Blue trucks are a familiar sight on early mornings when they pick up recycling material from residents’ blue carts. Over the summer, not all that recycling was processed.
This may come as a shock to Redding residents who faithfully put recycling in their blue carts for weekly pickup.
Not all those bottles, cans, cardboard and more got recycled over the summer. Sometimes truckloads of those reclaimable items instead found their way to the dump.
A city transfer truck deposits cardboard that otherwise might be recycled at the West Central Landfill off Clear Creek Road.
So much for those conscientious residential recyclers who feel they’re helping the environment and saving the planet from pollution. It’s also a snub to those who take the extra step to clean and rinse food residue from their metal cans and pet food containers.
In a test, A News Cafe recently slipped a tracking device in a CRV-stamped plastic container, and you’d be surprised where it wound up.
Plastic jug went from blue cart to landfill
As temperatures soared during the summer, thousands of pounds of perfectly-good recycling made it to the first stop at the city’s transfer station but ended up at the West Central Landfill near Igo – bypassing the city’s sorting process entirely.
In response, Paul Clemens, the City of Redding’s Deputy Director of Public Works, said that’s not the city’s standard practice.
“No, I wouldn’t say that much of that material went to the landfill,” Clemens said. “It’s not our habit to do that.”
The recycling-skipping revelation originated from a whistleblower tip to A News Cafe that’s backed up by CalRecycle and a Shasta County inspection report.
The source – a former solid waste employee – was upset not only for the lack of recycling, but how they felt the public was being deceived.
Further proof comes in a video and photos – obtained from a separate, clandestine source – showing recycling either about to be mixed in with regular household garbage, or the recycling in piles at the dump.
Click here to watch the video.
A News Cafe has agreed to keep the sources anonymous, but they have intimate knowledge of how recycling works at the city’s Solid Waste Transfer Station on Abernathy Lane and were interviewed in person.
The sign at the entrance of the city of Redding’s Solid Waste Transfer Station on Abernathy Lane. Whistleblowers say over the summer, thousands of pounds of recyclables were taken to the dump instead of being recycled.
A News Cafe verified the claims in late summer by placing an Apple AirTag in a clean, empty AriZona Iced Tea jug with a California CRV symbol, meaning it’s recyclable and eligible for a cash refund.
The plastic jug with the AirTag was tossed into one of the city’s residential blue carts, which also contained clean, cut and flattened cardboard boxes, plus a few brown glass and clear plastic beverage bottles.
After sitting for several days at the transfer station, the iPhone’s Find My App showed the AirTag location had moved to the county’s landfill off Clear Creek Road.
In an Aug. 30, 2024 screenshot, an iPhone app shows an AirTag placed in a plastic jug sitting at the Redding Transfer Station awaiting processing.
The Find My app shows an AirTag placed in a plastic jug that ended up at the West Central Landfill near Igo instead of being recycled.
An iPhone app shows a plastic jug containing an AirTag tracking device ended up at the West Central Landfill near Igo instead of being recycled.
There the jug sits today – taking up space in a smelly garbage dump instead of properly being shipped off to a recycling facility.
By all accounts, the city still maintains its recycling program and the informer says the nonrecycling occurrences have been substantially reduced since September.
Still, the city not following through with all the recycling pays lip service to the idea of preserving landfill space for real garbage.
Extenuating circumstances
Dump runs to the landfill containing recycling spiked over the summer when hot temperatures prevented all the incoming material from being sorted.
The dump runs happened when recyclables piled up and the transfer station ran out of storage space or the material got contaminated one way or another. The blue recycling trucks didn’t go straight to the dump, but left their loads in heaps at the transfer station, awaiting trips to the landfill.
In a report from July 29, 2024, an inspector from the Shasta County Environmental Health Department said the landfill was getting “an influx of recyclable material that is being pushed through from the transfer station.”
“The transfer station states that they are needing to push the material through because there is limited space for holding recyclables and the workers have been released early due to the high temperatures,” the report says.
“The transfer station is working to create a contract in order to have the recycled material hauled off or shipped off to another (processing) service when material gets too backed up so the products aren’t sent to the landfill,” the inspector added.
The state relies on Shasta County inspectors to serve as the local enforcement agency for oversight.
A spokesman for CalRecycle, a.k.a. the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, noted the state agency is in charge of certifying local solid waste enforcement efforts so they meet state standards.
Workers from the Siskiyou Opportunity Center sort recyclables at the city of Redding’s transfer station. The materials recovery facility, or MRF, shuts down when temperatures get too hot for the workers.
CalRecycle spokesman Lance Klug said in an email the county inspector who wrote the report “documented shutdowns at Redding’s Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) related to extreme heat in the facility, which caused a temporary backup of processing materials that could potentially be recycled,” Klug wrote.
According to Klug, the county agency said the transfer station over the summer sent “two days’ worth of materials for disposal to maintain facility storage requirements.”
Under the radar
However, this is where stories begin to differ.
The former solid waste employee who contacted A News Cafe said the summertime practice of mixing recycling with the trash went on for a minimum of six weeks.
