Pensacola鈥檚 rebooted curbside recycling program has cleared its first bar, Mayor D.C. Reeves said, with sign鈥憉ps running ahead of the city鈥檚 initial goal. 鈥淲e鈥檙e now up to 2,700 households, which is about 13% of our current sanitation,鈥� Reeves said at his weekly news conference. 鈥淲e were aiming for 10% in the first month. So we were actually surpassing what we expected we were going to have.鈥�
The city relaunched curbside recycling this summer as an opt鈥慽n service with an emphasis on cleaner loads and resident education. Early participation is a promising sign, but the real test will be contamination 鈥� non鈥憆ecyclable material in the cart that can cause entire loads to be rejected. Reeves said the city is still tallying that statistic.
鈥淚 don鈥檛 have the full cumulative clean contaminated percentages,” he said, but I have the weight. We鈥檙e at 42,000 pounds of clean recyclables so far, cumulatively.鈥