Omaha’s recycling program falling behind peer cities

Rachel Garey-Jacobsen keeps her worms in her basement. 

Every week, she carries her metal compost container full of food scraps downstairs to feed the worms in their bin. In a few months’ time, the red wigglers will convert Jacobsen’s food waste into compost that she then will put in her garden. 

Jacobsen is an avid recycler, ramping up in 2018 when she moved from Grand Island to Omaha. 

In 2019, she started recycling glass by using the drop-off bins available across the city. After moving into a house, she took part in the City of Omaha’s curbside recycling program, which allows people to recycle certain paper, plastics and metals. She then transitioned to recycling soft plastics with the Hefty ReNew program and added earthworm cultivation and regular composting in 2023.  

“I remember growing up hearing about it, like, ‘Take care of the Earth’ (and) ‘Recycle.’ That kind of stuff,” Jacobsen said. “So seeing it in practice in other places, I was like, ‘Maybe it’s not that hard to do it here.’” 

It’s not hard to do here, but few people do it. 

Although the City of Omaha has increased the amount of recyclable materials that it keeps out of the landfill, a Flatwater Free Press analysis found its efforts to promote recycling lag behind most peer cities.

Flatwater looked at the recycling programs of 10 cities that the Greater Omaha Chamber uses for comparison purposes. The analysis shows that Omaha’s recycling program has remained stagnant compared to those with stronger recycling regulations, more diversion opportunities and greater access. 

Omaha introduced its curbside recycling program in the mid-1990s. It started off with the blue bag program, then quickly expanded to open-top 18-gallon green bins in 1996. Since 2020, it has offered covered 96-gallon carts. 

The city’s recycling program, which costs the average household nearly $200 a year in local tax payments, has annually collected around 16,000 tons for more than a decade. The switch to the big bins in 2020 caused a leap in tonnage, according to James Kee, the City of Omaha’s environmental quality control manager.  

Now, the city is regularly diverting over 20,000 tons of residential recycling every year, with an almost 16% diversion rate from the landfill.

In comparison, 150,000 tons of waste was sent to the landfill in 2025. 

Included in Omaha’s recycling calculation are mixed recyclables such as plastics, metal cans, cardboard, paper and glass. Yard waste also is included in the calculation.

Recycling programs in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City and Boise, Idaho, go a step further, adding curbside composting and glass recycling and focusing on recycling in multi-unit dwellings, such as apartments.

Residents in the cities are given their own compost carts that are picked up each week.

In Boise and Salt Lake City, food waste and yard waste are collected in the same cart. Boise’s compost program began in 2017 and accounted for about 28% of the city’s total waste last year, according to Talia Miller, the city’s public works communications coordinator.

Boise and Salt Lake City also offer residents the option of paying an extra fee to use a glass recycling cart. The other cities, aside from Omaha and Kansas City, offer glass recycling in their mixed recycling carts.

While traditional recycling plays a “key role” in reducing waste, Miller, from Boise, said the expansion of diversion programs is “essential” to growing cities, extending the lives of landfills and promoting sustainable practices. 

Recycling ordinances also have a large impact on waste diversion in cities. 

Unlike Omaha, Minneapolis requires recycling services to be provided for both businesses and residences, including apartments. The ordinance took effect in 2011. 

Salt Lake City also requires businesses and apartments to provide recycling services if they produce more than 4 cubic yards of waste per week. The city’s waste management team said businesses and apartments produce half of the city’s waste. 

“Salt Lake City, probably a lot like Omaha, is growing up, and there’s just less single-family (recycling),” said Chris Barker, Salt Lake City waste and recycling community engagement manager. 

In Milwaukee, a variety of materials are banned from the landfill, and apartments and businesses are required to provide recycling services. 

Although Milwaukee has no curbside compost program to accompany its recycling services, the city hosts an annual compost bin sale, encouraging residents to start backyard composting. Milwaukee also launched a free food waste pilot program in 2025, with 10 drop-off locations. 

Other cities, including Raleigh, North Carolina; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Cincinnati; and Kansas City, Missouri, are working to expand recycling access and launch pilot programs meant to lower the amount of trash dumped into the landfill.  

