In 2024 there were 422 recorded illegal trash dumpings in East Palo Alto. I investigate systemic problems with scheduling large item pick ups, and I propose better enforcement strategies using video cameras.

In 2024 (1/1/24 to 12/31/24) there were 422 recorded illegal trash dumpings in East Palo Alto; this is the number of dumpings that were either reported by the public to the City of East Palo Alto Environmental Services team or they were proactively observed by the Environmental team.

This statistic does not include all illegal trash dumpings because there are uncounted cases where the Maintenance team may proactively pick up dumpings on the way to the Corp yard, or residents may also pick up illegal trash dumpings.

This map below (link) was created by our City of East Palo Alto Environmental Services team to track the locations of dumpings in 2024 calendar year.

Because this is public data, I was also given authorization to share the spreadsheet below which includes 412 data points. The 10 illegal trash dumpings along the San Francisquito Creek bank and bed are not included since they do not have an address.

Costs

For illegal trash dumpings that are under 200 pounds and do not contain hazardous waste, our city's Environmental Services team contacts Recology to pick up the items based on the current year's contract. If there is hazardous waste, Recology will not pick it up, so our Maintenance team has to go pick up the waste, bring it to the corp yard, sort the waste, and then schedule for Recology to pick up the items.

To my knowledge, there is no additional direct cost from these Recology large item pick ups from the public right of way or from the corp yard, but I know for certain that a cost exists. Because the costs for illegal trash dumping are bundled into the Recology city contract costs, it is difficult to determine how much of these costs that every resident pays per year is due to illegal trash dumping. The Recology trash contracted cost has been increasing every year and is distributed across ratepayers in East Palo Alto.

Looking at the historical property tax records for my single family home, I see an increase over the years for Recology trash collection fees:

I will attempt to estimate the cost of illegal trash dumpings to the city. For residents, each extra prepaid Recology large item pick up costs $112.72. If we also factor in labor costs from the Environmental Services staff and/or Maintenance staff at $100 per dumping, this totals to $222.72 per illegal trash dumping occurrence. This cost multiplied by the 422 illegal trash dumpings equals $93,987.84. This is not including the costs for illegal trash dumpings that were not counted because they were proactively cleaned up by Maintenance or residents, and it does not include the more costly clean ups inside the San Francisquito Creek during the winter months to prevent flooding. Let's round this up to $100k.

East Palo Alto has 9,248 housing units (Census Reporter), so illegal trash dumping from a purely clean up perspective is costing each unit $10.81 per year recurring. Additionally, there are health and quality of life concerns which are now computed into this cost.

Why There are Dumpings

There have been a lot of complaints about illegal trash dumpings in East Palo Alto, and I also have been bothered with the illegal trash dumpings in my neighborhood. I dug deeper and discovered a Clean City Plan which City Council had approved in 2017 because there were 1,201 illegal trash dumpings in the fiscal year prior to the study. City staff is currently working on getting that uploaded to the City website at my request, and I will link it here once it is becomes available. The document mentions 2 explanations for the number of illegal trash dumpings: process and lack of enforcement.

Process

From a process perspective, one of the biggest problems facing East Palo Alto tenants is that tenants are not allowed to call Recology to schedule large item pick ups twice a year. Only landlords/homeowners are allowed to call to schedule. I had observed this problem personally when my tenant neighbors were moving out and did not know how to get rid of large items. They were going to reach out to EPACENTER for permission to dump into the EPACENTER dumpster. Only after I told them that Recology had a system of scheduling 2 large item pick-ups did they reach out to their landlord who scheduled the large item pick up for them. This problem of tenants not being able to schedule large item pick ups is exacerbated for multifamily apartment buildings. Only the owner / property manager of a multifamily building can schedule up to 2 large item pick ups per year, and it is entirely optional. Individual units cannot schedule their own large item pick up dates. This means that if I was living in an apartment in East Palo Alto and was moving out at the end of the year - and the next scheduled large item pick up was not until March - then I would need to either pay Recology to schedule a large item pick up, or I would need to haul the items myself to the San Carlos Shoreway Environmental Center (which is where Recology takes all of our City's trash) and pay item-by-item to dispose of large items. A sofa, for instance, is $38. One can imagine that rather than go through all of these hurdles, the tenant might find it easier and cheaper to just dump the items on the side of the road. When I called Recology to figure out if this policy could be changed, they told me it could not and that all cities Recology contracts with only allow for 2 large item pick ups per year.

