Santa Fe City Solid Waste Management is rolling out a new proposal at the city Public Utilities Commission meeting next week: "Greenleaf" recycling bins to be picked up bi-weekly for an extra monthly fee.
"The impetus is that a lot of people don't have trucks and anybody who has a city yard probably has clippings they produce every month, every year," Solid Waste director Regina Wheeler says.
Even though the program would be called greenleaf, since the current city trash cans are green, the new containers will probably be brown 96-gallon rolling bins, which Wheeler says she hopes won't be confusing. Households who opted in to the service would have to pay about $4 extra per month. In order to make the project feasible economically, at least 1,000 Santa Fe households would have to get on board.
Wheeler says she knows city residents are currently under-utilizing its existing curbside recycling service, though SFCSWM doesn't keep statistics on how many households use the bins. Right now, SFCSWM is giving out about 150 bins per week to city households who don't have them, for a total of at least 1,000 since December 2010. Wheeler estimates that only about 30 percent of city households use the service, and speculates the low participation rate might be due to confusion during past years when recycling pickup was bi-weekly.
"I think people got really confused and gave up," Wheeler says.
Santa Feans can stop by 1142 Siler Road (two blocks south of Agua Fria) between 8 to 5 Monday to Friday to pick up the bins if they don't have them. No paperwork is needed, just an address corresponding to an up-to-date account.
