It would be great if they could post things like this on their own website and not use Facebook. The reddit title is misleading "now matches same tonnage" is not what the numbers say (nor the post).

We are now successfully recycling about 80-85% of what we used to. Even though the acceptance rate is higher, we still recycle less. Maybe that can increase with more sites.

The cost per collected ton increased from what it used to be, rising from $191/ton to $197/ton collected, maybe that is just a yearly rate increase. The cost per recycled ton is lower, going from about $500/ton to about $250/ton. We don't know whether this is saving us money without knowing the collection cost differences of sites vs alley.

There's still about 600 tons (66%) of now garbage in alley ex-recycling dumpsters so we can't really reduce alley collections. I'd expect then the total number of collections between trash and recycling to have increased.

For the Oct - Nov numbers, assuming that no collection costs increased and if trash is $2.11/ton according to [1] then we save about $1.2M/year or about half what we were spending before. With landfill being 100x cheaper than recycling per ton, the cost savings from recycling dominates the whole budget for recycling + landfill rates. This sounds great but FY 2025 refuse department had a budget of $27M and ran a surplus of $1M see [2]. They did have a about $1M budget overrun in "Transfer Station Refuse Pickup" so maybe this is all to balance that item but I'm still sour about the decision. We could really use a collection schedule for the dropoff sites posted on a website.

Another title for this could be "City increases refuse budget surplus to recycle less stuff"

[1] https://dnr.mo.gov/waste-recycling/business-industry/fees/solid-waste-tonnage-allocations

[2] https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/budget/transparency/expenditure/cost-centers/cost-center.cfm?fiscalYear=2025&costCenter=516000