Enforcement

From an enforcement perspective, illegal trash dumpings have been difficult to enforce because it is difficult to build a case to levy the $1000 fine. Of the 422 recorded illegal trash dumpings in 2024, only a handful had reported video surveillance footage associated with them. Of the footage that was reported, many were not clear enough to see the license plate numbers on the car. If our City wants to get serious about enforcing and dissuading illegal trash dumpings, we need better cameras where we can read the license plate number. That way, the police department can add the license plate number in the Flock Safety hotlist system, and anytime that vehicle enters into East Palo Alto the police department will get a notification on its location. This Flock Safety camera is very effective and has helped our police department find 7 stolen vehicles in February 2025 alone (Audit Report)!

Solutions

The reason why I am getting more involved in this is that our Public Works & Transportation Commission which I chair has received a number of complaints about illegal trash dumpings in the public right of way. Moreover, when I attended a city council priority session this week I noticed that quality of life concerns including illegal trash dumpings were brought up by over a quarter of attendees as one of their top priorities.

I believe that the police department's recent council-approved installation of 25 Flock Safety cameras is a potential technology game changer from an enforcement perspective. I am working on a plan to see if the police department could get approval to use the non-ALPR Flock Safety video cameras to enforce and dissuade illegal trash dumpings into the San Francisquito Creek since those risk flooding which would impact the highest density of East Palo Alto residents living on the west side near Woodland Ave.

From an education and policy standpoint, I think we need some reforms to large item pick ups. The City may consider re-opening the Corp yard for large item dumpings - this was discontinued per the Clean City Plan after getting large item pick ups from Recology - or the City and apartment owners may consider paying for additional large item pick up days every month.

Analysis

A friend helped me run the Excel data through Anthropic's Claude AI Pro model, and these text and figures below are Claude's work. This was amazing and saved me at least 2 hours of manual work.

Illegal Dumping Analysis Findings
Based on the data analysis of the illegal dumping tracking report for 2024, I've identified the following key insights:
The 3 Most Common Dumping Items
    1    Mattresses (80 incidents) - By far the most frequently dumped item, accounting for nearly 20% of all illegal dumping incidents.
    2    Couches/Sofas (69 incidents) - The second most common item, representing about 17% of all dumping cases.
    3    Refrigerators (40 incidents) - The third most common item, making up approximately 10% of illegal dumps.
High-Level Trends
    1    Bulky Furniture Dominates - The data reveals that large, difficult-to-transport furniture and appliances make up the vast majority of illegal dumping incidents. This suggests that disposal convenience is a major factor in illegal dumping behavior.
    2    Seasonal Patterns - There are clear seasonal variations in dumping rates:
    ◦    Winter (Dec-Feb) and Fall (Sep-Nov) see the highest rates of illegal dumping
    ◦    November (48), December (47), and July (47) had the most incidents
    ◦    March had significantly fewer incidents (11) compared to other months
    3    Dumping Hotspots - Several locations showed repeated dumping incidents:
    ◦    2411 Pulgas Ave. had 13 separate incidents (when combining similar addresses)
    ◦    1783 Michigan Ave. had 6 incidents
    ◦    842 Green St. had 5 incidents
    4    Reporting Method - From the data structure, it appears most incidents were "Spotted" rather than "Called in," suggesting proactive monitoring is more effective than relying on resident reports.
    5    Prompt Removal - The data shows that most items were successfully removed (as indicated by the "Y" in the "Items Removed?" column), suggesting effective cleanup processes are in place.
The visualization provides a system-wide view of the illegal dumping patterns. From a site reliability engineering perspective, this data could help optimize resource allocation, especially during high-volume months like November and December, and target educational campaigns specifically around proper disposal of large furniture items.

These are my comments and questions:

• Personal items like mattresses and couch/sofa's are the most common illegally dumped items. This implies that these are residents (not necessarily all from East Palo Alto) who are doing most dumpings, as opposed to commercial waste haulers.
• The spring months have less dumpings. I wonder if this may be correlated with less tenant move outs in the spring?
• The number of monthly dumpings peaks at the middle of the year and at the end of the year. I wonder if this may be correlated with more tenant move outs at the end of the year?

Summary

In general, things are getting better and we have a lot more work to do. From 2016 to 2024, there has been a 16.45% year-over-year decrease in illegal trash dumpings, which exceeds the 10% year-over-year-decrease objective set in the 2017 council-approved Clean City Plan. There were 1,201 dumpings in 2016 and 422 dumpings in 2024.

If you see any illegal trash dumpings, you can report them by following the instructions on the City's Reduce Waste page: https://www.cityofepa.org/publicworks/page/reduce-waste.