Gainesville City Commission decides to sunset residential food waste collection pilot program

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At the October 23 General Policy Committee meeting, the Gainesville City Commission decided to sunset its residential food waste collection pilot program and made no decision about when to start enforcing the ordinance that requires food waste collection in multi-family residential properties, as part of a lengthy discussion on a number of solid waste topics.

Update on solid waste topics

Public Works Operation Manager Jarod Lloyd told Commissioners that the City’s residential food waste pilot program, which covered a little under 700 homes, cost about $164,360 this year and diverted 7.5 pounds of waste per home.

Click here to see the whole presentation.

Lloyd said that the pilot program is free for participants, but the participants were surveyed, and about 70% of them were not willing to pay more than $5 to continue the service, which costs the City almost $20 per house. 

The residential food waste pilot program diverted an estimated 52 tons of food waste in Fiscal Year 2025 at a cost of $2,885 per ton; Lloyd said that if the food waste had been added to the residents’ garbage, it would have cost $65 per ton, “so it’s much more expensive.” 

Traditional recycling rate is 44% with a 9.5% contamination rate

Lloyd said the City currently averages a 9.5% contamination rate on recycling and would expect the same rate if a food waste program were expanded; the City’s traditional recycling rate is 44%, which ranks Gainesville and Alachua County fifth in the state. Lloyd said that ranking is because the City and County get “diversion credits” from the New River landfill because the landfill has a methane gas capture program; those credits boost the adjusted recycling rate from 44% to 66%. 

Food waste collection estimated at $4.7 million to $24.2 million a year

Collecting food waste from single-family residences, multi-family residential properties, and commercial sites would cost the public about $4.7 million to $24.2 million a year, plus start-up costs. Multi-family and commercial properties would need to have a cart or dumpster enclosure for food waste collection, and restaurants without wait staff would need to purchase food waste containers so customers could sort their food waste. 

Food waste recommendations

Due to these costs, staff recommended sunsetting the residential food waste pilot program, modifying the food waste ordinance to remove requirements for multi-family residential and commercial front-of-house food waste collection, continue the current requirements for grocery stores, and continue current requirements on back-of-house food waste collection for restaurants with more than one cubic yard of food waste per week (about 25% of restaurants). 

Describing the problem with front-of-house food waste collection, Lloyd said, “Think of McDonald’s, where everybody is dumping their food into one container. Currently, by ordinance, they have to have a garbage, recycling, and a food waste [container] in the front of the house, and unless every single customer is separating everything out perfectly, your contamination rate is going to be so high that it’s all going to wind up being trash.”

“Are we making money on recycling? The answer is no.”

Lloyd continued, “Our recycling is getting reused appropriately. So the big question is, are we making money on recycling? The answer is no. We’re paying somewhere between $10,000 and $42,000 every single month, just to recycle.” He said glass, which is 43% of the recycling stream, is costing the City money, and it costs $65/ton to dispose of contaminated items placed in recycling bins. Lloyd said the City is paying to get rid of almost 53% of the recycling stream.

Staff recommendation

The presentation concluded with a nine-part staff recommendation:

• Direct the City Manager to sunset the curbside food waste collection pilot, effective Dec. 31, 2025;
• Direct the City Manager to research and return with options to address staff concerns related to construction and demolition haulers that work without applying for a permit;
• Direct the City Attorney and City Manager to advertise ordinances to:
• Eliminate multi-family food waste collection requirements;
• Eliminate front-of-house food waste collection requirements;
• Permit pharmacies to have options other than containers for drug collection (such as mail-in bags);
• Add mandatory reporting requirements of violations for haulers (such as a commercial business refusing to recycle);
• Finalize the solid waste fund sufficiency study;
• Require haulers to provide collection container types and sizes;
• Hear feedback from haulers regarding the franchise fee restructuring;
• Provide feedback or direction to staff regarding franchise fee restructuring.

Public comment

During public comment, five people asked Commissioners to continue curbside food waste collection and not weaken their Zero Waste ordinances. Several trash haulers said they would not be opposed to restructuring the franchise fees. 

Commissioners mostly support ending residential pilot program and front-of-house food waste collection requirement

After public comment, Commissioner Bryan Eastman agreed it was “ambitious to think that people that are drinking and eating will adequately sort their food scraps from their other material… That seems like the least controversial of the things that are in there.” He said the big decisions would be the single-family and multi-family residential food waste collection.

Doing the math on the price per household of the residential food waste pilot, Commissioner Ed Book said, “That’s about $200 a user that the City is paying right now. I support the food waste and the composting, but the City can’t be paying $200-plus a user annually to have somebody put out the scraps at that very low participation rate.” He supported sunsetting the current program but immediately putting out a Request For Proposal to see if it could be done for a lower price. 

Commissioner Casey Willits supported eliminating the requirement for front-of-house food waste collection because “the real bang for the buck is in the back of house.” He said that if the City “fully enforces” the back-of-house requirements, they could add front-of-house in the future. He and Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut both said they supported allowing pharmacies to implement other options for collecting unused drugs, such as providing a mail-in option instead of just having bins in the stores. 

Willits: Multi-family property food waste collection requirements push costs to renters

Willits, however, was concerned that a food waste collection requirement for multi-family properties “pushes costs to apartment-dwellers and particularly renters — poor people, young people, people of color. That’s what we know about people who live in apartments… I don’t know if it’s the equitable way to get food waste diverted.”

