pensacola eliminated curbside recycling, we stepped back 15 years in time. Instead of curbside recycling, we got wasteful twice-weekly trash pickup without any discount for households carrying their own recycling to the pickup locations and barely filling one can (let alone two huge trash bins!) each week. The choices made by the city have been ignorant and backwards.
When I moved to the city almost 22/23 years ago, I paid about $16.50 per month for garbage pick up twice a week. Then along came recycling and they gave us two cans but only picked up once per week. Then because, recycling was a scam (it all ended up in the same pile), they went back to picking up twice a week one can each time….its now almost $40.00 per month. and they are going back to once per week. Thus going up 400 percent in 22 years on a per pick up basis. I don’t know what inflation has done during that period, maybe someone can post it…. For the record, I am not scrubbing my peanut butter jar, using soap, water, etc. so I can put it in a special can…. but I take stuff and put it in the big bins on Summit on a regular basis. But here is what I really want them to do…..is pick up on time. Trash sitting in the street for weeks is ridiculous.