Nothing Seems to Stick to Recology, Just Wondering…
Now it turns out that a jury recently found Recology at fault in not properly reporting concrete waste that was sent to landfills while the company collected a $1.36 million bonus by reporting the concrete had been recycled. As The SF Weekly reported: "A jury last month said that Recology falsely claimed it diverted enough refuse from area landfills to earn a bonus in 2008 (the result of an agreement with the city in which Recology customers are on the hook for the bonus). As such, customers are due back that $1.3 million."
Bloomberg flatly suggested in its headline that San Francisco's recycling claims are garbage, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian devoted five pages online to what it called the garbage game, asking is Recology fudging the figures on how much San Francisco waste is being diverted from the landfill, with the complicity of city officials.
It's simply astonishing that nothing seems to stick to Recology. In February 2013, we cited a national industry publication, Waste 360, that had called into question claims by Recology and San Francisco's Mayor Ed Lee that the city diverts 80 percent of its waste while sending only 20 percent to landfills. Writing in Waste 360, Chaz Miller, the state programs director for the Environmental Industry Associations, said the city's numbers did not hold up under scrutiny. The city only reported sending 440,000 tons of waste to landfills, which it said accounts for 20 percent of its waste. That would mean San Francisco generated 2,220,000 tons of waste. If San Francisco stood by that number, Miller wrote, then each man, woman and child in San Francisco generated 2.73 tons of trash that year, or more than three times as much as EPA's estimated national per person waste generation rate.
News reports focused on Recology's close political ties to Mayor Lee and suggested that San Francisco officials were not keen for McVeigh's lawsuit to succeed. Why is that, one wonders? The SF Bay Guardian, in its lengthy report on the lawsuit, said David Anton, McVeigh's attorney, suggested Recology's close ties to powerful city officials might have something to do with the cits lack of interest in targeting the company for the improperly received incentive payments, an assertion which Recology spokesman Eric Potashner told the Guardian was "completely untrue."
Still, it's worth remembering that Recology and its predecessor Nor-Cal have held a 80-year monopoly on trash-hauling in San Francisco, and in 2012 it spent $1.7 million to defeat a city referendum that would have opened garbage collection to competitive bidding. Finally, let's not forget its attempt to enter Oakland's $1.2 billion garbage contract bid with a brazen suggestion that the city use public financing to build a local waste facility for Recology to manage! I mean, c'mon!
