Curb Side Recycling in Indianapolis
Curbside Recycling Pilot in Keystone-Monon neighborhood (image credit: Curt Ailes)
A couple weeks ago I arrived home from work and discovered an unfamiliar scene as I drove down my street. There were yellow & blue bins in every property’s front yard, including my own. There was a packet of information included with the bin explaining that my neighborhood had been selected for a 3 month curbside recycling pilot program; which is being offered by Republic. At the end of the 3 month period, a one time charge of $48 for the next year will be billed if we choose to continue.
To be completely honest, I was excited to see the bin in my front yard. Republic will pick it up every other week on the same day as my garbage pick up. The bin is huge and my only worry is that we will fill it too fast. We already take a disproportionate amount of recycling (compared to garbage) to a neighborhood bin on a weekly basis. The good news is that we do not have to sort it and everything we currently recycle is directly compatible. After a couple cycles of using it, I have noted that our 96 gallon recycling bin is almost always full every other week, while our 30 gallon garbage container is less than halfway full every week.
The arrival of the bin really got me thinking about where the City of Indianapolis is with the rumored city-wide curbside recycling program. In 2009, an RFQ was issued by the city to area recycling vendors to gauge whether or not a “free” curbside service could be offered. According to the City website, there IS a curbside program currently in place where they issue a 96 gallon bin. This seems to be the same program that my neighborhood is a pilot participant in. I turned to Molly Deuberry at the DPW to see where the city’s prior RFQ efforts lead. According to her,
“The City is required by contract with our current solid waste haulers to first negotiate with them prior to soliciting outside bids related to curbside recycling. Those are the negotiations that we have been having. To date, we haven’t been able to reach an acceptable conclusion, but we haven’t given up yet. And let me say, we haven’t had a lot of pressure or push for mandatory recycling.”
Additionally,
“When the Ballard Administration came to office in January 2008, there were roughly 8,000 households participating in curbside recycling. Through outreach, increasing awareness, and partnerships, we have increased that number 2 ½ times to just over 21,000 households. That means an increase from 3% of the population to 8% of the population. The Mayor has been very clear that 8% is not enough—we need to keep looking for ways to increase curbside recycling. Thus the idea of the recycling pilot was born.”
To me, that says that our politicians are trying, but only a small number of us our voicing our support of such a system. Even looking at other cities, recycling is seldom “free” and is included in waste fees. It would be a stretch to see a new wide spread and intensive program be put into service totally free. I think the bigger problem is again, convincing people that it is worth paying for the service. It is a quality of life issue that people must be willing to pay for. Personally, the pilot program put us over the hump. The trouble of taking pieces to area bins is worth paying $6 a month to have it picked up. However, I have to say that we never actually subscribed. The pilot program has helped us along with that.
Where are all those pipes headed?
Sanitary Sewer @ Capital & South Street
If you spend any amount of time on the south side of downtown Indianapolis you may have noticed a large scale project going on. It looks to the casual observer like a bunch of pipes that are suppose to be under the ground, that are routed above ground for the most part along city streets and occasionally buried beneath at street crossings using thick steel plates.
Clean Streams Sign
This past weekend, I started at the Lilly campus where the pipes appear to begin and started walking, armed with my camera. What I discovered, was a vast stretch of pipes traversing the streets of downtown’s less dense areas. Namely, where a lot of parking lots and abandoned streets are located. I discovered a pumping station in the ground, but open to the air. There were many things to check out and as I walked, the scope of the project only got bigger. The shear amount of pipe on the ground indicates a large amount of labor was invested to just get these all hooked together. That tells me that this must be a pretty big, and important, project.
Pumping Station @ Lilly Campus Building
The roots of our focus area here should probably start with the Indiananapolis DPW (Department of Public Works). Navigating their website can be as tricky as making your way through a cornfield maze at halloween time. Their site is divided up into many different sub categories classified by the type of work going on. Luckily, they devote a lot of space to sewer and water issues. A topic which has gotten a lot of press in Indy over the last couple years, and will undoubtedly get MUCH hotter, is that of CSO’s or Combined Sewer Overflows. Back when our fore fathers started platting cities, they thought that it would be convenient to combine sewer drainage, and storm water drainage. Today, we see the very reality of what our fore fathers did, making life difficult for us. The federal government has, in recent years, decreed that all cities with CSOs undertake plans to split these utilities into seperate sewer and overflow drainage systems. The obvious point here, is that less raw sewage will end up in our rivers. Indianapolis’ long term plan can be found here.
Pipes near Illinois St & Merrill St
With this decree came the realization that MASSIVE work (and expense) would be required to do this. In the future, that will require some serious tax hikes for sewer and water users of Marion County. This has also gotten a lot of press lately albeit a bit more politically focused, in the form of Mayor Greg Ballard’s attempt to “sell” the sewer and water utilities to Citizen’s Energy. They claim that future rate increases will be less than they would be under the current operating conditions. That obviously, remains to be seen.
What is going on right now on the southside of downtown, appears to be a comparatively minor piece of the overall picture though. Through the DPW’s website, I was able to view the list of projects from 2009-2013. If you focus on the areas designated by CS-32-005 you will get a sense of the area of focus for this article.
Pipes under CSX Overpass @ Merrill & Delaware Streets
According to the sign on site, this is the Merrill Street Combined SewerRehabilitation portion. According to informal requests to the DPW, they are calling this a sanitary sewer bypass. Upon further sleuthing, I was able to find that this involves “in place curing of pipe liner and manhole rehabilitation”. Also, the work should be finished up by late August to mid-September according to the same inquiry. When this project is complete, expect a much more visually appealing project begin to take shape. UrbanIndy.com will have some information on that in the near future; but for now, take comfort in the fact that the work that is taking place now while ugly in appearance, is being done to make our enviroment a little better for us now, and a LOT better for our children.