YPSILANTI, MI - Come January, Ypsilanti residents can again pitch glass bottles and jars into their curbside bins as a change in where the city takes recycling will allow a return to collection of some materials discontinued more than two years ago.
On Tuesday, Dec. 7, Ypsilanti’s City Council voted unanimously to authorize an agreement between the city and Recycle Ann Arbor, a 44-year-old nonprofit that this year completed upgrades to a transform a dormant recycling plant in Pittsfield Township into a state-of-the-art facility.
The Materials Recovery Facility at 4150 Platt Road, owned by the City of Ann Arbor, shut down amid safety concerns in 2016. But it’s back up and running this year thanks to new, cutting-edge machinery installed in the past year.
That means Ypsilanti’s recycling will only have to travel seven miles, instead of the current 29-mile journey to the Western Washtenaw Recycling Authority’s facility in Chelsea. That will cut down on fuel costs, vehicle rental fees and emissions, according to a Ypsilanti city memo.
Those savings are offset by a $10 bump in cost per ton to accept materials at the Ann Arbor plant, but in total Ypsilanti city staff estimate the switch will save the city about $860 a year, though those figures alone don’t account for efficiency savings, the memo states
Perhaps more importantly for residents, using the new recycling plant will mean an expansion of the kinds of items the city will collect through its curbside program. Notably, the city will again accept glass containers of all colors.
Ypsilanti stopped picking up milk cartons, juice boxes and glass in its single-stream system in 2019 after its recycling provider said glass containers were breaking inside bins, making the material difficult to separate from other materials.
Ypsilanti Department of Public Services Director Ron Akers told city leaders the switch, which is being implemented in January, will slightly restrict the kinds of plastics the curbside program can accept, though he expects that impact on residents to be minimal.
The new program will take clean plastic bottles, jars and containers of the PET (#1), HDPE (#2) and PP (#5) varieties, according to the agreement. The current plastics pickup program takes those plastics in addition to plastics marked with numbers 4, 6 and 7
An audit showed plastics make up about 10% of what the city’s curbside program collects, Akers said, adding the plastics from the discontinued group were less than a quarter of a percent.
The changes mean some residents likely can stop hauling glass to drop-off stations. After the decision to halt collection of the material in 2019, Ypsilanti officials offered residents a pass to Recycle Ann Arbor’s drop-off station, which usually charges an entry fee.
Dozens of communities across the country have suspended curbside glass collection, the nonprofit recycler says in an article on its website, blaming a “recycling industry that’s been damaged by corporate greenwashing, bad public policy, and inadequate consumer education.”
Most of the glass Recycle Ann Arbor collects will be transformed back into new glass bottles, rather than be used as landfill cover or some other aggregate material, its CEO Bryan Ukena previously said.
The nonprofit partners with a unique glass processing plant in Ohio that can purify broken and mixed glass, allowing the materials to be truly recycled, according to Recycle Ann Arbor.
Ypsilanti residents looking for more specifics can watch out for updated recycling rules on the city’s website, Akers said, before the program kicks off in the new year.