St. Paul signs new trash deal with single hauler

St. Paul announced a new trash-hauling agreement Wednesday that may finally put an end to years of garbage wars.

The city has entered into a seven-year contract with FCC Environmental Services to provide garbage, yard waste and bulky item collection for 90% of the city’s one- to four-unit households. St. Paul will provide those services for the remaining 10%.

The new system is scheduled to begin April 1, 2025.

“This evolution of our hauling programs advances our city’s sustainability goals while addressing all of the concerns we most commonly hear from residents,” Mayor Melvin Carter said in a statement.

This will be the first time St. Paul has worked with a single hauler on citywide collection. The city used to leave it to residents to arrange their trash pickup. In 2018, the city implemented organized trash collection, contracting with a consortium of haulers. The new system was supposed to scale back truck traffic, pollution and wear-and-tear on streets while also standardizing rates.

Almost immediately, opponents said the new system wasn’t saving money or allowing them to share carts and services. They succeeded in putting the question up for a citywide vote in 2019. Organized trash collection won, but many concerns and hard feelings remained. St. Paul is under contract with a consortium of five trash-hauling companies that generated thousands of complaints for missed collections in 2022.

According to the city’s announcement Wednesday, FCC Environmental will spend more than $25 million on a new facility that will include a compressed natural gas station and buy more than 30 new collection trucks fueled by compressed natural gas. The facility will be located in St. Paul, officials said.

Starting in 2026, property owners will be able to opt out of the program and share carts with others, under specific provisions. Property owners will receive quarterly bills from the city after services have been rendered, rather than pre-paying haulers under the current system. Customer service will be handled by city employees.

St. Paul has also entered into a new five-year contract with Eureka Recycling for the collection of recyclable materials from approximately 80,000 properties with one to four units. That starts Nov. 1. At the same time, FCC Environmental will collect recycling from approximately 48,000 residential properties with five or more units.

“We are excited to partner with FCC and Eureka in this bold step to work closely with our residents for every household to take a more proactive role to reduce, reuse, and recycle more materials, and create overall less waste collectively as a community,” St. Paul Public Works Director Sean Kershaw said in a statement.

For more information and updates about the city’s recycling and garbage programs, visit www.stpaul.gov/recycle or www.stpaul.gov/garbage.