After 15 years of handling El Paso’s residential recycling service, Friedman Recycling has sold its El Paso and Albuquerque operations to Waste Connections, a national corporation that has more than 400 operations from coast to coast. The sale price is undisclosed, and the El Paso City Council will be asked to approve the assignment of the recycling contract with Friedman to Waste Connections. That item is on the council’s March 1 agenda for approval.
“We intend to do business as usual,” said Ellen Smyth, the city’s managing director of Sun Metro and Environmental Services. “They did not approach us at all until it was a done deal.” There is no reason, she said, why Waste Connections taking over Friedman’s contract will have any impact on the city’s recycling services, which has consisted of the city picking up recyclables in the blue bins and delivering them to Friedman’s site where they are separated for sale.
The city’s biggest problem with its recycling program, Smyth said, is the large amount of nonrecyclables that El Pasoans are putting in their blue bins and which Friedman has had to sort out and haul to the city’s solid waste dump near Clint – at a shared expense with the city. Every month, Morris Friedman said, his company handles 13,000 to 14,000 tons of recyclables for the city of El Paso. “The reason we feel comfortable with Waste Connections is because they’re a large company, but they operate as a small company,” Friedman said. “They have a very similar feel to the way we operated our business, and we feel strongly that they will continue to take care of our customers and our team members the way that we did.