PROVIDENCE — Over the past few years, the city has received payment for about half the tickets it has issued for recycling violations.

From 2022 to 2024, the percentage of recycling tickets paid hovered just above 50%, according to public records reviewed and analyzed by ecoRI News.

In 2024, the Department of Public Works issued 1,392 tickets, but received payment for 765 violations, or about 55% of the tickets issued. The city received payment for 211 of the 412 tickets issued in 2023, and 1,012 of the 1,939 tickets issued in 2022, 51% and 52% of the violations handed out by DPW respectively.

According to DPW director Patricia Coyne-Fague, the low paid rate is partially due to the way Providence’s recycling law is written. Unlike other types of tickets, there are limited consequences for those who don’t pay their recycling tickets or other types of city environmental violations.

“If you get a whole stack of parking tickets, eventually you’re going to come out and there’s probably going to be a boot on your car, right?” she said. “We don’t have anything like that.”

Recycling tickets come with a $50 fine, plus fees for paying online and additional fees for late payments.

Part of the problem is that recycling violation tickets get issued to the property owners, even though a renter may have violated the recycling ordinance. Some landlords don’t even live in Providence, or Rhode Island in general, Coyne-Fague said.

If a recycling ticket goes unpaid, the city eventually sends it to collection, but it doesn’t impact a person’s credit and will not end up on their tax bill. Some unpaid tickets have been dismissed by Coyne-Fague or a judge, she said, but many likely aren’t resolved because of the lack of repercussions.

“The tickets, right now, just don’t have the teeth, if you will, that we would like them to have. That said, I think enforcement is an important piece, but it’s only one piece of the whole recycling puzzle,” Coyne-Fague said. “Enforcement, I would say, is not the most effective piece of it.”

Providence has the worst municipal recycling rate in the state, at around 7% last year. The low recycling rate means more trash is sent to the quickly filling Johnston landfill and costs the city millions of dollars in tipping fees and fines from the state.

To try to combat these problems, Coyne-Fague said the DPW is focused, right now, on education.

The city’s new contract with Waste Management, the company that handles Providence’s residential trash and recycling collection, includes an educational component. For example, the company attended PVD Fest this year to try to educate residents about what can and can’t go in the recycling bin.

DPW staff also visits Providence Public Schools to teach students about how to recycle and why it’s important.

“You got to get them when they’re young,” she said. “They’ll go home and tell mom and dad and show them, and hopefully the family will learn something new about recycling.”

The city is also replacing all the residential trash cans and recycling bins this year, which will be partnered with an outreach program around the city. Currently, the cans and bins come in a variety of colors, with the trash can typically smaller than the recycling bins.

Coyne-Fague said she believes this causes confusion, and when the smaller trash cans fill up, residents use the recycling bin for excess trash.

Although education is the strongest tool the city has at the moment, Coyne-Fauge said the Smiley administration attempted in the past to strengthen the recycling laws to make them more effective and plans on trying again in the future.

“Enforcement is just one piece of that right now,” she said. “Enforcement, I would say, is not the most effective piece of it. I think that with some legislative changes, we could make it more effective where people do pay those tickets right away and change their behavior.”

The city has submitted legislation to the General Assembly in the past to give the recycling violation ordinance more teeth, but it didn’t pass. Coyne-Fague said they’re going back to the drawing board to see how they can modify the law to make enforcement a more effective method of changing people’s behavior.

The lost revenue for unpaid tickets is less of an issue for Coyne-Fague than trying to get people to recycle more and recycle properly.

In total, the city received $120,000 in revenue from the paid recycling tickets issued between 2023 and 2024. But it could have received at least $65,000 more for the unpaid tickets over the same time period.

With an overall budget in the hundreds of millions, Providence isn’t generating a huge percentage of its revenue from recycling tickets, she said. A much larger problem are the fines and fees the city pays for exceeding its waste cap or for sending improper recycling to the Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation’s facility in Johnston.

“There is a major financial consequence to the city when we exceed our cap, when we don’t recycle properly,” she said. ecoRI News previously reported that it costs the city millions of dollars. “The city pays a lot of money for that, and so how do you combat that?”

In a perfect world, she said she wishes that all residents had the knowledge they needed to recycle properly.

“Generally, people, you know, they want to be good neighbors, and they want to be good citizens,” she said. “So, if I had a magic wand, I would just want everyone to be able to have the knowledge that they need to have to do it the right way.”

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