Provided/City of Houston
The City of Houston is spending $2 million to contract outside help in trash pickups.
Craig Semiens was finishing his shift as a city trash collector when he jumped on a Zoom call, painting a dire picture of the city’s waste management system.
“We don’t have enough manpower,” he said, in a webinar on Thursday hosted by Environment Texas, a clean energy advocacy group. “We don’t have enough trucks out here in order to supply the needs of a growing city.”
More than that, he added, the waste collectors don’t get enough respect from the community. As a result, employee morale is low.
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Houston’s waste problem is nothing new — City Council member Joaquin Martinez says issues with trash collection date back to the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey — but bottlenecks in the system continue to delay thousands of Houstonians’ trash pickup services.
Pamela Jones, a Kashmere Gardens resident of nearly a decade, had trash outside her home to be picked up on Oct. 2. By Oct. 29, when she spoke with Houston Public Media, the trash was still there.
“Come pick it up, do your job,” she said. “Of course, do your job. To me, that’s basic service. I don’t know what’s going on with the city, but that’s basic service. I expect basic service.”
Hours after Jones spoke with Houston Public Media, the trash outside her home was picked up.
As of Nov. 25, 2025, 35,962 Houstonians reported missed trash pickups, according to Environment Texas; another 20,604 heavy trash pickups weren’t picked up either.
“Houston is at a major crossroads,” Stacy Savage, founder of Zero Waste Strategies, said.
Provided/City of Houston
The City of Houston is spending $2 million to contract outside help in trash pickups.
This week, the City of Houston began turning to outside help for trash collection. A city spokesperson confirmed contractors with AshBritt, a private service, began collecting garbage in southwest Houston on Wednesday, under a $2 million contract.
In late July, the Houston City Council agreed to spend $12.5 million to go toward 31 new solid waste pickup trucks, largely in an effort to address delays in recycling pickup. Environment Texas reported that some 31,928 recycling pickups were missed this year.
“We do applaud those efforts to make a more robust Solid Waste Department, but we need more,” Gabriela Hamdieh, waste and recycling associate at Environment Texas, said during Thursday’s discussion.
Hamdieh argued Houston needs to turn its gaze to a solid waste fee: a fee residents would pay to boost revenue for waste collection services. Each of the major cities in Texas, except Houston, have a waste collection fee. In Austin, monthly trash fees range from $26 for a small bin to $58 for an extra-large bin. San Antonio’s monthly solid waste fees range from $14 to $31, while Dallas’ solid waste fee is $38 a month.
Council Member Martinez said he was committed to the solid waste fee, though he did not have an estimated cost during the webinar on Thursday. He added that a bigger-picture overhaul of the city’s trash services could cost around $125 million.
“We know that as we address something as basic as your trash service through solid waste, it definitely improves neighborhoods, quality of life, safer neighborhoods,” Martinez said. He’s also working on a pilot program in his jurisdiction, District I, which he said would streamline heavy trash pickup requests.
Two-thirds of Houstonians said they’re willing to pay a nominal “garbage fee,” according to a 2023 report from the Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research.
“There are sort of two sides to that,” Dan Potter, “One of it is folks that are aware, yes, we don’t pay a garbage fee currently. But then the other part of that is kind of a comment on, ‘well I don’t think we’re quite getting the service that we want to be getting, and so we probably aren’t spending the amount of money that we should be spending.'”
Environment Texas is advocating to implement a solid waste fee beginning by next summer. Hamdieh noted that even if such a fee is implemented, it will not resolve the waste crisis overnight. Instead, it would accumulate funding that could then be put to use.
But some residents and officials are adamantly opposed to something that would raise taxes or fees on residents. Even Pamela Jones, who had trash outside her home for nearly a month, said she was “all fee’d out” and said the city should work with the funding they have.
Staffing shortages have also contributed to the delays. Some 40 employees within the city’s Solid Waste Management department have voluntarily retired, as part of Mayor John Whitmire’s initiative to cut spending, reducing staff levels by nearly ten percent.
“There’s a lot to be said around being able to fund a department sufficiently to be able to not only create those jobs and keep the community clean, but to create a stronger trust bond between the city and the residents,” Savage said.
Dominic Anthony Walsh contributed to this report.