OBERLIN — After being halted for months by the pandemic, recycling is back up and running today in the city of Oberlin — though not without serious sacrifices.
City Council cast an emergency vote Monday to make significant cuts to its recycling efforts. The program is no longer mandatory for all residents, instead downgraded to a voluntary, subscription-based service that residents can opt into for free.
Collections will go biweekly and the pickup schedule will shift.
And perhaps most painful for a city that prides itself on being green, glass and higher-numbered plastics won't be accepted anymore. They'll have to go in the trash.
"The main driver for all of these changes is money," Public Works Director Jeff Baumann said. "It currently costs about four times as much to recycle as to put stuff in the landfill."
About a quarter of what the city takes to Republic Services to be "recycled" is glass, he said. But it's not turned into new bottles, as residents might imagine.
Instead, the glass is processed for use in roads inside the New Russia Township landfill, Baumann said, and Oberlin pays up to $40,000 per year for the service.
Republic has stable markets for No. 1 and No. 2 plastics, but not for No. 3 and up, he said. That leads to a lot of confusion over which plastics can be recycled and which must go in the garbage.
Most residents end up recycling the wrong kinds of plastics, according to Baumann, which drives up costs because Oberlin is charged a $75 per ton surcharge when more than 15 percent of what's collected is "contaminated."
Council's vote Monday comes after more than a year of recycling cost hikes.
In 2018, China implemented its "National Sword" policy and banned most paper and plastics that it had previously recycled. That eliminated a key market for U.S. recycling materials, and drove up domestic costs.
In April 2019, Republic more than doubled what it charged the city for recycling, bumping the fee from $27.50 to $57.20 per ton. The increases kept rolling until it hit $100 per ton at the start of 2020, Baumann said.
That sent Oberlin's recycling costs spiraling upward from $24,000 per year to $120,000.
Now well-meaning residents of Oberlin will have to make a decision: Scrap glass and plastics or find another way to recycle them.
Council President Linda Slocum said that years ago, Republic's predecessor, BFI, had bins at its Oberlin-Elyria Road facility where residents could drop off recyclables. Those are long gone, Baumann said.
The Lorain County Collection Center at 540 South Abbe Road in Elyria still collects both glass and higher-numbered plastics, but Baumann predicted it will soon stop for the same reasons that have forced Oberlin's hand.
