Denver will speed up compost bin delivery next year — while cutting back on recycling pickup

Denver will deliver green compost bins to every solid waste customer who wants one by the end of March, city officials said in announcing an acceleration of their often-maligned rollout.

The citywide expansion of composting service had been expected to take until the end of 2025. But to hit the moved-up deadline — and limit the greenhouse gas emissions of its trucks — Denver will cut back on collecting recyclable items from customers’ purple bins. Recycling pickup will go from weekly to every other week starting Jan. 6.

The frequency of large-item pickup services will also be reduced from once every four weeks to once every nine weeks next year, the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure announced Thursday.

The coming changes won’t impact the base prices charged by the city. Pay-as-you-throw trash collection service will still be priced based on the size of the black trash bins each customer uses, ranging from $9 to $21 per month. The city has been providing $9 quarterly credits to customers who are still waiting for compost services. Those credits will end in April, according to DOTI.

The city pivoted to a fee-based trash service and weekly recycling pickups at the beginning of 2023 as it also began making compost pickup a standard free service. Based on observations since then, city officials hope the tweaks will improve reliability and help the city better meet its landfill diversion and greenhouse gas emission reduction goals.

“What we’ve learned over the years is (that) we are dramatically underusing our recycling bins each week. We are actually increasing our impact on the environment by running that much recycling (pickup) without that much demand,” Mayor Mike Johnston said in an interview. “We can use the people and the trucks to run those weekly compost routes all over the city.”

When the City Council approved the city’s transition of trash collection services to a program funded by fees on residential customers, one of the selling points was a doubling of recycling collection frequency from every other week to weekly.

But the added work put a strain on an understaffed waste collection department immediately, requiring the city to contract with a third-party hauler to provide those weekly pickups in some neighborhoods through 2026. Customers have been frustrated at times with missed pickups of different services.

In May, officials told a council committee that city collectors and contractors were completing 94% of their routes every week through that point in the year, down from 95% in 2023. That completion rate has slipped further since, according to DOTI leadership.

“These adjustments in our collection schedules will allow us to improve customer service, creating greater reliability in our collection services and improving route completion rates for trash, compost and recycling,” DOTI executive director Amy Ford said in a DOTI news release. “In other words, we pick up your solid waste the day we tell you we are going to pick it up. Today we are at 90%, and we are striving to be at 95%.”

DOTI will be sending letters to 67,000 solid waste customers next month asking them which size compost bin they would like, the release says.

Those customers live in the city’s waste collection districts 1, 6, 7 and 9, which generally cover some northwest, central, east and southeast neighborhoods. They will then have until Jan. 10 to opt into the service and receive their compost bins as part of a first round of deliveries early next year.

There are 180,000 solid waste customers in the city. Bins have been provided in four of Denver’s nine collection districts so far, with rollouts still in progress in District 3, which covers northeastern neighborhoods including Park Hill and Central Park, according to DOTI’s release.

Denverites can dispose of food scraps and yard waste in their compost bins, reducing the amount of waste that otherwise would go to the city’s landfill and emit greenhouse gases like methane as it decomposes. With composting, those items are turned into a nutrient-rich soil additive.

DOTI said the initial wave of requested green-bin deliveries would be completed by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Johnston was more specific during his interview, setting March 15 as the likely completion date for the ramped-up rollout.

The data Johnston and other city officials are using to inform decisions suggest that 50% of a household’s weekly waste is compostable, 25% is recyclable and the final 25% is landfill trash, he said.

DOTI said running large-item pickup on a once-every-four-weeks basis was a factor adding to the city’s waste stream by encouraging people to trash items they might otherwise be able to offload through alternative means.

Once that compost rollout period is over in April, DOTI is encouraging customers who produce lots of recyclable waste each week to request a larger or even second recycling cart if they need one, department spokeswoman Nancy Kuhn said.

Councilman Kevin Flynn voted against the pay-as-you-throw trash program in 2022. But he supports the changes DOTI and the mayor announced this week, he said, especially in light of the extra 170,000 miles the department reported its recycling trucks have been driving per year to make weekly pickups.