When curbside recycling returned to Jacksonville this month, there were concerns it would return the city to the avalanche of garbage it faced before services were suspended.
That doesn't seem to have happened. Waste collections appear to have stabilized, although they're still far from ideal.
At the height of the waste crisis, the city was missing over 3,000 collections each week. From Sept. 13-19, the city missed 4,178 pickups, more than half of them yard waste.
Since suspending recycling six months ago, the city was able to get collections back on track, missing fewer than 600 collections some weeks.
Although that number has trended back up in the past two months, the return of recycling every two weeks doesn't seem to have made it worse.
The week before the city resumed its normal recycling services, waste haulers missed 1,500 collections, two-thirds of them yard waste. For the next two weeks, even with recycling in the mix, that number remained relatively unchanged. Waste haulers missed 164 recycling pickups the week of April 4 and nearly 300 the week of April 11, but they balanced it out by missing less garbage and yard waste.
The city is still working to get missed collections to zero. A Jacksonville City Council special committee on solid waste continues to meet at City Hall through the end of June to solve structural problems with the city's waste management, including issues of funding and infrastructure.
