After listening with guarded optimism to Mayor Michael Nutter’s campaign promises about curing Philadelphia’s recycling woes, Christine Knapp saw Nutter prove that he was serious Thursday.

And Knapp was thrilled.

“The infusion of money will help the city buy trucks and get the infrastructure it needs to develop the kind of program we’ve been asking for,” said Knapp, an outreach coordinator for PennFuture.

Nutter called for the city to invest $6 million in the coming year and $25 million over the next five years to create a user-friendly recycling process and increase participation rates citywide. Nutter’s five-year plan projects collecting 58,000 tons of household recycling in fiscal year 2009, 11,000 more tons than the city’s target for fiscal year 2008.

According to Nutter, the city will expand single-stream recycling — where recyclables are combined for processing — to North Philadelphia in May and will implement weekly single-stream recycling throughout Philadelphia by January.

“No one has made this kind of commitment to recycling from the General Fund since” the Wilson Goode administration, RecycleNow Chairman Maurice Sampson said. “Now we need to see a plan before we start spending that money.”

Carlton Williams, deputy commissioner for sanitation, said a large portion of the funds would likely go toward converting old recycling trucks into single-stream compactors.

---

Rising participation

The Streets Department has already extended single-stream collection to Northeast, South, Southwest and West Philadelphia. According to Deputy Commissioner for Sanitation Carlton Williams, the program has had the most success in the Northeast, where trash-to-recycling diversion rates have increased from 8 percent to 14 percent.