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Recycling market crash hits county budget

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Staff

By Rich Fowler
Staff Writer

Thanks in part to its recycling programs, Orange County residents lead the state in waste reduction. They now throw away half of what they threw away in 1991, and things were going so well until recently that the county was making money by selling the materials it collected.

But when the recycling markets crashed last October amid the declining global economy, what was once a growing source of income for the county suddenly became a new expense.

In the last three years, Orange County has been steadily making more and more money from selling the materials it collects through its community recycling programs. In 2005-06, the county got $326,830 and by 2007-08 it was getting $518,895 for the recyclables it collects from rural residents, drop-off centers and businesses.

Now, instead of getting paid for the materials it collects, the county has to pay to have them hauled off to be recycled. After it’s processed, it’s usually sold on the market at a loss. For the last six months, the county has made $217,752, but a large part of that came from the three months when the market was at its peak.
Orange County Solid Waste planner Blair Pollock said the sudden change in the market has hit many places hard.
“We’re paying to recycle. Some communities have stopped recycling because they don’t want to bear the costs,” he said.

In a tight budget year, the focus is going to be on preserving services.
“We will essentially hit the wall like everyone else this year on our ability to provide services,” Pollock said. “Certainly no new services can come out of the current budget.”

Residents of Carrboro, Chapel Hill and Hillsboro aren’t affected by the changes in the recycling markets as much as rural residents because the county has a five-year contract with Waste Industries Inc. to handle curbside recycling in those towns.
Waste Industries charges the county a fixed fee per house, then sells the materials it collects. In 2007-08, the program cost the county $720,788. The county’s contract with Waste Industries runs through March 2011.

One more planned addition to the volume of recycling will come in March. Corrugated cardboard has already been banned from commercial trash, and on March 1, 2009 it will be banned from residential trash too.
So what can residents do?

“We really want people to focus on genuinely using less stuff,” Pollock said. “That’s the biggest paradigm shift for right now.”

Reducing the amount of stuff residents throw away or recycle can be as simple as:

• Composting organic waste.

• Choosing reusable products over disposable ones. Use a water bottle instead of buying bottled water and use rechargeable batteries instead of disposable ones.

• Using cloth instead of paper for things like napkins, dish cloths and grocery bags.

• Considering packaging when buying products, and buying products from companies or stores that take back their old containers, like egg cartons or milk bottles.

Another thing residents can do to save the county money is not bundle recycled materials in plastic bags when they dispose of them.

“Anything in a plastic bag is really nothing but costly and processing painful for us. Our guys try to open the bags, because we get penalized for lower quality of material,” Pollock said.

When will the markets for recycled materials get better? At a recent gathering of recycling industry members in Chapel Hill, nobody had any idea when prices would improve.

A recent report from the state Division of Waste Management said that the recycling markets should improve when the global economy recovers, but said that 2009 will be a tough year for selling recycled materials.

For more tips on reducing and reusing waste, check out the Environmental Protection Agency website at www.epa.gov/epawaste/conserve/rrr and for more information about community recycling, go to www.co.orange.nc.us/recycling

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