Oakland expands illegal dumping cleanup to 7 days a week

By Da Lin

The City of Oakland is stepping up its fight against illegal dumping. Mayor Barbara Lee announced Friday that cleanup operations will now run seven days a week, an expansion from the previous Monday through Friday schedule.

City crews have struggled for years to keep up with the mounting piles of trash scattered across neighborhoods. Critics, however, said the city still isn’t doing enough to enforce anti-dumping laws and hold repeat offenders accountable.

In the past five years, city workers have collected roughly 102 million pounds of trash — about the same weight as the Titanic — according to Josh Rowan, interim director of Oakland’s Department of Public Works. The cleanup has cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

Much of the frustration comes from residents and volunteers who routinely clean up the same sites, only to see them trashed again within days.

“We have roofing [material] that’s over here, wooden boards.  This was most likely [from a construction site],” said Vincent Ray Williams III, co-founder and CEO of the nonprofit Urban Compassion Project, as he surveyed a fresh pile of debris at the corner of Peralta and 26th streets in West Oakland.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” Williams said, noting that the trash had reappeared just four days after city workers cleared the area on Monday.

Williams and his co-founder, Supriya Golas, said they also cleared the same site about a month ago.

“Within five hours, we cleared 61.8 tons of trash from this area with about nine volunteers. That’s huge. But no sooner was the trash gone did it come back,” Williams said.

“I’m truly disheartened. This is demoralizing. For this to come back like this, it just shows the lack of accountability and enforcement. This has become kind of like a de facto dumping ground within Oakland,” Golas said.

Urban Compassion Project organizes volunteers to remove illegally dumped trash across the city. But even with their efforts, public works crews remain overwhelmed.

In the 2024–2025 fiscal year alone, the city reported collecting 18 million pounds of trash. To help ease the strain, Lee said Oakland will expand cleanup operations to weekends using existing funds.

“Our crews can cover more locations and resolve service requests much more swiftly.  And we’re doing this without spending additional taxpayer dollars,” Lee said.

Public works officials found about $250,000 in labor savings, which will be used to fund overtime pay for weekend cleanups.

Rowan said the city is also focusing on prevention, working with Waste Management to explore increasing the size of residential trash cans, lowering trash rates, and ensuring every business has a Waste Management account.

“We’re focusing first on prevention. Then, we’re looking at, really, what are the people and equipment we need to do the pick up. The third phase is going to be enforcement,” Rowan said.

But Williams and Golas argue that without stronger enforcement, illegal dumping will persist. Despite “No Dumping” signs and surveillance cameras at the Peralta and 26th site, new piles continue to appear.

“It’s costing us integrity. It’s taking away hope,” Williams said.

For now, weekend cleanups are only guaranteed through the end of this fiscal year, which runs through June. City officials said if additional funding becomes available, they may extend the program beyond that.