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Spokane green bins will soon be picked up year-round, with limited winter service

A City of Spokane Solid Waste Department employee dumps yard waste along his route near 30th and Martin on Spokane's South Hill, June 30, 2010. The city will begin collecting yard waste bins once a month in the winter starting in January. Previously, the city did not collect green bins from December through February. (Dan Pelle/The Spokesman-Review)
By Emry Dinman emryd@spokesman.com(509) 459-5472

Spokane residents with a food and yard waste bin will soon be able to have them picked up by the city during the winter with a limited service coming in January.

But the boost in service will come with increased bills.

Customers who pay for a green waste bin can get them emptied once per week between March and November, but until now the service has halted entirely from December through February. Starting next year, crews will begin emptying those bins once per month during the winter, always during the first full week of the month; so, next month, Jan. 6-10.

Customers will be charged for the additional three pickups per year, but rather than a fluctuating seasonal rate that’s lowered during the winter, the yearly costs will be averaged out over the full 12 months, with the same bill every month.

Costs for each pickup are also increasing next year from $5.18 to $5.54, meaning customers will receive bills each month for $20.72. The increased service fee and frequency of service will lead to just shy of $30 more for customers every year.

The change was partially driven by customer requests, and partially by state law that requires cities of Spokane’s size to move toward more organic waste collection, said Kirstin Davis, spokeswoman for the city’s Public Works Division.

“We’ve gotten more and more requests for this,” Davis said. “We had a few mild winters and people have been able to do more yard cleanup, and more people are composting and wanting to put their food scraps and compostable into their green bin.”

The city already was required by state law to provide a year-round organic waste pickup by 2027, and by 2030 green bins will no longer be optional for residential customers as the state attempts to keep more food and yard waste out of landfills. Organic waste presents challenges in Spokane as the only municipality in the state to use a waste-to-energy incinerator because food and yard waste often takes considerably more energy to burn than it produces due in large part to high water content.