ST. LOUIS COUNTY, Mo. — Every week, Karla Ukman of St. Louis County puts her trash in a blue bin out on the curb for Meridian Waste to pick up.
But she said whether a driver actually comes to get it all is a question she never knows the answer to.
"They will skip us for weeks on end, just our house and then they started skipping the whole cul-de-sac," she said.
That means sometimes weeks worth of trash can sit out in all sorts of weather, accumulating by the day until Meridian finally shows up.
"It's overflowing. It's stinky, especially in the humidity of St. Louis," Ukman said.
And when she tried to call and report the problem, she says her frustration only grows.
"You may not actually get a hold of anyone," Ukman said. "They will hang up on you. When you ask for a supervisor, they never transfer you. You could sit on hold for an hour and a half."
Other customers in the Sorrento Springs neighborhood near Ballwin told 5 On Your Side they've had similar and worse experiences with Meridian.
Danielle Myers said she once had to wait three weeks for her trash to get picked up.
"They show up like 50% of the time and take our garbage when they decide they want to," she said.
Brittany Schmitt echoed those same concerns.
"I don't know one resident in our subdivision who is satisfied with Meridian at all," she said.
Since January 2017, Meridian has had a contract with St. Louis County to provide garbage, recycling and yard waste services to roughly 20,000 customers over five years.
We are now halfway through the agreement, and county officials seem to have a severe case of buyer's remorse.
"We think the state that we're at right now is unacceptable. And we very much wish this is not where we were," said Spring Schmidt, the acting director of the St. Louis County Department of Public Health.
Through a public records request, the I-TEAM was able to get a scathing letter the county sent to Meridian on Friday, alerting the company to "repeated violations" of their contract.
Schmidt said the letter is the result of multiple previous attempts to get Meridian to comply with the terms of their agreement.
"When communication fails and the opportunity to work together, it does result in a sense of escalation. So we do find them to be in breach of the terms of the contract," Schmidt said.
The letter states that in the last two and a half years, the county has received 417 complaints directly related to Meridian's failure to provide timely and sufficient service.
More than 120 of those complaints, according to the letter, are from the last three months alone.
Schmidt said the majority of the complaints are tied to the same re-occurring problem.
"Missed pickups. Missed pickups. Missed pickups. Missed blocks in addition to streets and areas," she said.
But the county's letter also makes a stunning revelation about where some recyclable materials are apparently really going.
Through another public records request, the I-Team obtained several pieces of video Schmidt said is evidence of Meridian failing to properly process glass designated for recycling.
In fact, the county said they have evidence Meridian has not taken glass to a facility for processing since at least November 2018.
In one of the videos recorded by a female customer, you can hear the woman state that a Meridian driver just threw her recycling in with the trash.
Contract violations like that, the county's letter states, are why it's issued Meridian 12 citations over the last year. Those citations range from $500 to $1,000.
Since March 2019 alone, the county says Meridian has delivered truckloads of recyclables to a facility that does not recover glass.
For many customers, that means items they thought they were recycling to help the planet may have actually ended up in landfills.
"Yes, people signed up for single-stream recycling with the expectation that is what was going to happen. Not meeting that expectation is also an issue," Schmidt said.
Now, the county is stepping up its surveillance and enforcement of Meridian's performance and trying to get the company to recommit to improving.
"Riding it out is not acceptable. We don't want a minimum level of performance here and just swallow it for a few more years," Schmidt said.
But getting out of the contract doesn't seem like an option that's on the table right now.
Schmidt said that could drive up costs in the long run and lead to a disruption in service as the county scrambled to find a new provider from an emergency bid process.
"We don't want to risk consumers having to pay more for services they were contractually told they would have for five years," she said.
That means at least for another two and a half years, thousands of customers are stuck with Meridian Waste. But it's a deal some said is total garbage.
"We don't want to be stuck and tied into something that's not working for our district, our neighborhood," Myers said.
"If we're being told who our trash company is, they need to do a better job of finding that company and listening to us," Ukman said.
There was a period at the beginning of the contract where customers had the option of "opting out" of the Meridian deal, but Schmidt said that is no longer available.
St. Louis County said there have been so many complaints, they've had to reassign staff to man a special hotline.
That's why the county is seeking to recoup $30,000 from Meridian.
The number to call if you have complaints is 314-615-HAUL.
A spokeswoman for Meridian said the company had not received the county's letter yet, but questioned the content in at least one of the videos.
She said the company has paid 11 of the 12 citations and made a number of management changes to try and improve service.
She said the company maintains a near perfect success rate in St. Louis County.