Under the best of circumstances, hauling trash is a tough job.
Last month’s snowstorms and freezing temperatures didn’t make it any easier. Yet, all things considered, trash customers were for the most part well served, with service canceled just one day — Feb. 15.
That led to later-than-usual pickup times for the rest of that week as crews worked in terrible conditions through Feb. 20 to catch up.
They didn’t quite make it, though.
Maureen Turner, manager of refuse and recycling services for the city, said crews picked up 1,041 tons of refuse that week, down from the 1,775 tons picked up in an average week in February. That left trash haulers with about 700 extra tons of refuse to pick up last week.
Recycling service, meanwhile, resumed last week after the city had halted it for two weeks.
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“We were like, you know what, let’s pick up the trash as best we can,” Turner said. “Recycling doesn’t stink, it doesn’t create any hazards, you don’t have any birds or rodents or anything trying to get into that, and so we felt it was much more important that we try to get the trash picked up as best we can.”
Tulsans should not expect to see their trash and recycling bills increase as a result of the storm.
“The customers’ fees will not change,” Turner said.
The only additional costs incurred by the Tulsa Authority for the Recover of Energy — the public trust that oversees the city’s refuse and recycling services — as a result of the storms were for dumping trash at a landfill and overtime pay for the city’s bulky waste crews, Turner said.
TARE had to spend $19,500 to send the city’s trash to the Quarry Landfill on 46th Street North last week because Covanta, the trash-to-energy company that usually receives it, has been closed for nearly two weeks.
Patrick Walsh, the company’s area asset manager, said the plant has been down since overnight Feb. 16 because of the weather. Covanta hoped to gradually resume operations over the weekend.
A number of factors contributed to the closing, Walsh said, including the storms, the skyrocketing cost of natural gas, and lower-than-usual deliveries of trash due to the dangerous conditions for haulers.
“The weather is what tripped the plant offline, the cold weather, and the secondary effect of that was the exorbitant cost of natural gas,” Walsh said. ”Instead of it costing us, let’s say on the high side $8,000 to $10,000 to start up a single boiler, it would have been in the neighborhood of $600,000 to $700,000 per unit, and we have three of them.”
TARE contracts with New Solutions to pick up Tulsans’ trash and recyclables. The trash is delivered to Covanta, 2122 S. Yukon Ave., which burns it to create energy. Recyclables are taken to Tulsa Recycling and Transfer, 1150 N. Peoria Ave.
New Solutions operates about 60 trucks daily with more than 100 trash haulers working neighborhoods across the city.
The week of the storms and cold made for rough sledding for those workers, said Gary Percefull, community relations manager for New Solutions.
“A lot of those neighborhood streets, while the city did an excellent job clearing the arterial (streets) and stuff, that is not where you haul trash 95% of the time,” Percefull said. “... The guys have just really had to work long hours then to do the catch-up. Now that the weather is normal, it’s fine to go haul, but we have twice as much stuff to pick up.”
Turner said last month’s storms had another, less obvious effect that might go unnoticed by most Tulsans.
“This impacts our sustainability,” she said. “Tulsa has been landfill free — which is less than 5% of the residential stream goes to a landfill — every year for eight of the last nine years. So if Covanta can’t get up and running, it does affect our sustainability as well.”
