Hennepin County cities take many paths to meet organics recycling mandate

Several west-metro suburbs launched organics recycling programs at the start of the new year under a new Hennepin County mandate requiring all cities to offer the service to their residents.

The county left it up to each city to decide how to roll out the service — whether using curbside collection or a drop-off site — and how to charge for it. In some places, it's voluntary for those who want to pay an additional fee.

In other places such as Golden Valley, residents will be charged for the service whether they choose to recycle organics or not — and that bothers some people, even if they favor recycling.

"Who likes being told they have to do something?" said Carrie Schmitz, a backyard composting teacher and advocate. "Make people want to do it."

Most of the county's large cities have complied with the policy, approved four years ago and made effective Jan. 1, with a citywide service contract under which everyone pays around $5 a month.

But neighboring cities have taken different approaches. Some require all residents to pay a flat fee, others let them voluntarily sign up. Not every city met the Jan. 1 deadline, and those that did saw some hiccups with collections.

"We gave cities flexibility in how they implement the requirement. So that flexibility did lead to a wide variety," said Ben Knudson, a supervisor with the county's Environment and Energy Department. "It's a little more of the wild west in the west metro because it's a straight line of those cities from Maple Grove all the way down to Eden Prairie where they decided that they didn't want to do a citywide contract."

The one constant is what is collected: everything from coffee grounds and filters to pizza delivery boxes, paper towels and even bones from a rotisserie chicken are hauled to one of the metro area's two compost facilities, rather than a landfill.

With an influx of food waste from the mandate, county officials are worried only two compost sites may not be enough. They're requesting state bonding funds for a $21 million anaerobic digestion facility in Brooklyn Park to break down organic material to produce biogas and nutrient-rich soil.

"We're concerned about the capacity to manage organics going forward," Knudson said.

Wayzata was the first city in the metro area to offer curbside organics recycling with a pilot program launched in 2003, nearly two decades ahead of most places. Residents there aren't charged an additional fee for the service.

In St. Louis Park, which rolled out organics recycling in 2014, and Minneapolis, which followed the next year, organics are bundled with solid waste services at no additional cost. Edina, Richfield, Golden Valley and Hopkins all charge a flat fee — as will Bloomington when it starts the service in March.

Knudson said in hindsight that Jan. 1 may not have been the ideal date to launch organics recycling, so they offered Bloomington some flexibility. "We didn't want to be distributing carts in the dead of winter," Bloomington City Manager Jamie Verbrugge said.

Under the Hennepin County policy, cities with more than 10,000 residents must offer curbside service either through a contract or haulers. The fees charged by those cities range from what you'd pay for a latte to as much as $60 a month in Champlin. Cities numbering fewer than 10,000 residents can meet the requirement by simply providing an organics recycling drop-off site.

No one currently participates in the program in Champlin, where residents expressed disappointment over the steep cost of organics set by a conglomerate of three haulers.

Only 8% of Robbinsdale residents recycle organics in the voluntary program started in 2019, according to the county, at a monthly cost of $11.50.

In cities where everyone pays under an organics recycling contract, Knutson said, participation rates are far greater. Minneapolis sees 51% participation, and other cities with contracts average 23% participation.

Not all residents are pleased with the across-the-board fee. Complaints surfaced on Facebook groups in Golden Valley, where a number of residents were upset about missed pick-up dates and said they wished the service was optional.

In Plymouth, garbage haulers rather than city officials set the price for organics recycling, and residents can elect to get the service through them. The same is true in Maple Grove, Brooklyn Park, Brooklyn Center, Crystal, New Hope, Eden Prairie, Minnetonka and Rogers.

Knudson said county officials hear complaints from both sides of the organics debate and have avoided recommending best practices — though he added they "clearly know what works better."

Golden Valley resident Emily Johnson Piper said her household of five kids makes the family "high utilizers" of organics recycling. She was one of a handful of residents that haulers missed the first three Fridays of January, leaving her with a full bin for weeks. But haulers worked out the kinks, she said.

Recycling advocate Schmitz, a University of Minnesota Extension master gardener, encourages neighbors to give Golden Valley's new composting service a try. She's happy to have another means of composting food waste that can't go in her backyard, like pizza boxes or meat. She'd like to see cities offer more recycling incentives, such as a free bag of soil for gardens.

But Schmitz doesn't agree with forcing residents to do it, and said she would've preferred an educational approach. "What's in it for me?" is the question that people ask, she said.