Do your garbage cans seem heavier lately? It’s not your imagination. Since the novel coronavirus pandemic began, residents are generating more trash — a lot more.

Dave Schaab is municipal marketing manager for Waste Management, which serves local communities including Streator, and he saw it coming. As soon as the pandemic hit and the schools and offices were locked, he figured the residential waste stream would climb. He wasn’t wrong.

“We track this very carefully,” Schaab said. “Especially last year — the 2020 portion of the pandemic — we saw in a big spike in residential cardboard, residential take-out and residential home-cooking wastes.

“And we saw a matching decrease in commercial waste. The overall volume remained the same, but it was higher in the residential line than in the commercial line.”

Jim Pozzi is manager of municipal sales for Republic Services, which serves several communities including La Salle-Peru. He said the surge is from habits adopted since COVID-19. Families began having groceries delivered rather than shopping in-person and began eating more takeout food. The packaging materials have led to larger loads of trash. Stimulus checks have spurred home improvements and, in turn, more refuse.

“At the height of the pandemic, we did see an increase in some our communities of up to 35%,” Pozzi said.

Schaab said the swells he recorded weren’t that high — the biggest spikes were well short of 30% — but he agreed the volume varies between cities and rural communities. In the cities, restaurant closures spurred people to cook or order takeout. In rural communities, where a night on the town is less frequent, trash volumes rose by smaller percentages.

City managers have kept a wary eye on the growing household pickups and posed a question: If volumes are increasing, then will collection rates go up?

Answer: Not necessarily — and certainly not in the foreseeable future.

“We’ve taken a look at all of our rates and right now, in this area, we haven’t had to adjust anything for the volume,” Pozzi said. “We’re not looking to increase anything at this time.”

Peru City Clerk Dave Bartley said even if there were a rate increase, the jump wouldn’t necessarily be significant and it certainly wouldn’t come out of left field.

“We’re in year 3 of a 10-year contract so we’re pretty stable,” Bartley said. “There are some escalators in the contract so they can be protected and come back to the table. Customarily, Jim (Pozzi) would keep the city up to date as to what would happen and when it would happen.”

But whether waste haulers can keep the rates in check long-term depends on how households manage the waste stream going forward. Waste haulers don’t so much need homeowners to trim their overall refuse as do a better job of deciding what goes into the trash cans and what goes into the recycling bin.

“The troubling aspect is residential recycling has been rather flat,” Schaab said, adding later, “That’s a trend we’d like to reverse.”

Schaab said homeowners either don’t know what is and isn’t recyclable or how to handle it — Rule No. 1: items must be empty, clean and dry — with the result that renewable materials go into the landfill and problematic items go into the recycling bins. Wood, for example, is a renewable resource but your waste hauler can’t recycle it.

There also are a few recyclable materials that require special handling. Plastic grocery bags are recyclable, but belong in the bag drop-offs at the supermarkets; if left in the curbside bins they’ll gum up the waste hauler’s machinery. Similarly, Christmas lights will cause machinery snags and should be saved for electronic recycling events.

“We want to see better recycling,” Schaab said. “The cost for sorting recycling has risen in the last couple of years and there are things that can’t go in.”

Pozzi said he personally is cooking more and dining out less frequently than before the pandemic. Similarly, he knows of many people who’ve used the lockdown to make wish-list home improvements or to clean out their basements.

“More people are home and have time on their hands and they’re finding things to do,” he said. “So people are cleaning and getting rid of old stuff.”

People are also gardening more, which presents amateur growers with a prime way to further cut down on their garbage pickup: Composting.

Nancy Jasiek is a master gardener in La Salle Township and she said home growers should divert organic materials — that is, vegetable scrapings, egg shells, coffee grounds — into composting bins and even by put their old newspapers to work in the garden.

“More people are planting vegetables now — it’s a big thing since COVID — and if you lay down four sheets of newspaper and put a layer of grass clippings on top, you won’t have to till or pull weeds,” she said. “When you go back out the following spring, there will be hardly anything left.”

Schaab thinks some pandemic trends are here to stay and we’re headed for a “new normal” in which residential wastes will remain high. To offset this, he said, Waste Management plans to hit the classrooms and teach children some recycling basics in hopes they’ll notice when mom and dad put something in the wrong disposal bin.

“If you give me a class of third-graders, I will turn them into captains of recycling for their households. And that’s our hope for the future.”