“What they’ve been doing … is that rather than run it (sort) or pay to ship it, they decided it’s just cheaper to bring it to the landfill,” this person said at the end of August, adding:
“So they’re bringing it in as recycling, but in the early morning before the rest of the staff gets there, they’re taking the loaders and scooping the recyclables, mixing it in with the garbage.”
A video shared with A News Cafe shows a loader filling a transfer truck with recycling. The source also said this was being done before the transfer station opened, so the public wouldn’t see what was happening.
“From what I’ve heard, they (were) doing four to eight trucks a week,” the person said.
Cardboard and other paper products sit at the Redding Transfer Station in late September while awaiting to get picked up for further recycling at another facility.
When the ex-employee used to work there, the city would contract with a company to have the unsorted recyclables hauled to a Sacramento facility, not to the dump.
“That’s a little more expensive to do, but it’s still the right thing to do … people care about their recycling,” the informant said. “It’s just cheaper to bring it to the landfill.”
Clemens has since said the city’s transfer station signed a new contract to reestablish recycling-hauling services.
The transfer trucks for the dump runs can haul about 20,000 pounds of recyclables, which is a lighter amount than regular trash loads.
Nate Moore, of Shasta County Environmental Health, said his office also received a complaint about what was happening over the summer.
Moore agreed the transfer station only has a certain amount of space to store material brought in by the blue trucks. When it piles up, material squashed at the bottom becomes unsortable.
“In the case where temperatures are above 105 (degrees) multiple days in a row and they continue to get a really high input of recyclable material, some of that stuff on the bottom isn’t really sortable anymore,” Moore said.
“They (transfer station) will take that to the landfill, but mostly all of what they’re taking to the landfill is stuff that can’t be recycled to begin with,” he said.
Otherwise, when the blue trucks drop their loads at the transfer station, the standard practice is to have the material sorted by a contracted crew. The recyclables get strapped down in bales before they’re shipped off by out-of-town recycling brokers.
“The last resort is to take recycled material to the landfill,” Moore said. “There’s going to be situations that come up and it’s going to be unavoidable from time to time, but that’s the last resort.”
Taking the unsorted recyclables to the dump isn’t illegal as county inspectors have found no violations at the transfer station.
Deputy Public Works Director Clemens said in September the city’s new agreement with Recycling Industries in Sacramento now accepts the city’s unsorted recycling when it gets backed up.
The previous company had been bought out so Clemens said the city had to redo the contract, and it costs the city to ship to Sacramento.
Crushed plastics that have been sorted await recycling at the Redding Transfer Station in late September.
The sale of sorted material such as baled-up plastic containers and crushed cans doesn’t make the city a lot of money, although cardboard is the most profitable.
“We don’t make enough off of what we sell to cover the cost of running the program,” Clemens said. “That’s not the reason why we run the program. We run the program to keep material out of the landfill, recover resources, recycle, reuse, save resources.”
Taking recycling to the landfill apparently occurred for a limited time.
“It wasn’t new material coming in. It was an amount of material that had to be moved. … We tried to still keep all of our fresh stuff that we can sort through and go through,” Clemens said.
Clemens said the AirTag that made it to the dump in the tea jug “could have inadvertently been knocked in with the trash that is pulled off the (MRF) belt.”
Or, he said, wind could’ve blown the container from one pile to the next. Maybe the jug became contaminated, although it started out clean with other cardboard, bottles and cans that were not dirty in the blue cart.
“There could be a number of (things) when they do the sorting and they pull trash off of the belt up at the top,” Clemens said.
Contamination a factor
So how does recycling go from a blue cart, to being dumped into a pile at the transfer station and then – as the one video shows – being loaded into a truck for a dump run?
First off, various circumstances may explain why a percentage of recycling gets diverted. In the documented cases over the summer, it got too hot for workers to sort and storage space ran short.
In addition, the recyclables, including office paper, junk mail, aluminum cans and glass jars, can become soiled and out-of-town recyclers don’t want them.
Not everyone at home follows the recycling rules. People will throw household trash into the blue carts when their “garbage only” gray carts fill up.
Dan Chianello, executive director of the Siskiyou Opportunity Center, said his workers still go to work every day to separate items at the MRF sorting equipment.
The city has a $1 million-plus contract with the opportunity center to perform the work although they have to quit early when the temperature reaches 105 degrees and above, Clemens said.
The MRF is under a metal roof and there’s fans, misters and swamp coolers for the workers, but often that’s not enough to beat Redding’s heat.
“If you were in that building when it was 110 degrees, you probably would faint,” Chianello said.
He said an average of 22 workers work on the MRF conveyer line starting at 6:30 a.m. Monday through Friday processing 20 tons or more a day on a full shift.
Typically, there’s 18 workers from the center’s developmentally disabled workforce along with four staff members on a raised platform.
Each person is in charge of pulling their own commodity and then the material is processed before being sold to different vendors.
Sorting can be a hard, nasty job because, as previously described, people use the blue carts for more than just recycling.
“Everything that you’ll find in a dumpster – the most nastiest dumpster – you’ll find in recycling,” Chianello said.
The Siskiyou Opportunity Center has a contract with the city of Redding to sort recyclables at the city of Redding’s transfer station.
