After years of hemorrhaging money and months of deliberating new terms, cities are pulling out of the Weber County transfer station’s recycling program. Those municipalities mostly mobilized due to a process that would have sent curbside recyclable waste to the landfill for four to six weeks. It was a sloppy concession meant to generate a cleaner recycling contract. But city officials felt it ran afoul of taxpayers’ priorities.
“Recycling is too important to our citizens for them not to have it for any length of time,” said Jay Lowder of Ogden City Public Services. In 2011, Weber County commissioners signed a five-year contract with Alpine-based Recycling Waste Solutions, or RWS. The company transported recycled materials from the transfer station to California after county workers assembled and bailed the material.
It also left the county holding much of the risk, but the recycling world looked bright. RWS was offering $80 a ton for recyclables, compared to the $5 per ton the county was getting back then. “I think initially the contract looked attractive. The recycling market looked robust for the long term,” said Kevin McLeod, assistant director of community and economic development in Weber County. “Frankly, I don’t think there was enough thought or consideration … had they looked at the potential of a market turn, they would’ve probably not entered into that contract.”
That’s because the market for recyclables is volatile, largely intertwined with oil prices and global demand for commodities. Regardless of how much cash RWS returned after trucking materials out of Weber County, the county was stuck paying high operation costs. Not long after the ink had dried on the RWS contract, the market took a nosedive. The transfer station has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars every year since, mostly due to its flawed recycling contract.
The Standard-Examiner attempted to contact representatives with RWS, but calls were not returned as of Friday afternoon.
County officials worked to clean up the transfer station’s bottom line by finding a new contractor that absorbed more of the market’s volatility. But officials couldn’t iron out the new contract details before the existing contract expired. That left them with a four-week period where recyclables would need to temporarily be sent to the landfill.
Most municipalities opted to abandon the county transfer station and forge their own agreement with Ogden-based Recycled Earth, which offered to take the recycling for free. “I’m very excited about it. I think most of the cities seem excited about it,” said Washington Terrace Mayor Mark Allen.
That’s great news for Recycled Earth, but the move came as a blow to Alex Bearnson of Revolve, a recycling facility set to open in Cache Valley next month. Revolve was supposed to begin handling the county’s recycling this year. “I don’t blame the cities at all,” Bearnson said. “But we go through this (proposal) process, we offer them all this stuff — I feel like we got stabbed in the back.”
To read the full story, visit http://www.standard.net/Environment/2017/03/25/Cities-bailing-on-Weber-County-recycling-program.html.