When the city of St. Paul sought to add collection in wheeled, lidded carts to its residential recycling program late last year, four companies responded to the city’s request for proposals.

Only one — Eureka Recycling — offered to do double duty by servicing alleys citywide and then handle the sorting and resale of recyclables to paper, plastic and metal buyers.

At first, it looked promising.

The nonprofit’s single-stream proposal included environmentally efficient trucks, partnerships with local buyers such as the WestRock paper-processing company, and a track record of keeping tabs on nonrecyclable materials in the stream, which can diminish resale values.

The current program costs the city $3.5 million annually, a savings from the previous $3.9 million contract, before fees for the new lidded carts.

“Their overall costs were lower,” said Anne Hunt, the city’s environmental director. “They also agreed to pick up all the materials that we did currently, and then added a few more — paper towel rolls and biscuit tubes. We asked them to provide really detailed information about the markets for materials. … It would be bad if we told people they could recycle a material, and then a year later we took it out.”

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St. Paul man threatened another man with a sword, charges say In addition, the city now pockets 80 percent of the profit off material sales after processing fees, up from 50 percent in a previous contract with Eureka.

“That helps us keep the rates we charge to residents lower,” Hunt said.

Eureka, the city’s longtime nonprofit recycling partner, ultimately won the five-year contract with St. Paul to service 84,000 single-family homes and small apartment buildings, as well as 33,000 multifamily apartment buildings.

Alley collection with blue, 64-gallon carts began Jan. 16.

A ROUGH START GETS BETTER

The new program rolled out on a rough note, with Eureka recently acknowledging its drivers skipped 10 to 15 alleys per day this winter because of ice.

Initial instructions prepared by the city and approved by Eureka failed to note that residents are required to leave a two-foot buffer around each cart so it can be lifted by a mechanical arm on the right side of each truck.

City officials have said St. Paul’s geographic information systems maps had limited information on alleys, and route maps had to be drawn practically from scratch. Some townhouse complexes were recorded as a single address, leaving dozens of residents sharing one cart.

Many taxpayers were livid, and Eureka’s complaint lines lit up. During a Feb. 8 presentation, St. Paul City Council Member Chris Tolbert told representatives of the nonprofit that their contract could be in jeopardy.

Until then, “there seemed to be a complete lack of acknowledgement,” said Tolbert, who represents Highland Park and Mac-Groveland. “Rather than saying ‘yes there’s problems, but we’re working to fix them,’ there seemed to be an air of ‘we don’t have any problems.'”

As Eureka Recycling approaches an important 90-day milestone in their contract with St. Paul, residents and officials say prospects are finally looking up, though some collection issues — and in some cases, hard feelings — still linger.

St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman acknowledged the initial criticisms during his State of the City address Wednesday, but said things have evened out.

“In part due to the ambitious scale of the project, and in part due to icy alleys, we got off to a bumpy start,” said the mayor. “But we are holding Eureka accountable and working with them to ensure collection continues smoothly. Complaints are down and current reports show our collected tonnage up 15 percent from last year.”

Coleman said the city, which collected 21,000 tons of recyclables last year, is on track to increase that amount by 35 percent over the life of the five-year contract, and boost participation 15 percent.

Joe Ellickson, a spokesman for St. Paul Public Works, noted that tonnage is up 27 percent in some of the lowest-income areas of the East Side and 34 percent across the Frogtown, North End and Summit-University area.

Some critics have pointed out that as a result of the placement of the mechanical arm, the trucks must service each route twice in order to collect from the north and south sides of the alley.

Many residents also were dismayed to discover that lidded carts came embedded with a microchip, without any form of accompanying explanation.

City officials emphasized that the chips — known as “radio-frequency identification” or RFID tags — are quickly becoming the industry standard, but are not actively being used to track who is participating in the recycling program, which is technically mandatory.

“We are not using the RFID tags,” Hunt said. “In the cart that we selected, that was standard.”

Despite the rough start, officials say educational mailers have since been updated with better instructions, complaint calls have dropped back almost to normal, and the tonnage of collected materials has increased as expected.

Several residents who had contacted the Pioneer Press in the first two months of the program to say their recycling collection had been overlooked for multiple weeks now say collection is running smoothly.

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Hundreds gather at Supreme Court to mourn Ginsburg’s death “Yeah, they have figured things out,” said Benjamin Kantor, who lives off Como Avenue and by early February almost gave up on getting his recycling collected.

His hilly corner lot — which has both front driveway and alley access — complicated matters.

“In all, the first three weeks they didn’t even come by, the fourth they missed our house and the fifth they picked it up the day after we were supposed to have it picked up,” he said. “Since then they have been fairly good about picking things up.”

City council member Jane Prince, who represents Dayton’s Bluff and surrounding East Side neighborhoods, said her office is handling a few lingering complaints.

But Prince added: “Eureka has worked hard to make things go smoothly. The East Side’s not easy — there’s a lot of places where we don’t have alleys, or the topography changes from one end of the street to the other.”

For Eureka, more than pride is at stake.

The city’s contracts give the nonprofit 90 days from the start of implementation to iron out any problems. After mid-April, failure to collect recyclables at a stop that has properly set out materials could result in a $50 penalty to the nonprofit for each instance, and failure to correct chronic problems could result in a $100 penalty for each instance.

CONTRACT DETAILS

The two-part contract with Eureka includes both collection and “processing” — the sorting, marketing and sale of collected recyclable materials from its materials recovery facility in northeast Minneapolis.

Owners of single-family homes pay $58 each year of the five-year program, up from $53 in 2016 to cover the cost of the carts. Those charges will increase by 2 percent or less in January 2019 and again in January 2021, based on the Consumer Price Index.

Republic Services, Tranquility Housing and Waste Management also competed for the citywide contracts in 2016.

Republic submitted a proposal to collect recyclables, but not to process them. Waste Management submitted a proposal to process recyclables, but not to collect them. And Tranquility Housing, which is not a licensed hauler in St. Paul, submitted a collection-only proposal indicating it owned one diesel truck.

Combined, the four proposals span well over 1,000 pages — not a quick read.

Here’s a shortcut: Eureka’s 87-page response to a city questionnaire provides a detailed overview of its proposed services.

The copy available at tinyurl.com/EurekaResponse has been annotated by a reporter, with hotlinks to notable paragraphs.

Questionnaires from all four companies are available at tinyurl.com/StpRecyclingProposals.

Among the highlights: the Eureka proposal emphasizes that 89 percent of the material that the nonprofit collects and processes is resold within 10 miles to buyers such as the WestRock paper-processing company.

Eureka also noted its experience doing alley collections in Lauderdale and in St. Paul, where it services multifamily buildings. The nonprofit had previously overseen the shift from bin to cart collections in Lauderdale and Roseville.

Through educational outreach and cart-monitoring video equipment on each truck, Eureka said it has reduced “residuals” — or nonrecyclable contaminants — to less than 2.5 percent of its collections from Lauderdale and Roseville.

Cleaner recycling streams result in less landfill waste, greater processing efficiency and a higher sale price to buyers, which reduces the cost to taxpayers. Eureka also noted its trucks operate on cleaner fuel (soy biodiesel) than is typical for the industry.

In its contracts, Eureka also agreed to submit year-end and either monthly or quarterly reports describing the amount of material collected, summaries of missed collections and complaints, and “unusual contamination issues and chronic problem properties.”