Scandal-ridden San Francisco garbage collector could lose one of his contracts with the city

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Recology, a scandal-ridden garbage company that has been collecting trash in San Francisco for almost a century, could lose one of its near-exclusive contracts with the city, a city official said.

While this may be the first time since the 1930s that Recology or one of its subsidiaries hasn’t won all of San Francisco’s garbage collection contracts, the contract in question represents only a small part of the behemoth’s business.

“This contract is not even a pimple on the body of an elephant that Recoclogy is working on in San Francisco,” Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said of the recent contract.

While the troubled firm retains its much more lucrative living-in contract with the city, Recology has been made aware of a potential $10 million contract with another company.

The City has notified Allied Waste Industries Inc. on a plan to conclude a contract for the collection of garbage from urban facilities.

Recology can appeal to the city, which still requires a formal vote on the contract in the form of a formal award decision.

Recology did not respond to a request for comment on the contract, originally reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 2021, Recology subsidiaries paid bribes to influence Mohammed Nuru, who, as head of the Public Works Department, monitored garbage collection rates. Former Recology head Paul Giusti later pleaded guilty in a federal case to participating in a scheme with Nuru to raise those rates.

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This scandal, and the federal cases that followed, led in part to the passage of a new law that would prevent city governments from soliciting funding from their contractors and those with whom they do business.

It was one such payment from Recology that got the former head of the Department of the Environment into trouble with the Ethics Commission last week.

The city’s investigation also revealed that Recology cheated taxpayers during Nuru’s tenure at Public Works. In the end, the company was forced to return nearly $100 million to taxpayers.

The larger question now looming over the company’s future relationship with San Francisco is whether the City will open a competitive bidding process for the much more important domestic waste contract that Recology has always awarded so far.

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