As recycling costs rise and foreign markets for used paper and plastics dry up, Fruitland Park could join the growing number of cities that are abandoning their traditional recycling programs and looking to turn their scrap into energy instead.
At a budget workshop Tuesday, city commissioners signaled their interest in renegotiating the city’s contract with Waste Management to eliminate recycling, which would save the city money and help offset an anticipated increase in trash collection rates.
“I’ve got no objection whatsoever,” said Commissioner John Gunther. “It means not having to put two carts in the driveway.”
Doug McCoy, a district manager at Waste Management, offered city officials a three-month contract extension, giving them until the end of the year to consider the idea and sell it to residents. The contract would otherwise have been up on Sept. 30.
Under a scenario outlined in its contract renewal proposal, Waste Management would take the city’s recyclables to the Covanta waste-to-energy incinerator in Okahumpka — where the city’s trash already goes — instead of hauling it to the company’s recycling facility in Tampa.
Sending everything to a single facility to burn would eliminate the need to transport materials to different locations, officials said.
“There’s no practicality for the city to have a separate pickup for recycling. That adds to the cost of the contract,” said City Manager Gary La Venia.
Another advantage of the plan is that it would increase the amount of available bin space for trash, since residents would no longer have to keep recyclables separate.
“Residents could spread it out between the trash and recycling containers. The only thing we’d be eliminating is the extra truck for recyclables,” McCoy said.
A major factor in the rising cost of recycling and the reduced demand abroad is the large amount of garbage that often ends up in recycle bins. China, once the world’s leading importer of U.S. recyclables, has dramatically restricted the percentage of trash it allows in shipments of recyclable materials. While a 15 percent contamination rate was once acceptable, that is no longer the case.
“What’s happened over the years is that the supply has outstripped demand, and buyers of recyclables are accepting only very small amounts of contamination. China wants less than 1 percent, so there’s much more processing costs associated with that,” McCoy told commissioners.
The Villages portion of Fruitland Park, which has its own waste collection contract separate from the city, ended its recycling program last year. Wildwood, Lady Lake and Mount Dora also have stopped traditional recycling.