Still New to Paying for Trash, Denver Residents Frustrated With Recycling Rollback

As of January 6, the City of Denver will only pick up recycling every other week as part of an ongoing effort to implement a Pay as You Throw trash system that began rolling out in 2023.

Under the new program, every household can opt into composting services. City officials hope this will improve Denver's poor waste diversion rate, or the measure of how much waste goes into compost or recycling compared to what ends up in landfills.

The original version of the expanded waste services ordinance, which was passed by Denver City Council in 2022, increased recycling to a weekly frequency, but the city officially announced in November that in order to streamline compost rollout and use resources most effectively, recycling would return to pickups every other week, as it had been prior to the ordinance being passed.

The city is also moving large-item pickup to once every nine weeks as opposed to every four weeks. By making these changes, the city has accelerated the timeline to get every person a compost cart. That process is expected to be completed by the end of March, when the previous estimate was by the end of 2025, but the changes to recycling and large-item pickups stay.

Not every resident is thrilled about the new schedule.

“Basically, all the services that they told us they were going to provide and the reason why we are paying for trash, they decided to take away this year,” says Nile Plummer, a Park Hill resident who says he and his close-knit neighbors were shocked to learn about the recycling cutback. “Nothing screams ‘progressive green initiative’ like reducing recycling services while still pocketing the trash fees they forced on us last year in the name of sustainability.”

People pay between $9 and $21 per month depending on the size of their trash bin. Those charges won’t change in 2025, even as service changes occur.

“We've heard Denverites loud and clear: They want composting options, and they want them now,” Mayor Mike Johnston said at a press conference in November. “This rollout will dramatically accelerate our compost service timeline citywide by nine months while meeting our waste needs in a climate-friendly and cost-effective way.”

However, despite what the mayor said, one of the first neighborhoods to receive compost carts hasn’t seemed to put them to use.

In May, Westword joined longtime contributor and avid composter Marty Jones for a walk to examine usage of the compost bins in Five Points, where Jones lives. That day, out of 92 bins visible from four blocks' worth of alleyways in Five Points, 27 weren’t placed for pickup and 21 were empty, for a total of 52 percent of bins unused.

Those results were slightly more positive than surveys Jones conducted on June 5 and May 22, which both showed over 60 percent of bins empty or not placed for pickup, and only sixteen bins completely full.

Plummer says his Park Hill neighborhood is similar, with recycling bins regularly overflowing but compost bins rarely filling up.

“They could have done bi-weekly compost and weekly recycling, especially because in the winter months we don't have a lot of compost,” he suggests. “Maybe even cut back on compost in the winter."
Residents can put food and yard waste into compost, which the city encourages, because composting is a direct circular economy: What goes into Denver compost bins will be transformed into soil and reused in Colorado.

Increasing recycling to a weekly system was designed with the idea that the more people recycle, the less waste ends up in a landfill. But in an announcement about the changes, the Denver Department of Transportation & Infrastructure said offering weekly recycling didn’t significantly increase the amount of recyclables the city collected.

What did increase was the miles driven by recycling trucks, at 170,000 miles annually. This added greenhouse gas emissions to Denver’s air, counteracting the eco-friendly idea behind the increase in recycling frequency, according to DOTI.

Despite an eventual goal that over half of the city’s waste go to recycling or compost by 2027, Denver has only made modest gains in the first two years of the new trash system. In 2022, before the program started, the diversion rate was 23 percent. In 2023 the rate rose to 26 percent. But in 2024 only a small gain occurred, with the city’s diversion rate at 26.5 percent for the year.

“Across the board, overall tonnage of trash, recycling and large items was down in 2024,” says Nancy Kuhn, DOTI spokesperson. “There was an overall reduction in waste in 2024, but compost tonnage was up by about 3,000 tons, which gave us that jump in the diversion rate, which is a good direction for us to be going in.”

DOTI found that residents only use about 58 percent of their recycling cart volume per week, whereas after two weeks those carts should be packed to the brim. Plummer supports the city becoming more eco-conscious and is a longtime advocate for better bike infrastructure; however, he believes the change to recycling could actually counteract progress the program has made so far.

“I used to live in Cheesman Park, and when I lived there, our recycle bins would be filled up every week, and then you just start throwing your recycling away,” he says. “That's what I'm really concerned with.”

Plummer lives alone with his dog and says his neighbors with children will put their extra recycling in his bin when theirs gets full. With bi-weekly recycling, his bin won’t be an option anymore, he says, so most of those items will likely be put in the trash.
Although residents now pay for trash, DOTI is still pulling from the city's general fund to make the new trash pickup program work. In 2025, the department will receive $15.7 million and says the charge for trash would need to increase if the expanded waste services program were to pay for itself. Kuhn says keeping recycling weekly and large-item pickup monthly while expanding compost would have required an even higher appropriation from the general fund this year.

The changes to the program could help with DOTI’s route completion rate, as well. DOTI Executive Director Amy Ford cited that as another reason for the approved service changes last November. In 2024, Denver had a 90.1 percent route completion rate. DOTI's goal is 95 percent completion, a number city council has questioned for still being too low.  Early returns from 2025 seem to show an improvement, however.

“Year to date, we are at 98.8 percent,” Kuhn says. “Last week [the week of January 6], and our first week of collection schedule changes, we ended the week with a 100 percent route completion rate.”

Plummer called 311 to ask how he could advocate for keeping weekly recycling. The 311 operator told him to reach out to city council about the program since the council voted to switch the trash system. Though Plummer says he has reached out to at least six councilmembers and the mayor’s office, only councilmembers Shontel Lewis and Sarah Parady replied.

Plummer says both expressed a willingness to examine a return to weekly recycling; Lewis confirms she is looking into the issue.

Still, Plummer finds it shady that the city instituted a fee for residents with the promise of weekly recycling, only to roll that promise back without public engagement.

“Their whole initiative was to make Denver greener. I just wish they would have stuck to that,” he says. “It feels really weird for a city like Denver. We're a progressive, forward-thinking and green community. We want to be environmentally friendly. For them to roll back access to recycling is just bizarre.”