EARTH SAVERS

Watch out. Something has changed… I’ve had their service for three years, it was great until this last year… First, there’s no way to get ahold of anyone on the phone, customer support is done through email only through “tickets”. When we had issues getting added service and their billing, I had to argue with someone over email who literally replied “why you mad?” when I was overcharged and they debited my account early. Then, a few months later, when asking to cancel my service, they ended my service early and took the remainder of the money I paid for the quarter pointing to a clause in their agreement that says if I cancel I forfeit any money paid for the quarter. My intention was to cancel at the end of the quarter, and when explaining this, they ignored me, canceled the service 2 months early, and took my money. DO NOT START SERVICE with these yahoos.

Well.

However, the reason I'm granting the "C" grade is the dramatic decrease in service from 2008 to 2009. We used to get emails and newsletters reminding us of pickup dates; that stopped. Shortly before we cancelled service we finally found out we were supposed to be on a regular pickup (1st and 3rd Mondays?) but I don't remember being apprised of that. I'd have to log on to their website every month to get pickup dates, and those were only updated for the current month - so I'd have to remember to get the dates every month. While Earthsavers does show up on the scheduled day, they sometimes delay scheduled pickups without much notice - we only got one pickup in six (!) weeks, from late November 2009 to early January 2010. Why on earth did they build in delays in December, when people have more waste than any other month?! I emailed to find out what was going on - after our regular date was skipped, or so I thought - and was told they'd changed the billing schedule and baked a December vacation for their employees into the pickup schedule. Again, this all went down without much notice - about ten days, which is a pain when you're having to calculate and re-calculate what days they're even supposed to be there to begin with. We routinely received $5 "overage" charges for excess boxes and what have you. A.) We didn't even have the largest recycling container size, B.) Cardboard is bulky. Good luck getting much else into your container unless you're willing to slice and dice boxes into very small chunks in order to avoid the overage fees. The last straw was when we were recently only given 3 days' notice to update credit card information or face a $40 re-start fee. This has happened before - when they put their customer information online we were only given three days to sign up. I tried to call Earthsavers' office to discuss this with them, but they've gone to voice mail only. I'm not paying nearly $30 a month for something I can do myself (hauling my recycling to a local center) to receive this level of service. I finally cancelled our Earthsavers account and will go back to taking materials to the local center. It's a shame this business doesn't do more to encourage people in the General Services District to recycle, since we're not receiving recycling pickup service from our local government.

see above story. They were OK until they got a big contract with Metro.

Fantastic service for those of us that can't get to the recycling center on a regular basis. Bobby and his staff are exceptionally friendly, thorough and punctual. The email reminders are especially helpful.