Pensacola’s rebooted curbside recycling program has cleared its first bar, Mayor D.C. Reeves said Wednesday, with sign‑ups running ahead of the city’s initial goal.
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“We’re now up to 2,700 households, which is about 13% of our current sanitation,” Reeves said at his weekly news conference. “We were aiming for 10% in the first month. So we were actually surpassing what we expected we were going to have.”
The city relaunched curbside recycling this summer as an opt‑in service with an emphasis on cleaner loads and resident education. Early participation is a promising sign, but the real test will be contamination — non‑recyclable material in the cart that can cause entire loads to be rejected. Reeves said the city is still tallying that statistic.
“I don’t have the full cumulative clean contaminated percentages," he said, but I have the weight. We’re at 42,000 pounds of clean recyclables so far, cumulatively.”
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City Hall has pushed outreach to build enrollment and cut mistakes at the curb, including a recent mailer to every household.
“Those postcard opt‑ins that went in, we’ve already got 200 of those,” Reeves said.
The rollout hasn’t been frictionless. Some residents have raised concerns about higher monthly bills tied to adding recycling service, the shift to once‑weekly garbage pickup, new collection days, and early‑phase misses as routes changed. Others say the city’s emphasis on cleaner recycling and better guidance was overdue and is worth the transition pains if it means the program can stick this time.
What to watch next is straightforward. Participation needs to hold or grow, and contamination needs to stay low enough that the material the city collects is actually recyclable. Reeves said the city will keep refining outreach as it compiles the numbers.
