Cullman residents who want curbside recycling pickup will soon pay $10 a month as the city transitions from manual collection to an automated system designed to improve worker safety and make the program financially sustainable.
The new program is expected to begin the first week of February 2027, with new recycling carts scheduled to be distributed during the last week of January. Sam Dillender, Cullman’s sanitation and recycling superintendent, said the change is intended to reduce the risk of injuries among sanitation workers who currently have to get out of their trucks repeatedly to collect recycling bins.
“When you get a driver getting out of the truck 4 or 500 times a day, there’s knee injuries or shoulders, there’s slip trips and fall,” Dillender said. “So we want to avoid that and take our program to the next step.”