Parts of KC got trash carts years ago. Why is everyone else still putting bags on curbs?

Editor’s note: This story is part of The Star’s series “Talking Trash.” All of the stories were inspired by questions and concerns we heard from Kansas Citians through listening sessions, an online callout and other conversations in our community. Stories will run throughout the spring, and you can find them all here. You can share thoughts in the form at the bottom of this story, or email kcq@kcstar.com.

Every Tuesday, Stacey Welch wakes up early to make sure all his trash is collected, ensuring no animals get into it or that nothing blows away before city sanitation workers come by.

If anything moves out of place, he’s sure to grab it and put it in either his recycling bin or his 68-gallon trash cart.

By 11 a.m. on a recent morning, Welch’s trash crew turned down Highland Avenue. Two men followed behind the truck, emptying some carts by tipping them over into the truck and others by taking out the bags by hand.

When Welch moved into his home in Kansas City’s Ivanhoe neighborhood about a year ago, the trash cart was already there for him to use each week.

These trash carts aren’t the same as the city’s new recycling carts that started rolling out earlier this month, and they’re not new. Residents in 10 city neighborhoods have been using them for nearly 20 years as a part of a pilot program that never expanded.

Earlier this spring, The Star asked readers what questions and concerns they had about trash and litter in the metro. Many who are beholden to the city’s controversial two-bag limit asked if and when residents will ever get containers to put their trash in.

Read more about why Kansas City has a two-bag trash limit here.

And after the city announced its recycling cart initiative, questions about the possibility of trash carts rolled in at even higher volumes.

Kansas City started looking into the possibility of trash carts many years ago as a way to reduce litter that spreads around neighborhoods when animals bust open trash bags and wind blows debris. Residents across the city still share that concern today, but the effort never spread beyond those first few neighborhoods.

More than 17 years later, the city still has no set plan to provide trash carts to residents citywide.

“I’ve seen the bags leak and I’ve seen them torn open by dogs and other animals,” reader Molly Noren told The Star of the current trash system.

“It’s pretty gross,” reader and Hyde Park resident Hillary Howell said. “You kind of have to keep your trash in until the morning of your pickup because otherwise animals will get into your trash and spread it around.”

Money has been one of the biggest barriers to trash carts in the past, according to public works director Michael Shaw, who oversaw the city’s solid waste programs when the trash carts were first launched.

This year is no different — in its latest budget, the city set aside only a small portion of the money needed to create a plan for a citywide trash cart program.

When did Kansas City first get trash carts?

The idea first came up in city council in 2005, after residents complained about trashy streets. By 2006, under the leadership of former Kansas City Mayor Kay Barnes, the concept made its way through budget debates. Then in 2007, public works launched the trash cart pilot program called KCarts.

City-sponsored trash carts — lids, wheels and all — first went to nine neighborhoods, mostly on the city’s east side: Eastern 49/63, Ivanhoe, Northeast Industrial District, Santa Fe, Columbus Park, Washington Wheatley, Citadel, Center City and Boston Heights. The following year, the Marlborough East neighborhood also got carts.

After it passed, Councilman Terry Riley told The Star, “It’s been a long time coming. This is one of the pieces of the puzzle I believe that can help Kansas City turn around and become one of the cleanest cities in America.”

Over time, officials thought the $400,000 investment would pay for itself, since the city would be able to spend less money on picking up litter and on workers’ compensation cases for injuries from lifting heavy trash bags, according to reporting from The Star at the time.

After a year, the city was supposed to evaluate the program and decide if it should move to provide the carts citywide, which was estimated to cost around $6.25 million at the time.

Why did certain Kansas City neighborhoods get trash carts?

The city chose each neighborhood for a different reason.

For example, officials chose Ivanhoe because the neighborhood had a significant amount of litter compared to other neighborhoods, Columbus Park because it had a lot of multi-family homes, Citadel because it had a severe bird problem and 49/63 because of the prevalence of on-street parking, according to Shaw.

Other neighborhoods, like Washington Wheatley, were a part of the pilot because of all the hills in the neighborhood. Officials thought carts could be an opportunity to get trash to the curb more easily.

In 2007, the Marlborough East Neighborhood Association decided to buy 450 trash carts from the city, according to neighborhood association president Steve Walker. Each cart cost around $65.

These first 10 neighborhoods still have their trash carts and can use them every week.

Promising early results

According to Shaw, as well as residents in at least three of the neighborhoods, the carts yielded positive results off the bat.

In the Citadel neighborhood, Shaw said fewer birds were attacking trash before pickup, and Ivanhoe saw less litter scattered throughout the neighborhood.

“In the neighborhoods where they are, they’re very popular,” he told The Star at the time. “And we have noticed a significant decrease in trash violations in those neighborhoods, and workmen’s compensation costs have been reduced.”

In Columbus Park, Kate Barsotti called the carts “fabulous.”

“It’s reduced litter and animals getting into the garbage, and it’s so much less unsightly than seeing a bunch of bags on the corner,” said Barsotti, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years.

Walker from Marlborough East agreed, adding that he remembers seeing significantly more litter and trash in his neighborhood before the carts than he does with the carts.

