Gwinnett County saw a jump in the amount of trash and recycled materials it collected in the first month of its mandatory new garbage plan, county officials said Tuesday.
And while the county also received thousands of complaints and questions about the new plan in its first weeks, the volume of calls has dropped substantially.
Those are two of the key findings from an update on the county trash plan prepared for the Board of Commissioners on Tuesday.
“We do have some success here,” Casey Snyder, the director of the county's solid waste division, told commissioners. “We’re going to continue to build on that.”
Gwinnett began a trash collection program July 1 that for the first time requires county residents to sign up for the service. Previously, an estimated 20,000 out of nearly 190,000 households in the unincorporated sections of the county declined to pay for trash collection.
Snyder said the five private haulers who now handle the county’s trash business collected 15,520 tons of garbage in July. That’s nearly half the 34,727 tons collected from April through June under the old plan.
Haulers also collected 2,029 tons of recyclable material in July, compared with 2,342 tons from May through June.
Snyder said the increased garbage and recycling collection indicates some people were disposing of their trash illegally until they were required to pay for garbage service.
Snyder also reported a decrease in the number of complaints and questions about the new system.
In the first weeks of the new plan the county received up to 700 phone calls a day about trash service. That has declined to 300 to 350 calls a day, Snyder said.
The new garbage plan was years -- and several lawsuits -- in the making.
Previously Gwinnett allowed residents to pick their own garbage hauler from a list of qualified companies. But county officials wanted to standardize service to discourage illegal dumping, promote recycling and cut down on truck traffic in county neighborhoods.
Two years ago the county tried to limit the number of haulers and contract with a nonprofit agency to oversee trash collection. Several lawsuits followed, and a Superior Court judge ruled the plan violated state law by delegating government functions to a private entity.
The new plan resulted from a lawsuit settlement. The county agreed to give five trash haulers exclusive rights to collect trash in different parts of the county.
Many residents were angry they no longer had a choice of haulers. They also objected to the county’s plan to charge for 18 months of service in advance on property tax bills mailed in July.
Commissioner Bert Nasuti said he has noticed a big drop in calls to his office as the county and the trash haulers responded to complaints. He said he is starting to get more calls from people who are glad trash trucks from different companies no longer drive their streets several days a week.
The county may still revise the trash plan. Among the concerns it may tackle: complaints that senior citizens pay the same collection fee as large families but often generate significantly less garbage.
“There’s going to be a little tweaking,” Nasuti said.
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