For weeks, recycling bins across Houston sat untouched, some for more than 40 days. Homeowners voiced frustration as piles of bottles, cardboard and other materials lined curbs throughout the city.
Now, city leaders are offering explanations and a plan to get recycling services back on track.
Recommended Videos
Interim Solid Waste Director Larius Hassen detailed a long list of challenges during a Houston City Council meeting, citing aging equipment, worker shortages, rodents damaging trucks and raw sewage backing up in facilities.
“It’s been a trying 90 days,” Hassen said. “I was told by a previous member that we could never catch up on recycling. It’s going to be five to eight days behind, and trash is two to three days behind. We’re working 12 to 14 hours, seven days a week.”
Hassen revealed the dire state of the city’s recycling fleet. Of the 218 trucks needed, only a fraction are fully operational, and some are literally being eaten from the inside out.
“Believe it or not, we have a rodent problem,” he said. “When you don’t clean out your trucks, rodents come in and rats are chewing the wires. We have maggots in the back of our trucks. We have locations where raw sewage is coming up in the facilities that employees have to deal with.”
Compounding the problem, the city’s 13 truck wash bays are barely functional.
“None of them work properly. We only have cold water,” Hassen said.
Mayor John Whitmire acknowledged the severity of the situation and defended recent efforts to fix it.
“He’s made drastic changes. Are we where we need to be? No,” Whitmire said. “It has one drop-off for the entire 600 square miles of Houston. That’s unacceptable.”
Currently, all recycling trucks must unload at a single facility, causing major delays.
“Most of our trucks spend an abundance of time just waiting at the recycling center,” Hassen said. “What used to take 45 minutes now takes well over an hour and a half.”
The department is also grappling with a significant staffing shortage. Nearly 27 drivers left due to the city’s retirement incentive program, marking a historic low, according to Hassen.
“This is the first time in the city’s history that we’re down that many drivers,” he said.
To address this, Hassen has involved side loaders, who typically work in automation, more actively.
“We had all the tools in place. They were just never tapped in and used to make the operation more efficient,” he said.
Additionally, the department’s routing software is outdated, and pickup routes haven’t been updated in more than a decade.
“It was just like the can keeps getting kicked down the road,” Hassen said. “There were no operational efficiencies. No up-to-date standard operating procedures.”
As a result, entire areas—especially recycling routes—have been missed.
“Trash is our main priority,” he said. “Sometimes we have to pull people off recycling routes to make sure the trash is picked up.”
Despite the challenges, Hassen is pushing a plan to turn things around. One major improvement is expected by the end of the year.
“The great news is we own four transfer stations. Two of them are operable and two of them aren’t,” Hassen said. “We have one coming online at the end of November or beginning of December. That will help with the bottleneck.”
Hassen also announced plans to open a new customer service phone line staffed with live agents to provide residents real-time updates on service delays.
“We’re going to have a number and a live agent for customers to call us to get an answer back to our constituents, to let them know where we are with everything,” he said.
Both Hassen and Whitmire said these problems started before their tenure and pledged to make changes.
“This has been going on for six years,” Hassen told council. “This is a problem that Mayor Whitmire inherited, and I inherited.”
He added, “Today is the day that we end. It won’t be a 2026 story on missed recycling.”
