Denver, Colorado Mayor Mike Johnston and representatives of Denver’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) accelerated the rollout of compost collection services, completing its citywide rollout in the first quarter of next year, nine months earlier than originally planned.
The move is aimed at moving more quickly to further the city’s waste diversion and emissions reduction goals, while maintaining high levels of customer service delivery.
Amid a backdrop of thousands of compost carts ready to hit city streets in early 2025, DOTI shared it will be reaching out to 67,000 customers in four collection districts in December with a letter asking them to choose what size compost cart they’d like to receive. The residents in these districts will have until January 10, 2025, to opt-in for the service and initial round of cart deliveries. Carts will be delivered in these areas in February and March, completing DOTI’s citywide rollout of the service and providing all 180,000 city customers access to compost collection.
Composting provides an opportunity for residents to dispose of food and yard waste, decreasing the amount of trash that goes to the landfill and reducing greenhouse gas emissions
To support the accelerated compost rollout and customer service delivery, starting on January 6, 2025, DOTI will move to every-other-week recycling collection to optimize use of its resources toward diversion goals. It found that offering weekly recycling collection in 2023 and 2024 did not result in significant increases in recyclables collected, while its trucks circled the city twice as often, driving an additional 170,000 miles per year. With every-other-week recycling, the city will also reduce fuel use, which also contributes to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Another change DOTI will make in 2025 is moving the city’s large item pickup (LIP) service from an every four week to an every nine week collection schedule. Offering more frequent LIP service does not support the city’s diversion goals but incentivizes waste and de-incentivizes efforts to find alternative options to throwing items in the landfill.
“These adjustments in our collection schedules will allow us to improve customer service, creating greater reliability in our collection services and improving route completion rates for trash, compost and recycling,” said Amy Ford, executive director of DOTI. “In other words, we pick up your solid waste the day we tell you we are going to pick it up. Today we are at 90 percent, and we are striving to be at 95 percent.”
There will be no changes to city trash collection fees in 2025, which are tied to the size of people’s trash carts.
Denver has been rolling out compost service at a rate of one district per quarter since late summer 2023, auditing carts and doing education to reduce contamination. In its first district rollout effort, DOTI provided a compost cart to every customer and saw high contamination rates (i.e., items in carts that weren’t compostable). In switching to an opt-in approach in 2024, where interested customers now sign up for the service, the city saw significant reductions in contamination and greater compliance with the compost program that accepts only food and yard waste, giving DOTI the ability to roll out compost at a faster rate.