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Aloha, Curbside: Today brings lousy news about city recycling programs from St. Louis and Honolulu.

The Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports that the Honolulu City Council's Budget Committee has cut $6 million in funding for the rollout of a curbside recycling program scheduled for next May. That money will instead be used to give relief to Oahu homeowners facing big increases in property taxes.

One councilman who opposed the cut says it effectively kills curbside recycling on Oahu because the economy won't recover enough next year to make new money available for the scheduled rollout.

In St. Louis, the city ended a pilot program that had provided free recycling in several neighborhoods after it was determined that the amount of recyclable material being diverted wasn't sufficient to make the program cost-effective, according to a story posted today by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The program, which served about 3,200 of the city's 147,000 households, was intended to run for just three months, but many of the bins had remained in city alleys for a year or more, prompting residents to believe the city had made the program permanent.

Prim Preakness: Unlike the recent Kentucky Derby, the cleanup at last weekend's Preakness was much more manageable than usual because a new ban on bring-your-own alcohol drove down attendance by about 30%, putting a damper on the race's notoriously rowdy infield party.

The Baltimore Sun reports that this year's Preakness was the first in memory for which day-after cleanup crews didn't face "a foul stew of booze and other detritus."

Another plus – there were no "sleepers" this year for cleanup workers to tiptoe around. In past years, the Sun reports, "it wasn't uncommon for the sun to rise on a few people sleeping in the Pimlico infield."

Pete Fehrenbach is managing editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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