Where Does Washington, D.C.'s Sanitation Budget Go?

Washington, D.C.’s annual budget for its solid waste division totaled over $79 million in 2018. That helped fund collection of 141,000 tons of residential refuse that year, with 24 percent of that being recycling.

Using the entire solid waste budget amount, the cost to haul that garbage was $562 per ton—much larger than other major cities like New York (2016: $288), Chicago (2018: $222), and Los Angeles (2021: $152). D.C. also has one of the lowest rates of residential garbage collected per person based on Census population estimates. It collects relatively little garbage yet spends a lot.

But in the same 2018 report, the city for the first time listed how how much garbage it collects citywide—not just residential garbage but commercial and other refuse sources as well. That was a much larger 881,716 tons, making D.C.’s solid waste budget per ton of garbage at $90—one of the lowest rates.

Yet that opens up many more questions about how those numbers come to be. A 740,000 ton difference between residential and total garbage is a massive amount. D.C. is unique in that it has a large number of offices because of the Federal government, but that still wouldn’t account for such a large discrepancy.

Only a few years prior, D.C. was estimating total garbage throughput of around 400,000 to 500,000 tons a year in their waste transfer stations, ostensibly from residential and all other sources combined.

A 2011 report noted that the city couldn’t estimate citywide trash rates since not all commercial haulers reported their numbers. Ostensibly, the unreported quantity from missing commercial haulers was somewhere in the range of 380,000 to 480,000 tons a year—the difference between the citywide total and the transfer station total.

Considering that D.C. spends so much on solid waste collection yet little of it is from residents opens a question about where all the garbage is coming from and where all the money is going.

Lackluster Garbage Data Reporting

Finding numbers for solid waste collection can be difficult as many municipalities don’t publish them or don’t publish them every year. Many have completely ceased to publish reports since 2018 as China stopped importing recyclable plastic, throwing municipal recycling programs into chaos.

Solid waste management budgets can sometimes include snow or leaf removal, sidewalk cleanup, and various other projects that may not exist from one city to the next. Reporting can be inconsistent, so data for various cities and years is not available.

On top of that, some publish differing numbers in their reports. For example, Baltimore’s annual report for 2021 lists total recycling at 30,000 tons, with a recycling rate around 15 percent in 2020. That would put total waste collected around 200,000 tons. In an annual report for the Department of Public Works in 2023, it lists collection of a much larger 700,000 tons—potentially a similar citywide total, but it doesn’t specify.

And sometimes municipal waste systems take in garbage from places outside the city limits.

Other Peoples’ Garbage

Disposal facilities also usually charge what’s called a tipping fee for taking in garbage from surrounding areas or from commercial businesses like restaurants, offices, and construction companies—otherwise known as commercial carting. In Baltimore, tipping fees added up to around $8.1 million in 2021.

Miami is a good example of how much money is at stake with tipping fees and how convoluted it can get.

Annual reports for Miami show the city collecting 936,000 tons in 2022. That equates to over 2.1 tons per person. It’s a large amount because Miami takes in a lot of garbage from the surrounding area. Unlike other cities, their annual reports don’t separate out the residential garbage from the total citywide garbage amounts.

The city spends a whopping $323 million a year to handle all of that garbage—or $732 per person—over three times that of New York City’s, which is easily the largest solid waste operation in the country collecting over 5 million tons a year.

That is offset by the large amount the city takes in by collection and disposal fees in a year—about $313 million. But while they are earning a lot from other peoples’ garbage, in the end Miami is paying a massive amount to haul trash. Most of the solid waste budget comes from garbage collection fees that amount to $509 per residence in 2024.

That seems like a lot considering that it’s over three times the total solid waste budget per person (not per household) of New York City ($167) and doesn’t include other funds from the general city coffers.

On the other side of the spectrum, cities like Portland, Oregon, Denver, Colorado, and Houston, Texas spend little per resident.

Where Is D.C.’s Tipping Revenue

According to a 2019 post from Neil Seldman with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR)—a nonprofit advocacy group focused on independent businesses—D.C. charges $60 a ton to incinerate non-recycled waste. That’s not too far off from Miami’s tipping fee in 2022-2023 of $68.77 a ton (raised to $71.53 a ton in 2024).

If D.C. is importing 740,000 tons of waste a year, they should ostensibly be earning in the ballpark of $44.4 million in tipping fees based on the $60/ton tipping rate—over half the department’s total budget. But that income doesn’t appear to be listed in the city’s budget.

Considering that the city only recently discovered how much total or citywide garbage it was taking in, they may not know how much they were earning either.