The City of Cincinnati, for example, started a multifamily recycling pilot program in 2025 for buildings with five or more units. The city says more than half its residents live in apartments and described this expansion as the key to its zero-waste goals. 

As of March, Cincinnati had 21 properties participating and had already diverted 37 tons of material from the landfill. 

Raleigh and Grand Rapids are in the middle of food waste diversion pilot programs. Grand Rapids Public Works Director John Gorney said the city is working on placing six compost drop-off sites around the city with a plan to focus on apartments next.

“The community feedback we’ve received, it’s so positive,” Gorney said. “I think it’s going to grow. We’re going to be putting in bins as fast as we can.” 

The City of Kansas City offers weekly recycling pickup with 65-gallon carts. The carts have smart identification chips to prevent them from being lost or misplaced and to monitor recycling collection. It also offers 16 free compost drop-off sites placed around the city.  

The cities of Tulsa and Des Moines offer traditional recycling but have not expanded much beyond those services.

With recent changes to its waste program, Kee asserted that the City of Omaha is competitive “with what’s going on across the nation” in terms of traditional recycling.

The city, which spent about $260,000 on outreach and recycling education last year, runs Wasteline Omaha, a program that provides recycling information through its website and sends occasional mailers to residents. 

Kee said the city ultimately pays to process recycling. But he also pointed to the value that recyclables hold in the waste economy. As of April, aluminum, an infinitely recyclable material, was worth around $1,900 a ton in the recycling market. Sending aluminum to the landfill costs $35 a ton.  

“It doesn’t make sense to throw it away when you could sell it,” Kee said. “We’re recycling this material because it has a value.” 

While Kee said Omaha has no plans to develop a food waste diversion program, the city is supportive of the curbside compost pilot recently launched by Hillside Solutions, a local waste management company. The pilot currently serves around 75 households with subscriptions starting at $25 a month. 

The city will also continue to partner with organizations such as Keep Omaha Beautiful, an environmental nonprofit that manages the Omaha Recycling Guide. 

According to the group’s 2025 report, Keep Omaha Beautiful gave 66 community presentations, participated in 29 public events and provided 177 youth education programs.  

Maddy Wahl, the group’s communications director, said Omaha is doing “pretty well” in its effort to divert waste from the landfill. However, the group would like to see better signage on bins to help reduce recycling confusion. It wants the city to expand recycling services to apartment complexes. And it hopes to eventually include food waste composting in residential pickup. 

“What I’m hearing from the public is that the vast majority of them do care and do appreciate the resources that we share, and also the services that are offered in our city,” Wahl said. “Maybe they don’t believe that their individual actions are making a difference, but we show them that they do matter.” 

Omaha was the first city in the nation to launch the Hefty ReNew Program, which allows its recycling center to turn hard-to-recycle plastics, such as Styrofoam, into reusable materials like plastic lumber. In 2023, the program contributed more than 1% to Omaha’s recycling stream, but by 2025, that figure had dropped to 0.6%.  

Kee said the decline could be because people must buy the orange Hefty bags — when the program began, the city gave them away — or by the increase of other recyclables into the waste stream such as cardboard, which can overshadow the Hefty numbers during the audits. 

Kee said there are no plans to implement a targeted campaign to promote the Hefty program as it continues.

Kee also noted that some waste sent to Omaha’s Pheasant Point Landfill is “being put to another beneficial use.” The landfill has captured its gas emissions since 2004 and used them to power engines to generate electricity.  

Pheasant Point recently upgraded to a renewable natural gas facility in December, better capturing gas released from the breakdown of organic materials like food and yard waste.

This new system is projected to serve the equivalent heating needs of about 20,000 households in Nebraska, according to Jonathan Stepp from Waste Management of Nebraska. 

Omaha Mayor John Ewing said the city will continue studying other waste successes around the nation and seeing what improvements, if any, can be made.  

“If the people of Omaha are thinking about it, then it’s important to me as mayor,” Ewing said. “And it’s important to this administration that we focus on that as well.”

Editor’s note: An updated figure provided by Stepp from Waste Management of Nebraska now projects Pheasant Point’s renewable natural gas facility to serve the equivalent heating needs of 11,500 households.