PROVIDENCE — In the past decade, since the city began enforcing residential recycling laws in 2013, it has handed out more than 25,000 tickets.

The Providence recycling ordinance mandates residents can only put recyclable waste in their recycling bins, not trash, otherwise they may face a $50 fine.

According to data reviewed by ecoRI News, the 02907 zip code had the highest number of tickets per capita, with 19 tickets per 100 people as of 2024. The zip code, which includes the Elmwood neighborhood and abuts South Providence, has the lowest median household income in the city and the highest percentage of residents who speak a language other than English at home, according to Census data.

City spokesperson Anthony Vega said the high rates of ticketing in 02907, as well as the 02908 and 02905 zip codes — which had an enforcement rate of 18 tickets and 16 tickets per 100 people, respectively — were due to “recycling blitzes” that took place in those neighborhoods.

Blitzes involve “early morning inspections of recycling bins along predetermined routes,” Vega wrote in an email to ecoRI News. “These blitzes began as early as 5 AM and were coordinated with Waste Management to delay recycling and trash collection until inspections were completed.”

Areas are chosen for blitzes because they have previously had multiple recycling compliance violations.

“Blitzes have proven effective in increasing accepted loads compared to rejected loads at the [Materials Recycling Facility in Johnston], and the City plans to resume this practice … later this year,” he added.

The data showed that ticketing in these zip codes and others around the city has decreased on average since the recycling ordinance was first enforced.

Across the city, 1,394 total tickets were issued in 2024, down from a high of 4,716 tickets issued in 2018, during former Mayor Jorge Elorza’s administration.

Vega noted that lower ticket numbers may not have to do with better compliance, however.

The pandemic had a large impact on enforcement, Vega noted, and ticket numbers have been relatively low since.

Despite being lower than average, the nearly 1,400 tickets issued last year, Mayor Brett Smiley’s second in office, were up almost three-fold from 412 tickets in 2023.

“In Mayor Smiley’s first year in office, the City did not conduct recycling blitzes, which typically required numerous staff and overtime hours,” Vega said. “At the time, the City was operating under an emergency-only overtime policy, which limited the ability to deploy those resources.”

The higher numbers in 2024 could be due to the fact that staff began issuing tickets during regular business hours. “However,” Vega wrote, “because sanitation routes begin early, some barrels may have already been serviced before inspectors arrived.”

Ticketing is meant to discourage residents from improper recycling practices that lead to more waste in the landfill, which can also incur tipping fees and fines for the city.

The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) charges Providence a $64-per-ton tipping fee on waste (recycling goes to RIRRC for free), as well as a $250 fee per rejected load of recycling, unless the city can self-identify the load as contaminated.

“For example, if a truck carries 6 tons of rejected recyclables, the tipping fee totals $384.00, plus the $250.00 fine, resulting in a total cost of $634.00,” Vega wrote.

The city also has a cap on the amount of waste it can send to the landfill before the tipping fee increases to $115 per ton.

Vega estimated that in recent years the city has paid an additional $2 million to $3 million because it has exceeded that cap.

According to an annual report on municipal recycling from RIRRC, Providence has the worst recycling rate in the state at 7.1%. (The state mandates a 35% recycling rate, though few municipalities hit that mark.)

Jed Thorp, the director for advocacy for Save The Bay and a strong supporter of a proposed state bottle bill, said education could be one of the most important factors in improving recycling rates in the city.

Even using fliers posted on bins or targeted social media campaigns in zip codes where the city knows there are high levels of violations could make a big difference, he said.

“That all comes down to resources,” said Thorp, but noting the high cost of tipping fees and fines, “it pays off for them at the end of the day.”

He was cautious to say a bottle bill, which would charge a deposit on some single-use beverage containers that residents could return to recycling centers for a fee, would not be a cure-all for the widespread underperformance of recycling in the state. But he said it could help.

Linda Perri, president of the Washington Park Association in the 02905 zip code, which had the third-highest per capita violations, said recycling compliance is a problem she sees in her neighborhood. People either don’t know what to put in the recycling bin or they run out of room in their trash, she said.

Perri said she dumpster-dives for her own tenants, trying to save recyclable items from the trash and vice versa. Looking around the neighborhood, she’s seen some overflowing recycling bins and said to herself, “God knows what it’s full of.”’

To a degree, it makes sense that a more densely populated neighborhood with lots of renters and students would have trouble with recycling compliance, but Perri also wondered, in an interview with ecoRI News, “Are they looking all over, or are they just looking here?”

Her neighborhood, which abuts and bleeds into 02907, has a lot of residents for whom $50 can make or break their budget any given week.

She said she wants to see a robust education campaign, the passage of a bottle bill, and larger trash bins to help prevent overflow into recycling bins.

Some of those things are coming, according to the city’s assistant director of sustainability, Kevin Proft.

While the General Assembly will ultimately decide whether a bottle bill passes in the future — it recently formed another commission to study its feasibility — Providence is planning an outreach campaign to coincide with new waste and recycling bins, which will be distributed to residents by the end of the year.

Currently, residents’ waste bins are a mix of colors: green cans with blue lids, green cans with black lids, completely blue receptacles.

“I don’t think it’s clear to all residents exactly which cans are for which stream,” Proft said.

Trash cans are also smaller than recycling bins in Providence, which Proft said seems to lead to more overflow trash getting into the recycling bins, where there is more space.

The new waste bins will be the same size, with black and gray cans for trash and blue bins for recycling.

“Give people a little bit more room for their trash if they need it,” he said, and “ideally, avoid people throwing overflow into the recycling, because they just won’t have overflow anymore.”

The purchase of the new cans will be tied to an educational program that the city will employ with the help of Zero Waste Providence.

There will be tables at festivals and other community events and places like the city’s libraries offering information about the new bins and what can and can’t go in each. Some staffers are proficient in Spanish to translate materials, and Proft said he hopes there will be a QR code for folks to access information in other languages as well.

As a part of the recycling compliance push, Waste Management will also employ its Smart Truck , a vehicle that has cameras to capture footage of recycling as it’s tipped into the truck. The videos are then analyzed to see where contaminations are happening.

Currently, the city sees which routes have contaminated recycling, but the Smart Truck analytics can zoom in to the building level.

From this data, the city will then be able to generate a list of residences that they can target with educational materials and outreach, Profit said, so they can “provide some education, instead of just ticketing people.”

A note on how this story was reported: When ecoRI News initially started reporting this story, it involved making a public records request from the city of Providence that yielded more than 25,000 addresses with no corresponding zip codes. (According to a subsequent records request that was denied, the city said it does not keep the zip code data in its records.) To map the addresses and then correlate where tickets were issued to income and language data from the U.S. Census, ecoRI News coded a python script and used a Google Maps API to match the addresses to zip codes. The script and API matched all but about 50 addresses, which ecoRI News searched for manually. In total only 14 tickets out of 25,548 could not be matched to a zip code.

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