The sorters will come across everything from paint cans, garden hoses and clothes to soiled diapers.
“It’s worse than that. I mean, they’ll put their own human waste in there. They’ve found empty guns, needles, drugs. They find all kinds of stuff,” Chianello said.
“(The workers) do a tremendous job in trying to capture as much as they possibly can, but the reality is you’re never going to catch everything,” he said.
Clemens says somewhere between 25 percent to 30 percent of recyclables that become contaminated or wet need to go to the landfill.
“There’s some material that you just can’t (recycle), like if it gets wet, if we have a large stockpile that’s sitting there and then it starts to rain and then you have lids that are open or material comes in wet and all of that bottom material gets wet, then your paper products are wet, your office paper’s wet, your cardboard’s wet. That material can’t be sorted through the process that we have,” Clemens said.
“Sometimes those get sent to the landfill if there’s times when material gets contaminated either by too much moisture or water – we can’t ship that or sell it,” Clemens said. “Other than that, we are still doing our sorting, recycling, marketing, shipping – all of those items.”
Other reasons the recycling piles up could be when mechanical equipment like the MRF breaks down, a motor fails or a baler stops working.
Trips to dump
Our whistleblower says the practice of taking recycling to the landfill was more widespread than anyone admits.
This person checked with local officials who said the city reported a percentage of recycling was going to the landfill so records were not being falsified.
“But their excuse is that they had this big pile and they can’t get it down to Sacramento to process,” the person said.
“The stuff they’re taking to the landfill is not (just) the stuff from the very bottom of the pile. In order to get to it, you’ve got to move all the stuff on top,” they said.
Bottles, cans, cardboard, newspapers and other brought-in material can sit at the bottom of piles for months and become unsortable, the person added.
“Because people put food in there, the rats get in there and just destroy it,” the person said. “I’ve been on the sort line and you’ve got rats running off the belt. It’s nasty.
“They’re sending the good, clean stuff that they’re collecting on a daily basis out to the landfill,” the person said when interviewed at the end of August.
The ex-worker says paper recyclables that get soaked happens more in the wintertime when it rains and people don’t close the lids tight on the blue carts.
“It rains and it gets wet – you just basically have to throw that away. The summertime, that’s not the case,” the person said.
Redding’s MRF was originally designed to process the recyclables that arrived every weekday, the person said, however “it hasn’t been upgraded and updated in 10 to 15 years.”
“We’re still so far out of date that our machine is completely obsolete,” the person said.
The problem with the piles could be solved by scheduling MRF runs on a Saturday. “A couple of Saturdays can really knock that pile down,” the person said.
To show how passionate some people are with recycling, the second reputable source told a story of how one morning a resident rolled out their blue cart late, but the garbage truck driver the woman was talking to said he could go ahead and dump her blue cart in with the garbage.
“She said, ‘What?’ Absolutely not.’ She was outraged that he was willing just to empty her cart for her. He knew where it was ultimately going,” the person said.
“She thought she was doing the right thing. And she was outraged at that mere suggestion of that one (blue) cart going in the garbage truck,” the person said. “How that person would react to 80,000 pounds (of recyclables) a week going into the landfill, might she be a little upset, yeah.”
At the time of the interview in late August, the second source estimated the city was hauling the 80,000 pounds a week for at least six times.
This second source raised ethical concerns as well.
“My question would be how do you explain to the community member that is taking their time and doing their part to recycle their products, rinsing their containers, separating it out at their home. How do you explain to them the justification to take what they’ve put the effort into recycling … why you’re putting it in the garbage. Why you’re putting it in the landfill.”
A second AirTag
Klug, the CalRecycle spokesman, said the county, acting as the local enforcement agency, will continue to monitor the facilities involved to ensure compliance with regulation and permit requirements.
Part of CalRecycle’s responsibilities include working with operators “to correct problems as quickly as possible,” Klug said.
The CalRecycle site shows in the most recent inspection the Redding transfer station continued to have zero violations. The Aug. 20 report shows there were no longer any areas of concern, but didn’t address all the times recycled material skipped the MRF over the summer.
In a follow-up test, a second AirTag accompanies a cardboard tray on its way to a blue cart. This time, the cardboard got recycled unlike the first time when a plastic jug with an AirTag got trucked to the dump.
Meanwhile, A News Cafe tested the recycling process a second time by sending off a second AirTag, this one tucked into a small, clean cardboard tray and put into the same residential blue cart.
This time, after a short stay at the transfer station, the cardboard-strapped AirTag was detected heading south to a likely recycling facility in the Bay Area or beyond, as it should’ve been.
At last check, on Oct. 9, 2024, the AirTag with the cardboard was tracked to the North Pacific Ocean, presumably in a ship carrying loads of paper recycling overseas.
An AirTag attached to a cardboard tray went from the Redding Transfer Station to a Bay Area facility before being tracked Oct. 9, 2024, to the North Pacific Ocean more than 4,000 miles away, presumably on an overseas ship containing recycling – on a slow boat to China?
Meanwhile, what’s to say the practice of taking recyclables to the dump won’t happen again next summer, when it gets too hot for the opportunity center crew to do its job.