In early 2008, about a year after the pilot launched, Kansas City published a new strategic plan for how it would manage trash and recycling, including an evaluation of the trash cart pilot.

The plan described the carts as a success, saying that the “litter index” and code violations related to trash decreased in the areas with carts. The recycling rates didn’t decrease, and residents in the neighborhoods with carts who participated in city focus groups wanted the program to continue.

Across the city, sentiment around the trash carts varied. The Star published letters to the editor from people asking how they could request to get a trash cart in their neighborhoods, as well as from people who said they didn’t want trash carts in their neighborhood because they looked like “mini dumpsters.”

In the city’s focus groups, residents said the carts were more attractive and easier to maneuver than trash bags, and that they created less litter, but also that they were difficult for some people to store and that some would stay out on the curb long after collection.

So why didn’t the program expand?

Despite multiple attempts to get more people trash carts, the city has never dedicated the necessary money to it, Shaw said.

In 2010, Shaw studied how to expand the carts beyond those first 8,500 households, and former Kansas City Mayor Mark Funkhouser pushed for the pilot to expand to 50,000 households, from the river to 63rd Street.

That plan never came to fruition because it didn’t make it into the budget. In the 13 years since then, no plan has gained the momentum needed.

Along with the potential benefits, citywide trash carts could potentially increase the cost of collection, according to a 2008 city report. That’s because a semi-automated approach — meaning workers wheel the carts out to the street for the truck’s mechanical arm to tip them into the truck — takes longer than if workers just grab bags from the curb and throw them into the truck, and requires more staffing than if the process was fully-automated.

Fully-automated means a mechanical arm would pick up the carts directly from the curb, which works in less dense cities like Olathe, but is harder in parts of Kansas City because of the prevalence of street parking.

Based on a 2008 city analysis of different trash collection options, fully-automated trucks would have cost the city around $1.10 per customer per month at the time, and semi-automated or manual collection would have cost $2.33 or $2.02, respectively.

According to Shaw, all of the city’s trash trucks are currently equipped with the capability to tip and load trash carts.

Are the old trash carts still holding up?

The neighborhoods that received trash carts between 2007 and 2008 still have those carts and get collection services from the city, but there is no longer any program or funding in place to repair and replace those carts if they are damaged or lost, according to Shaw.

“Once they’re gone, they’re gone,” Walker of Marlborough East said. “Then you’re back to the bags again with debris all over the place.”

Since they received their carts so long ago, they don’t have a microchip to help locate them either.

Ivanhoe residents like Alan Young told The Star that the program worked great when it first started, but in the last few years, their carts aren’t always emptied on collection day, and trash bags are left behind.

“If the trash is on the curb, why not take all the trash?” Young said. “I don’t know if the crews are trying to cover too much area. I don’t know if the guys are just lazy…I don’t know what it is but it’s gotten steadily worse.”

Walker and Columbus Park’s Barsotti have noticed the same thing.

Barsotti said that the bags may be too heavy, since many of the sanitation workers she’s seen use their hands to get the bags out of each cart instead of the trash truck’s cart tipper to dump the carts.

Shaw said some sanitation workers might opt to pick the trash bags out of each cart in an effort to move faster, but the tippers are there to more effectively dump each cart and reduce the amount of trash that sanitation workers have to pick up manually.

Young said he can tell that it takes longer for crews to collect the carts since sanitation workers have to drag the cart from the curb to the truck to use the tipper.

On average these days, Shaw said city trash collectors pick up around 6,000 pounds of trash and walk about four or five miles per day.

Will the trash carts ever expand citywide?

Talks of launching a citywide trash cart program are still in the works.

City manager Brian Platt announced in March that Kansas City would begin discussing how to implement citywide carts this summer.

Shaw said the cost of the program will likely be around $8 million — $1.7 million more than what citywide trash carts would have cost in 2007. That’s not including the cost of workers and cart maintenance over time.

Last year, city council considered a $17 million proposal to introduce both trash carts and recycling carts citywide, but ultimately decided to spend $6 million on just recycling carts.

City leaders hope the new recycling carts will shift a trend of decreased recycling in Kansas City, by making it easier for residents to recycle more items and ideally reducing the amount of waste that the city is sending to landfills.

“You see more people throwing things away versus recycling,” Shaw said. “You go to recycling carts to reverse that. The idea of a cart is to allow you to recycle more, because you have more capacity.”

When both options were on the table, 3rd District councilwoman Melissa Robinson supported the move to get trash carts to all households as well.

“It is something we have to get a handle on for so many reasons,” Robinson had said last year. “It really impacts the amount of pride that you have in your community, in your city.”

In the city’s most recent 2023-2024 budget, the council put aside $1 million for trash carts, but Shaw and Platt said there is no plan for how that money will be spent or a set timeline for when the city plans to roll out citywide trash carts.

During a February budget hearing, Platt said that there’s a chance the city won’t purchase the carts until next budget year.

“I think a lot of residents really want trash carts,” Shaw said. “It’s more work for us. It’s not as easy to do, but it’s not about the collection. It’s about the quality of service, and it’s about the cleanliness of our neighborhoods.”