Jane Fraytet watched in horror last week as the contents of her recycling bin were thrown in the back of a garbage truck along with her garbage. For over three weeks, her recycling had not been picked up and paper, plastic and cardboard had begun to build up at her Arnold Drive home.
“Does the city still have a recycling project?” she asked in an email to Creative Loafing. Four of her neighbors wondered the same thing as the materials they had put out to be recycled piled up.
Fraytet’s neighbor Karrie Payne is still fuming over a run-in she had with a worker riding in a recycling truck when she tried to get him to pick up the cardboard boxes she left out to be recycled.
“I tried to help him pick them up and it was almost like he was too lazy to get out of the truck,” Payne said.
Another neighbor who asked us not to use her name said that after she called the City of Charlotte’s Solid Waste Services to complain that her recycling hadn’t been picked up in three weeks, a garbage truck stopped in front of her house and her recycling was dumped in with the trash. They left everyone else’s recycling on the street, she claims. For the next two weeks, once again no one came to pick up her recycling.
“It’s been kind of aggravating because they tell us to recycle,” she said.
Solid Waste Services Public Information Officer Brandi Williams said that the woman’s recycling wasn’t picked up because of “a late set out” and claimed her recycling was picked up within eight hours of “the miss.”
Robert Kimrey finally called CL in frustration about a similar problem two weeks ago. Kimrey, who lives on Queen Ann Road off South Tryon Street, qualifies for the city’s backyard garbage pick-up program because he is confined to a wheelchair. The city often forgets to pick up his trash, he says, sometimes for weeks at a time. Although the city doesn’t officially have backyard pick up for recycling, he leaves it out anyway. Sometimes it gets picked up. Other times it’s tossed in with the trash.
The day after CL called officials at Solid Waste Services to inquire about the problem, Arnold Drive residents said their trash and recycling was finally picked up and hauled off in the proper vehicles.
Though Fraytet claims she has made over 10 complaint calls to Solid Waste Services of which she kept a record, Williams had no record of her calls.
Note: If you’ve had trouble getting your garbage or recycling picked up or you’ve seen sanitation workers dump the contents of recycling containers into the trash, we’d like to talk to you. Please call Creative Loafing at 704-944-3646 and leave your name and phone number.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2003.
