Oct. 14—Santa Fe Environmental Services Division Director Shirlene Sitton was named "recycler of the year" at an industry event last month.
Sitton, who will have been with the city for eight years in November, was awarded at the 2023 New Mexico Recycling & Solid Waste Conference, which is hosted by the New Mexico Recycling Coalition and the New Mexico SWANA Roadrunner Chapter.
Sitton said the honor caught her off guard.
"I was very touched that my peers had nominated me for that," she said.
Sitton was awarded for "her ongoing dedication to improving recycling programs and outreach in Santa Fe" and also honored Kim Rivera, an account technician for the Santa Fe Environmental Services Division, as Solid Waste Employee of the Year for "providing excellent customer service and support to the Division," according to a city news release.
The division has struggled with staffing shortages in recent years and is trying to hire more drivers for its collection trucks. It is particularly interested in people who already have commercial driver's licenses, Sitton said, but also is open to training people.
Supply chain issues have also made it more difficult to repair and replace collection vehicles, which led to the temporary pause on some recycling pickup this summer.
Despite the challenges, Sitton said, she's proud of the work the 70-person division has accomplished.
"We do some pretty big lifts with not a lot of staff," she said.
The division has made ambitious changes during Sitton's tenure, including shifting to automated collection in 2017, building a compressed natural gas station to fuel its trucks and implementing a cloud-based GPS tracking software all truck drivers use on their routes.
When she came to the department, "we had three people on a recycling truck running down the street and physically picking stuff up," Sitton recalled.
The change to automated collection is much safer for workers, she said. The shift to compressed natural gas took place after a City Council directive requiring trucks to run on clearer fuel, Sitton added, and is a "bridge between diesel and electric."
One of the biggest projects came last year as the division conducted a route optimization that shifted trash pickup to a four-day-a-week, 10-hour day schedule with more efficient delivery routes.
"We saved a lot of miles on the trash routes" with the overhaul, Sitton said.
The department serves about 34,000 single-family accounts throughout the city and in 2022 recycled 7,800 tons of material.