Commissioner James Ingle said he would like to do an RFP for curbside food waste collection to get “hard numbers… because… the way we’re doing it right now is not necessarily sustainable, but that doesn’t mean there’s not sustainable ways to do it.” He also supported “really enforcing the rules” on commercial businesses, beginning with a “reasonable enforcement schedule.”

Mayor Harvey Ward supported keeping the multi-family food waste requirements, but he wasn’t in favor of expanding curbside food waste collection to single-family homes in a time “where we want to be trying to make the world more affordable, not less affordable, and I have a hard time figuring out how we can make that work without adding on additional fees to solid waste collection.” He said that asking everyone to pay for food waste collection for 400 houses was “not equitable,” so he supported sunsetting the pilot program.

Ward said the current vendor is “open to adding people on a personal pay basis, so it’s not as if we’re shutting down the concept of personal pickup for that program. The question is, are 150,000 people gonna pay for it, or are people gonna pay for it on their own? That’s the question before us.”

Ward: Multi-family food waste collection should reduce trash collection costs, “so it ought to be revenue-neutral or potentially even positive”

Ward said the multi-family food waste collection requirement “is not particularly equitable on its own, but if we reduce the waste that’s going into multi-family dumpsters, then they’re going to pay less,… and hopefully that would even out. So it ought to be revenue-neutral or potentially even positive. So I feel okay about that.” He thought they should start enforcing the multi-family food collection ordinance. 

Chief Operating Officer Brian Singleton said that when the ordinances went into effect, there were no companies in town providing food waste collection services, but now there is at least one option, and the large trash haulers are also exploring that market, “so back in July, we sent out all those letters, so everybody’s aware, at this point in time, that the ordinances are on the books. So if there is a desire to start enforcing, we would like that direction from the Commission.”

Willits: “How are we going to tell [renters] that they have to do the thing that’s best for the planet, but everybody in single-family doesn’t have to?… I don’t think it’s fair”

Willits said, “I really have a problem forcing the least among us to deal with… multi-family food waste, as opposed to curbside single-family food waste… How are we going to tell them that they have to do the thing that’s best for the planet, but everybody in single-family doesn’t have to?… I don’t think it’s fair.” He also said he wasn’t comfortable taking credit for the methane gas capture at the New River landfill: “The math on that is a little less than believable.”

First motion

Book, who was participating remotely, made the following motion: 

1. Sunset the curbside food waste collection pilot program, effective December 31;
2. Have staff develop an ITN and/or RFP for a food waste collection program, evaluate the responses, and bring back recommendations to the City Commission;
3. Consider other aspects of a food waste program that may be practical and cost-effective, such as, but not limited to, collection centers, opt-in programs, and enforcement mechanisms.
4. Research and return with options to address staff concerns related to construction and demolition (C&D) haulers.

Chestnut seconded the motion. 

After Ingle asked to split the motion, Commissioners voted 4-2 for part 1, with Eastman and Ingle in dissent and Commissioner Desmon Duncan-Walker absent.

Parts 2-4 passed 6-0, with Duncan-Walker absent.

Second motion

Ingle made a motion to approve the remaining staff recommendations from the presentation except for the part about food waste collection for multi-family properties. Eastman seconded the motion and asked to change the last recommendation to “direct staff to continue exploring franchise fee restructuring,” along with options for incentivizing brokers to get a license to haul instead of racking up violation fees. 

Ingle’s motion passed 6-0, with Duncan-Walker absent.

Third motion

Ingle made a second motion to reject the staff recommendation to eliminate the multi-family food waste requirements, and Ward said that doing nothing would accomplish the same thing and keep the current requirements in place. Ingle said, “In that case, I make a motion to do nothing.” Eastman seconded the motion, but Ward said it wasn’t “an actual motion.”

Fourth motion

Willits made a motion to postpone enforcement of the multi-family food waste requirements until the City gets back some proposals from vendors and makes a decision, “yes or no on that.” Chestnut seconded the motion and said she would like to add “a research component” to that. 

Ward: “I’m going to ask that the next time we bring forward a boatload of recommendations, some of which are connected and some of which aren’t, we rethink it.”

Ward said the agenda item had “a whole lot of things going here at once, and… I’m going to ask that the next time we bring forward a boatload of recommendations, some of which are connected and some of which aren’t, we rethink it and bring forth things that are connected and come another day with the things that are not connected,… because this is all over the place, and it continues to be, with what we’re doing on the dais. And I don’t think that is the best way to handle the business, but here we are. We’re doing it.”

Ingle said he believed the costs for people who live in apartments is around “a buck a door,… very little actual burden” that doesn’t compare to the costs for collecting food waste from single-family residences. 

Willits said he didn’t believe “it’s as negligible as we think… I think we can all agree it is more efficient [than single-family], but all that proves is that multi-family in general is more cost-efficient than a development pattern of single-family homes…. Yeah, it is cheaper, but… I don’t think it’s equitable to demand… that those people pick up the cost.” He said he would only support it if it were city-wide. 

Willits’ motion failed, 3-3, with Ward, Eastman, and Ingle in dissent. 

Fifth motion

Ingle made a motion to “begin enforcement” in January, Eastman seconded the motion, and Willits said, “For what? We’ve got a very big ordinance.” Ingle withdrew the motion until a discussion could be held about rolling out enforcement for multi-family properties, grocery stores, and restaurants. Ward decided to end discussion on the agenda item: “We did a whole big basket of stuff, so thank you.”