A new proposal for an opt-in curbside recycling program came Friday with hard cost estimates and considerable sacrifices.

At a work session Friday morning, Ward 3 Alderman Jeffrey Rupp and Ward 2 Alderwoman Sandra Sistrunk presented a “bare bones” curbside recycling plan estimated to cost $136,900 per year to operate.

To fund it, it would need 800 households to sign up and agree to pay $15 per month, which was highlighted in the proposal as the target participation. If 1,000 signed up, the program could charge each $12 per month. For only 625 households, the monthly charge would be $20.

Rupp and Sistrunk, along with sanitation department director Christopher Smiley, crafted the proposal as part of an ongoing conversation to bring back curbside recycling after the city discontinued the service in 2020.

“Whether we support this idea or not, we really need the numbers if we’re going to talk about it,” Rupp told The Dispatch after the meeting. I think that number ($136,900) is realistic.”

The proposed program would be conducted by the sanitation department with existing equipment and include twice a month pickup – one exclusively for cardboard and one for aluminum, steel and paper. The program would not accept plastic or glass.

Sanitation would take the recycling directly to Waste Pro in Columbus, rather than have the company pick it up from Starkville. The separate collection days for certain materials would reduce the acceptance fee the city would pay Waste Pro, plus it would mitigate contamination fees.

Opt-in customers would have to pay a separate charge for a 64-gallon bin in which to put recycling at the roadside – which Sistrunk estimated would cost $55 each for the city to obtain before passing that on somehow to the customer.

“It’s manageable and bare bones,” Sistrunk told The Dispatch after the meeting. “It will ‘ouch’ us, but it is something we can do.”

The new opt-in proposal starkly contrasts with one proposed last month by Ward 5 Alderman Hamp Beatty, which he estimated would cost participants $6 per month and include recycling some plastics. His proposal did not nail down a cost estimate for the city to operate the program, however.

Beatty for several months has pushed unsuccessfully for months to bring back curbside recycling but was instrumental in 2021 establishing a drop-off site at the sanitation office for citizens to bring cardboard, aluminum, steel and paper.

“There is a very limited market for plastic,” Sistrunk said at Friday’s meeting, responding to pushback from Beatty over not including plastics for curbside recycling. “They cannot guarantee us our plastic will get recycled. They’ll pick it up. They’ll collect it, but … there’s a 70- to 80-percent chance it will not be recycled, that it will ultimately be bundled and taken to another landfill. So we will have paid an additional cost but not done anything to guarantee it will be recycled.”

But Beatty continued to push back on the price, arguing charging that much for an opt-in program was a “self-fulfilling prophecy” to kill the idea.

“We go to $15 a month, you cut out a whole class of people who won’t be able to afford to do curbside recycling,” he said. “… That’s the death nail of recycling.”

Instead, he pivoted to proposing a mandatory citywide program, which would add $1 to every household’s monthly sanitation bill. That would raise $144,000, he estimated, which would cover the cost of the most recent proposal.

Sistrunk and Mayor Lynn Spruill noted what they saw as two flaws in Beatty’s thinking. One, the proposal assumed sanitation would run a truck on two routes twice per month directly to participants’ homes. A mandatory program meant the truck would have to run citywide to all homes – which is four routes on regular garbage pickup days – at least doubling the charge. Sistrunk, however, noted running citywide curbside recycling would likely take a near $4 per month extra charge to cover costs.

Also, Sistrunk said the city’s sanitation rates are currently so low, the department has no working capital, forcing the city to borrow money any time it needs to buy a garbage truck. Adding curbside recycling, even as she and Rupp proposed, would cut into other services, like litter pickup, and she would rather see a rate increase bolster existing services.

I think there are some basic services we need to take a hard look at in terms of rate structure before we start adding things,” she said.

What’s next?

While Beatty said he now intends to put a measure before the board to fund a mandatory curbside recycling program, an about-face from his previous position that it needs to be opt-in, Sistrunk said she wants to put out a request for proposals for a private company to handle curbside recycling.

“It allows us to get in the business much more quickly and it doesn’t interrupt the current work going on at (the sanitation department),” she said.

Otherwise, a longer, as yet undetermined, process would ensue for gauging participation for a city-run opt-in program.

While Rupp and Sistrunk both said they would support the opt-in recycling program they presented Friday “if there was enough participation,” neither thought it would drum up that much public interest.

“I would sign up, but I just don’t detect a lot of appetite for it,” Rupp said. “I’m not getting swamped with calls from citizens asking for recycling.”

Spruill, too, believes drawing 800 participant households is unlikely, though she said she would support the new proposal if participation would fund it. She added, though, the city’s drop-off site is effective.

“It’s not that we aren’t recycling,” she said. “We just don’t do it curbside. At the drop-off site, there’s a much greater chance those things are actually getting recycled.”

Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.

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