The critical and continuing issue of all things garbage bedevils the city.

To get actionable information about how to resolve as best as possible some of the issues, from overflowing private dumpsters to residents throwing away so much garbage into the city-issued large bins that they overflow — leading the city to think there is no recycling going on in that household —  was a topic at the Finance Committee this week.

Linda Pratt, the Holyoke Recycling Advisory Committee chair, said that students from Holyoke Community College helped out the city by collecting data as they followed trash pickup crews from the city’s Department of Public Works in recent weeks.

Residents who have alleys have complained over the years that pinning responsibility on them for picking up other people’s trash, including spent needles, which are dangerous objects that mishandled can cause infection. The city has responded that half of the alleys behind the residences are the responsibility of the property owners. No one is happy.

Ricardo del Valle, the coordinator of solid waste and recycling at DPW said his team wrote 40+ violation warnings to residents recently who did not have their trash bins properly closed and/or were not recycling correctly.

“Lately we have been cracking down more on the city ordinance for refuse, which in turn is going to lead to more recycling, which is also less expensive for the city,” said del Valle. “If I’m not mistaken. I believe we are paying for trash tonnage at $96 a ton. And since the city does dual-stream recycling, the recycling only costs us just under $30 a ton. So with more recycling, that’s going to help save the city and taxpayers money.”

The crew was sticking the city’s ordinance right on the barrels, he said, to help ensure that residents read it and update their actions accordingly. Yet, he said: “We saw no effect. We posted it on social media. So no effect. So we started cracking down on it. Currently today, we had a lot less offenders than the 40-something that we had, last week.”

Said Pratt about the HCC students: “They rode with the crews for the entire time it took to pick up recycling throughout the city, which is a four-week period. And we got data on what actually how much recycling was actually happening because we really did not know. So now we have some nice baseline data. So when we look at improving recycling in the city, we will have some ideas about where we started.”

The agenda and documents provided to councilors are here.

Here is the link to DPW information on recycling.

Lastly, the School Committee Advisory Committee met and preparing to submit its report to the School Committee. That video is here.