Nashville's curbside recycling program moves to every other week pickup

• Curbside recycling services in Nashville's Urban Services District will increase to every other week pickup starting Jan. 30.
• In 2021, the curbside recycling program yielded 10,998 tons of recycled materials.
• The announcement comes after years of delays due to budget constraints and trash collection issues.

Nashville's curbside recycling services are moving to every other week pickup, a long-awaited boost of the city's recycling program.

The new pickup schedule will start Jan. 30.

"This has been a big goal for the city for a long time, and this is at no additional cost to (residents)," Nashville Mayor John Cooper said Wednesday. "This is a huge, important step toward achieving zero waste, building an economy that better integrates reusable materials and cutting Nashville's carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, which is our goal."

The change will apply to all households currently eligible for curbside recycling services. Residents of Nashville's Urban Services District — a roughly 200-square-mile area home to about 512,000 people — are eligible for curbside recycling if they currently receive trash collection from Metro using brown rolling carts.

Urban Green Lab Executive Director Tod Lawrence said Nashvillians produce twice as much solid waste as the national average and recycle half as much. The percentage of Nashville waste sent to landfills has risen from 69% to 83% in the last 12 years, he added.

In 2021, the curbside recycling program yielded 10,998 tons of recycled materials. While recycling is important, Lawrence said the first priority is reuse and reducing waste.

"Whenever we throw something away, whether that's a tomato, a plastic bottle, or a slab of sheet rock, we throw away all the natural resources, emissions, money, time and love that went into making it in the first place," Lawrence said. "That's why today's change is so important."

Prior Metro budget allocations along with grants from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and the Recycling Partnership will fund the expansion.

Use curbside recycling? Here's what to know.

More than 109,000 Nashville residents currently participate in Nashville's recycling program, according to Cooper.

Eligible residents can request up to three recycling carts through hubNashville or by calling 311. Residents with more carts than they need can also notify the city via hubNashville.

Curbside recycling customers will receive postcards with their new pickup schedule in the coming weeks. New collection schedules can also be found at www.recycle.nashville.gov.

"As with any new program, we do anticipate some hiccups as we begin our new collection services," said John Honeysucker, Metro's assistant director of waste services. He asked residents to be patient as they work through kinks in the launch and report any missed pickups to hubNashville.

Expansion follows turbulent years

Nashville's recycling program has seen a rocky few years.

Plans to expand curbside recycling to every other week pickup were first announced during former Mayor David Briley's administration but put on hold in early 2020 as the city faced budget constraints.

Metro renewed a five-year agreement with Waste Management in May 2020 to keep recycling pickup once per month, though this came at an additional $1.7 million cost thanks to higher processing fees. That agreement also gave Nashville a higher percentage of the revenue from the sale of recycled materials to mills: a 70-30 split with Waste Management.

Nashville temporarily suspended curbside pickup in December 2021 as the city dealt with mounting trash pickup delays. It resumed in February 2022.

Nashville received a $75,800 grant from the state effective Jan. 1 to purchase additional curbside recycling carts. The city matched the grant with $75,800 in Metro funds. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation provides annual rebate grants to the state's five most populous counties for recycling programs, but those grants were put on hold during the pandemic. This money is the first tranche of those funds granted to Nashville since the rebates were reinstated.