By Michele Evans / NYweeklyRecord.com / Date: 7/22/2026
Category: Transit / Government Accountability / Environment / Taxpayer Waste
NEW YORK CITY, NY – New York City Transit asked workers to separate recyclables, then failed to make sure the material stayed out of the trash. A July 21 audit from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority inspector general found breakdowns inside agency facilities, in contractor handling and in the oversight meant to protect both the environment and taxpayer dollars.
Inspectors sampled 40 NYC Transit facilities and found improper recycling separation at 21 of them. At least seven locations lacked suitable recycling containers, while 23 did not have proper labels to tell workers where materials belonged.
The failures did not end at the bin. The audit found that the disposal contractor mixed correctly separated paper and cardboard with ordinary trash, sending material that employees had sorted toward disposal instead of recycling.
Paper and cardboard recycling dropped by roughly 80 percent after 2019. According to the inspector general, NYC Transit did not detect the plunge, exposing a basic monitoring failure in a program operating across a vast public transit system.
Gothamist, citing public records and invoice data, reported that the contractor was Action Carting and that the failures contributed to about $800,000 in extra fees. The company did not respond to Gothamist’s request for comment.
The inspector general estimated that a stronger recycling program could divert more than 600 tons of material from landfills each year and save more than $100,000 annually. Those estimates underscore the double cost of weak controls: taxpayers pay more while recyclable material becomes garbage.
The audit also found that NYC Transit lacked the data needed to test whether contractor bills were accurate. That means the problem was not only what happened to the recycling. It was whether the agency had enough evidence to know what it was paying for.
MTA officials said they directed changes in vendor practices, are retraining employees and plan to require electronic billing and weight tickets in the next contract. The agency accepted or partially accepted six of the audit’s nine recommendations.
Those steps are a start, not a clean bill of health. The inspector general said a second audit will examine the contractor’s performance and billing, potentially answering questions the first report left open about the full financial impact.
New Yorkers are routinely told that sorting waste is a shared civic duty. A public authority must meet the same standard. NYC Transit now owes riders and taxpayers proof that separated recycling will remain separated, contractor bills will be checked and the same failures will not be allowed to disappear into the trash again.
Sources
MTA Inspector General Recycling Audit
Gothamist: Private Sanitation Firm Trashed MTA Recycling, Audit Finds
Leave a Reply