Once Austin warned its residents on Oct. 22 to boil their tap water before drinking it, it didn't take long for panicked shoppers to clear out grocery stores of plastic water bottles and jugs.

The city, whose treatment plants had been overwhelmed by silt-heavy floodwaters, ended up handing out 625,608 gallons of bottled water over four days.

But, when the boil notice was lifted Oct. 28, work at Austin Resource Recovery was just beginning.

The amount of plastic recycled in the three weeks following the boil water crisis was “just crazy,” said Ron Romero, division manager for operations at Austin Resource Recovery. Recyclables collected in October increased 8.7 percent from the previous year, data from the center show, and recyclables hauled in November jumped 5 percent from the previous year.

A total of 5,228 tons of recycling were picked up in October, up from the 4,808 tons collected in the same month last year. In November, collectors picked up 5,164 tons of recyclables, an increase from 4,917 tons in 2017.

“I’ve been here 20 years, and I’ve been managing this division probably for the last 12 years, and in my time, I hadn’t seen anything — just the amount of volume it had increased due to these circumstances — I hadn’t seen anything like that,” Romero said.

The resource center collects recyclable trash twice a month from about 200,000 customers in Austin and sends the items to material recovery facilities to be separated and sold. When the boil notice first went out the morning of Oct. 22, Romero said the team didn't immediately panic because they did not expect to see an increase right away.

"What we kind of planned for was the following days coming up. We had a meeting with staff on the operational way we were going to attack this," he said.

Forty staff members worked a total of 255 overtime hours in the two weeks after the notice, and additional trucks were used to compensate for the extra recycling seen in the weeks following the notice.

Austin Resource Recovery also worked on messaging to the city to encourage recycling of the plastic bottles people were picking up, spokeswoman Memi Cárdenas said. The boil notice was a good way to see what the consequence would be if people didn't recycle, she said.

Outside of the boil notice, Austin residents are good about recycling, Cardenas and Romero said, and Austin Resource Recovery typically sees an increase in recyclables put out in December and January during the holidays, and in June, July, and August.

Recycling carts were overflowing with plastic after the notice, and residents set up extra boxes with more plastic bottles and jugs to be picked up along their curbs, Romero said.

"We saw a huge increase in volume," he said.

So much recycling was done that it seemed to Romero that residents preferred bottles over boiling during the notice.

“It was really a surprise. They were telling everyone to boil the water. We didn’t see it with the amount of recyclables that we collected,” he said. “I don’t think they necessarily heeded that advice.”