Baltimore will spend up to $7 million to provide curbside recycling collection for the first time in nearly five months next week with the help of five contractors, city officials announced. Recycling pickup has been suspended since August due to the coronavirus pandemic, which sickened numerous city employees and forced Baltimore officials to reassign remaining workers just to get trash collected.
To restart recycling collection beginning Tuesday, Baltimore will contract for a year with two small haulers, as well as with three workforce development groups that will put city residents to work with the aim of eventually getting them hired as government employees. The groups providing staffing for the effort are the Living Classrooms Foundation, Roca and Lazarus Rite.
Baltimore already is using two other contractors — Goode Companies Inc. and Spindler Refuse Service Inc. — to assist with trash collection during the pandemic at a cost of about $1.2 million.The city also executed an emergency contract in December to buy routing software to offer turn-by-turn directions to truck drivers, allowing employees or contractors unfamiliar with a particular route to step in.