A recent decision by China to stop accepting certain kinds of waste from the West could have a complex and costly ripple effect on cities like Santa Fe.
As the community prepared to hold annual Earth Day celebrations Saturday, largely aimed at encouraging practices such as recycling, county officials said changes overseas are creating major adjustments on the local recycling front.
The Chinese action has prompted a series of contract adjustments between the Santa Fe Solid Waste Management Agency and Friedman Recycling Cos., the Albuquerque firm that takes and markets Santa Fe’s mixed recyclables. The result: potentially higher fees for private waste haulers and increases to Santa Fe County residents, according to a memo from Public Works Director Michael Kelley to the County Commission.
The county, in a joint powers agreement with the Waste Management Agency, whose board includes county commissioners and a city councilor, operates the Caja del Rio Landfill, the Buckman Road Recycling and Transfer Station and nine smaller transfer stations “for sorting, baling and selling our recyclables,” said Neal Denton, a sustainability specialist with the county Public Works Department.
The waste management board on Thursday unanimously approved the latest amendment to the Friedman contract, which, in a worst-case scenario, would increase costs to the agency by somewhere between $540,000 and $720,000. The increase will be covered for the 2019 fiscal year by cash reserves, Executive Director Randall Kippenbrock said Friday.
“The agency will be looking at establishing a fee for recyclables,” Kippenbrock said. “It’s yet to be determined how we would set that fee.” He added that any any recycling fees would be imposed on city and county governments and major private haulers.
In an email, Denton cautioned it’s unknown what kind of long-term fiscal impact there will be on city, county and private haulers due to the increasing costs of shipping materials to the Albuquerque firm.
In 2017, China informed the World Trade Organization it would no longer accept 24 kinds of waste from Western nations, a move that took effect at the beginning of 2018. The Chinese refused to take the recyclables because “they were getting a lot of contamination, things that were not supposed to be in the bale whether it was food, liquids that contaminated the paper or just something that wasn’t supposed to be in there,” Denton said.
The standard established by the Chinese mandated that recyclables contain no more than 0.3 percent contamination, while the previous standard was between 3 percent and 5 percent, Denton said. “That standard was widely considered impossible to meet, so it ended up being a de facto ban on anything coming in.”

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