What happens when a city’s recycling program stops working?

Teri Peterson’s recycling bin sat on the side of her quiet Houston street for one extra day. Then two. Two weeks. Four. 

On June 24 — 29 days since she’d rolled out her 96-gallon bin for its biweekly pickup — she joined thousands of her neighbors across the largest city in Texas, and called Houston’s non-emergency service request number, 311.

Soon, Peterson learned she and her neighbors were but one street smack in the middle of a massive recycling slowdown. In June, Houston’s 311 call center logged more than 8,000 complaints about missed recycling, making it by far the most common issue among residents of the nation’s fourth-largest city. It wasn’t even close: For every call received about the city’s second-most common complaint, missed garbage pickup, the city fielded 2.5 recycling complaints. 

And those complaints are not being addressed in a timely fashion. Only one in five recycling complaints filed in the month of June was resolved “on time,” according to the city’s own standards, earning an “F” in the city’s self-rating system, and creating a breakdown in services that experts say is likely to hamper residents’ recycling habits for the foreseeable future.

‘We haven’t had our recycling picked up in a month’

“All our neighbors’ bins are full because our whole street was missed,” said Peterson. Her neighbors know the drill. When this happens, one of them calls 311 and keeps the rest of the street informed. The issue is usually resolved relatively quickly. 

This time, when Peterson called 311, she was surprised by the call center employee’s response to her complaint. 

“Oh, we’re behind by a week,” the employee told her. “Just leave it out.”

“They didn’t come two weeks ago,” Peterson replied. “So, like, we haven’t had our recycling picked up in a month.”

“Oh,” the employee replied. “That’s bad.”

While Peterson vowed to ensure all her recycling ended up where it was supposed to go, she wondered if everyone else would make the same decisions. 

“People are going to come up with the solution that is most likely to get that trash out of sight, out of mind,” said John Atkinson, an associate professor of civil, structural and environmental engineering at the University at Buffalo in New York. “And that might mean not relying on recycling. If it’s not reliable, you can’t rely on it. Right?”

Atkinson, who researches waste management and recycling, said he cannot think of another large city that has suffered a recycling collapse as massive as the current situation in Houston. 

“I haven’t heard of something of this scale,” he said. 

City officials told Straight Arrow News (SAN) they do not have historical data to show how this recycling snafu measures up against emergencies, such as cleanup after Hurricane Harvey in 2017. But there are some clues in recent 311 records that show the significance of this spring’s recycling issue. 

Recycling has held steady as Houstonians’ top complaint for months. In the 12-week period leading up to June 26, 2025, 311 fielded 12,461 calls on the topic. During that same time the previous year, 311’s top complaint was for storm debris pickup — a result of a torrential derecho that felled thousands of trees and left almost one million houses without power. Yet even in a disaster that large, the city received fewer calls for storm debris pickup during that same 12-week window last year, at 10,105. 

“It’s bureaucratic disaster eclipsing natural disaster,” Environment Texas Executive Director Luke Metzger told SAN. “I’ve never heard of any disruption like this.”

Why is the city of Houston’s recycling so behind?

Houston’s problem stems from a lack of trucks and available staff, according to city officials, who have noted that upwards of 45 of the city’s 241 trash and recycling trucks are currently out of order. 

“Due to an aging fleet, there can be more than 40 vehicles, either in the shop for repairs, maintenance or down from an accident at any given time,” said Veronica Lizama, chief of staff for Houston’s Solid Waste Management Department. Houston has long relied on older trucks, often purchasing vehicles that are already used and relying on them for decades. 

That will soon change. In April, Houston’s city council approved $11.2 million to purchase new trash trucks. That includes about $4.5 million for 10 zero-emission side loader trucks.

In total, about 35 trucks will be brought online. But that will take months. And a deep dive into budget documents reveals that only 19 of the trucks the city plans to purchase are side-loaders — those that pick up recycling bins using an arm fixed to the truck’s side. 

It’s unclear whether that will be enough to fix the city’s current problem. When asked directly whether 19 new recycling trucks could “fill this gap,” Meagan Riche, a solid waste spokesperson, told SAN that “they will provide much-needed relief for drivers whose vehicles require frequent trips to the mechanic.”

The city’s recent retirement incentive package has further compounded the issue, Lizama told SAN. Thirty-seven solid waste department employees took the buyout, including 17 drivers, she said. That hit to staffing numbers is likely to further exacerbate pre-existing budget issues in a cash- and worker-strapped department, which already outspends all of the city’s other civilian departments in overtime each year. 

As the department’s budget proposal put it: “Limited resources create challenges in providing scheduled collection services.” And those challenges have hit home. While the city targeted a 68% on-time collection rate for fiscal year 2025, the actual estimate was closer to 50%, budget documents show.

What happens to residents when a city service like recycling breaks down?

Houstonians already recycle at less than half the rate of the average American, which means any further throttling of recycling behavior in the nation’s fourth largest city could quite literally pile up into mountainous problems. 

Houston’s “diversion rate” — the share of household waste that is recycled — dropped from 19% in 2024 to 16% in 2025, according to city data. 

“That’s well below even the Texas average of 23%, which is crazy, and then far, far below the national average” of 34.7%, said Metzger. 

People recycle for a variety of reasons, including environmental and conservation concerns. 

“But people also just don’t like waste,” said Metzger. “So I think they want to recycle, but people are only going to go so far to do it. So you’ve got to make it easy for people, and if you don’t have regular pickup, then what are you going to do? You’re going to throw it in the trash instead.”

Interruptions in recycling services like the one Houston is currently experiencing can lead to even lower recycling rates as families run out of places to keep their caches of online shopping boxes and plastic bottles. 

“If we have a bunch of easy recycling services, then we can reduce what’s going into landfills,” said Metzger. 

And that’s especially critical in Houston, where four of the area’s five landfills are projected to fill up within the next 20 years.

For weeks, Houston officials have been adamant that the recycling struggle is nearing an end. On Friday, June 27, Riche from the city’s waste department told SAN that “service should return to a more normal schedule starting Monday, June 30.”

Yet 311 data shows that the city was still reporting more than 20,000 open complaints about waste issues in early July. 

“A lot of people, their main priority is to get rid of this stuff,” said Atkinson from the University at Buffalo. “And as soon as there’s a wrench thrown in that, the priority is not going to change. They’re still going to try to get rid of stuff, and if there’s a risk of it not being picked up, it’s certainly going to affect people’s mindsets moving forward.”