CLEVELAND — Cleveland city leaders are trying to figure out why a city waste collection crew took a resident’s recycling bin and put the bin itself in the city’s trash truck for disposal last week. The bizarre, apparently isolated incident was captured on the resident’s home security camera.
Watch the story on News 5 at 6 p.m.
The resident’s home security video captured the city waste collection crews making their weekly rounds last Thursday in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood. The resident did not want to be identified. The video shows the crew emptying multiple trash bins into the back of the trash truck before dumping the contents of the resident’s recycling bin into the truck as well. The resident has not opted into the city’s recycling program, which was re-launched in the summer.
At some point in the next few months, waste collection crews will stop collecting the contents inside blue recycling bins if residents have not opted into the recycling program before a contractor hired by the city eventually collects the blue bins themselves.
However, a city spokesperson told News 5 that facet of the program has not started yet, making what happened next even more perplexing.
The surveillance video shows one of the crew members grabbing the resident’s recycling bin and placing it on the mechanism that dumps the contents into the back of the truck. Then, inexplicably, the blue recycling bin itself ends up in the back of the truck before another one of the crew members pushes twice on the bin, driving it further into the back of the truck. The truck’s crushing mechanism then pulverizes the recycling bin and other trash.
The crew then continues on its route.
A city spokesperson said the incident should not have happened in any way, shape or form. Additionally, top public works and waste collection officials are in the process of trying to determine what happened and why.
When the blue bins are eventually collected from residents that have not opted into the city’s recycling program, as many as 10,000 bins will be cleaned and stored at a city facility to serve as replacement bins. The remaining bins will be melted down and recycled, according to a contract approved by the City Council last spring.
In May, the City Council approved a $500,000 for the city to hire a contractor that will be tasked with assessing, retrieving and recycling the blue recycling carts that are to be collected over the next several months. Only those that have not opted into the city’s recycling program will lose their blue carts.
In May, Terrell Pruitt, the director of the Division of Waste Collection and Disposal told the City Council’s Municipal Properties and Services Committee that, at the time, the city was estimating that as many as 100,000 blue recycling carts would eventually need to be collected.
“There’s a portion of those blue carts we will keep as a balance for replacements. However, the vast majority of our blue bins have reached an end of their useful life. There is a value in the resin and we expect the vendor to recycle those carts and use them to make new ones,” Pruitt told council members. “There is a value in the actual resin. The value to the marketplace is having these carts. What we’re paying for is the labor and operation of removing these carts off the street from each individual household.”
Even if the process of collecting the blue bins was underway, it should not have resulted in the Old Brooklyn resident’s bin being trashed, officials said.
