Curbside recycling in the City of Pittsburgh accepts #1 and #2 rigid plastics up to a gallon jug's worth of volume per item. IBC totes — every single one of them is #2 HDPE — do not qualify under any reading of the ordinance. A 275-gallon tote would fill a blue cart by itself. The honest gap between what people assume the city takes and what it actually takes is bigger than most residents realize.
What the city program covers in practice
- Household HDPE bottles and jugs under a gallon.
- PET water and soft-drink bottles.
- Paper-based containers, cardboard, and mixed paper.
- Aluminum and steel cans, rinsed.
Not covered: films, bags, #3-#7 plastics (mostly), rigid plastics over one gallon, anything industrial, and any container that has held a regulated product. That list looks surprisingly long when you write it out. Most homeowners, when we tell them their garden-hose reel body can't go in curbside because it's oversized, are genuinely surprised.
The drop-off centers do more than you'd think
The Environmental Services drop-off stations at Hazelwood and East Liberty do take some of the items curbside does not, including bulky rigid plastics on the right day and electronics by appointment. Neither station will take an IBC tote without a commercial haul manifest. The workaround, for a homeowner with a single used tote, is usually one of three routes:
- Find a regional private recycler (there are about nine in the six-county area).
- List it locally for free and let a farmer or water-hauler pick it up.
- Cut the cage off and recycle the HDPE bottle as scrap while separately recycling the steel.
The third option works but most people don't have a reciprocating saw and the patience. That's the hole the private yards fill. We pick up singles from homeowners about eleven times a month — for free when we're already running a route, for a flat pickup fee when we have to come across town.
What the city's data tells us
According to the 2023 Pittsburgh Environmental Services annual report, about 49% of household waste by weight could be diverted under the current program rules. The actual diversion rate is about 17%. The rest ends up at the Imperial Landfill in Findlay Township. Of the missed diversion, about 8% is oversized rigid plastic — a category that includes every IBC tote, every 55-gallon drum, every bucket over 5 gallons, and half the garden-hose reels in Allegheny County.
The gap between what the city can take and what the region produces is exactly the acreage that small regional recyclers operate in. We are one of nine, and there is plenty of room for more.