Ron Littlefield

After the controversial move last year to scale back curbside recycling from weekly to monthly, Mayor Ron Littlefield said he wants the city to increase the service to twice-a-month pickup in a year.

The city will need to buy new, more environmentally friendly trucks for the expanded service, he said, and he plans in the upcoming capital budget to propose funding to buy the new vehicles, although he acknowledged that he has no estimates on how much money will be needed.

“Just how we work our way into (twice-a-month pickup) is something that we have to plan for,” he said earlier this week.

Richard Beeland, spokesman for the mayor, said Friday he is unable to say how much it costs the city to conduct monthly curbside pickup. He also said it is “a little premature” to have an approximate cost of expanding the service to twice a month.

The city may go to a free subscription service with “committed” participants who elect to use city-provided recycling containers, Mr. Littlefield said.

“We haven’t figured out just yet how we will be able to winnow it down to the people who truly will participate,” he said. “But I don’t really want to run trucks all over the city if only one or two people in some parts of the city are going to participate.”

When pitching the monthly curbside pickup program in 2006, officials estimated it would cost roughly the same as before, about $1.1 million a year. Although vehicle maintenance and fuel costs declined, that was offset by collection containers the city had to buy for new drop-off recycling centers.

The mayor and Mr. Beeland said the plan to expand curbside pickup was not a reaction to opposition the mayor received when he scaled back the service last year. Mr. Beeland said the idea always has been to increase curbside recycling service if participation improved.

“We’ve seen a steady and continued growth in recycling,” he said.

The amount of clean recyclable items picked up by the city rose roughly 34 percent from 2,300 tons in 2006 to 3,081 tons last year, according to the city. Clean recycling refers to items ready to be recycled immediately without being pre-cleaned or picked through to discard unusable parts.

“I think we can do better than that if we go to containers, we go to automated pickup, and we go to twice monthly,” the mayor said.

Right now, the city provides monthly curbside service and also offers several recycling drop-off centers where people can take items.

In looking at the potential price tag of twice-monthly pickup, Mr. Beeland said city officials will have to consider that fuel prices have gone up, that vehicle maintenance will be higher since they will be run more than now, and that it will cost the city to provide wheeled recycling containers to those who want to take part in the curbside service.

The containers — which cost “upward” of $50 apiece and are similar to those now used for trash — would be picked up by vehicles with movable arms, Mr. Beeland said.

Mr. Littlefield said he does not want the city to “put a lot of containers out there that people are going to use to keep their garden materials in.”

Sandy Kurtz, co-director of the local nonprofit Urban Century Institute, an environmental organization, said twice-a-month curbside pickup would be a move in the right direction.

“More is better than less, for sure,” said Ms. Kurtz, a Chattanooga resident.

But she said weekly service “would be even better.”