To each their own

New York City’s Commercial Zone Agreement bidding process is liable to leave some haulers scratching their heads about their future.

According to a 2019 news release from the New York City Department of Sanitation (DSNY), “more than 90 different private carters have crisscrossed the city each night for decades to service the city’s 100,000 commercial businesses, driving long, overlapping and unsafe routes.”

With 65 commercial contracts available per the process, Mr. T’s Carting President Thomas Toscano says he believes it is likely some haulers that now serve the city won’t win some of these bids.

However, he says he believes the bidding will go well for Mr. T’s Carting and Boro-Wide Recycling, both of New York City, which will merge if that happens.

“I have to tell you, we probably spent less than 5 percent of the time even thinking about the competition,” he says. “My philosophy was, very simply, the best outcome was to win all the zones we wanted with a price I could make money at. My second best would be to lose the zone or zones. My worst outcome would be to win the zones at a margin where I’d be bled to death.”

Jennifer Porter, vice president at Gershman, Brickner & Bratton Inc. of McLean, Virginia, says municipalities in many areas are using franchise agreements to attain recycling goals and social justice aims as they affect workforce and health and safety impacts. New York City is no exception.

According to its commercial zone plan, the DSNY hopes to divert 100 percent of its commercial waste from landfills by 2030. Haulers that apply for commercial contracts are required to provide recycling and organics collection, as well as waste management and air pollution plans and more.

To that end, Toscano says Mr. T’s Carting and Boro-Wide would build an organics facility from an existing transfer station and recycling center.

“Boro-Wide has a recycling facility on a piece of land on rail that’s ideal for a rail-based transfer station,” he says. “We’d build the rail transfer station and convert our current transfer station into an organics facility.”

Toscano says the synergies of combining Boro-Wide and Mr. T’s would be “exponential” because their existing facilities complement each other well.

He says he believes the combined company would be among the five largest haulers that might be bidding on the DSNY Commercial Zone Agreement.

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Baltimore partners with small, local haulers

Not all geographic areas feature the same business environment as New York City, though. In Baltimore County, Maryland, the county is working with about 30 local haulers to help prepare them for formal public bids in about 2026.

“These haulers have been with us for about 30 to 40 years,” says D’Andrea Walker, acting director of public works for Baltimore County.

The county’s goal is to modernize collection but not in a way that leaves behind the small, locally-owned haulers who have been serving the area for decades. Increased volume, the necessity to recycle as much as possible and new technology are a few of the factors that have moved the county to try to improve local hauling.

“Some of them used to haul trash with a horse and buggy. That’s how far back some of these haulers ... go,” Walker says. “We have to start to change our industry here in Baltimore County, and one of the things that this county executive did was start a five-year program where we put together a workgroup.”

That workgroup includes a mix of haulers, officials, consultants and leaders within the waste collection industry.

“[The haulers] have done a fabulous job for us in terms of moving solid waste around the county,” Walker says. “So, we did a subgroup so that we can hear the concerns from them. And most of the concerns from them were, ‘Are you going to put us out of business because you’re going to go with big companies and no longer have us do anything?’”

The haulers are under a five-year agreement with the county, which ties their fees to the consumer price index and offers grants that can help with fleet upgrades.

“One of the unique things we did was we’ve given them grants to improve their trucks to put tippers on the back because we eventually want to change the type of cans that our residents use,” Walker says. She adds that the county will completely cover the cost of the tippers through the grants it’s offering.

“We’re meeting them halfway in these five-year agreements that we have with them,” Walker says.

Through the five-year agreements and the more formalized agreements to follow, the county hopes to improve its recycling rate, which is currently in the 30 percent to 32 percent range. This is typical for the area, according to Baltimore County Solid Waste Bureau Chief Nick Rodricks.

“The big addition we’re working on right now is polypropylene (PP),” he says.

To that end, he says the county is seeking a grant that would help fund an optical sorter that could process PP at the county’s material recovery facility (MRF). The county also accepts glass for recycling, which is sent to Cap Glass, headquartered in Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania.

Residential education should be a big part of increasing the recycling rate, Rodricks adds.

“I rode a route [recently] where there were 70 houses in a unit, and there were eight cans set out, so you know it’s not the haulers’ fault,” Rodricks says.

Walker says the county has been talking to haulers about “using their trucks as a billboard” to communicate with area residents.

“We beefed up the staff that we have in our solid waste bureau to specifically do outreach because outreach and education play a large role in being successful in our everyday management of solid waste,” she says.

“Some of them used to haul trash with a horse and buggy. That’s how far back some of these haulers ... go.” – D’Andrea Walker, acting director of public works, Baltimore County, Maryland

Franchise veterans in Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon, is on the other end of the spectrum. The city has had franchise agreements for waste collection and recycling for about 30 years.

Arianne Sperry, program coordinator for the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability, says the city’s franchise history began in 1991 in response to Oregon’s Opportunity to Recycle Act, which requires some cities to establish regular trash and recycling collection.

“With the franchise, the city sets services that are available … and it sets the rates,” she says. “The rates cover the cost of providing the service and then also incorporate a target operating margin, so the haulers have the opportunity to realize a 9.5 percent operating margin.”

That has enabled haulers to grow in partnership with the city over the years. But, in 2017, Sperry says the city conducted a franchise review “where we applied an equity lens for the first time and realized there’s a lot of discrimination and exclusion that happened throughout the 20th century.”

She says the city realized at that time that the franchise system inherited some vestiges of systemic racism because it was mostly white men who owned hauling companies when Portland’s franchise system was established. Since then, those same firms have been protected by the franchise system, which itself is “ exclusionary,” Sperry says.

“That’s one of our big, meaty topics we’re still wrestling with and still trying to figure out how to address,” she says.

One way Portland is doing that is by encouraging minority-owned companies to compete for contracts serving the city of Portland’s government.

“We have an exception from state procurement rules that allows us to focus our bidding, when we’re the customer, on companies that are certified by the state of Oregon as either being woman-owned, an emerging small business or a minority-owned business,” she says.

The 12 to 15 city collection contracts can be beneficial because they only involve municipal solid waste collection, and smaller companies can compete more effectively for them.

One change that went smoothly was the new requirement in 2011 that haulers also collect food scraps, Sperry says.

The food scraps needed to be collected weekly, and, after that, garbage was collected every other week, presenting a big change for consumers. Yard waste, which had been collected every other week, was moved to weekly collection so it could be collected with food scraps. For a while, feedback in a regular satisfaction survey was negative.

“We had a pretty steep dip in 2012 … but the next year we bounced back,” Sperry says. “While change is difficult—it’s always going to be hard—people actually ... adjust more quickly than we expect.”

As cities and counties continue to move toward franchise agreements, GBB’s Porter says it has to be at their own pace, in their own style and for their own reasons.

That includes what existing programs they look to for guidance.

“I feel like, as a consultant, one of the things I have to keep in mind is that sometimes you can’t influence it, and people really only may want to look around at adjacent counties or cities that are literally next to them,” she says.

The author is managing editor of Waste Today and can be reached via email at bgaetjens@gie.net.