Five Year Solid Waste Plan Reveals Single-Stream Recycling Not Meeting Critical Goals
BETWEEN 2010 AND 2012, Berkeley, California, Walpole, Massachusetts, Auburn, Maine, and Concord, New Hampshire, among other U.S. cities voted not to adopt single-stream recycling, or abandoned single-stream recycling, according to a 2012 study by the Container Recycling Institute.
Ottawa and Toronto, Canada both decided against single-stream recycling, as well, after factoring in environmental and financial costs.
One town in England discontinued single-stream recycling and saw a 20 percent increase in landfill diversions in just two years.
Single-stream recycling was sold to Ann Arbor residents as a “sure thing” by Ann Arbor city staffers, politicos and local environmentalists, including the Ann Arbor Ecology Center and its long-time director Michael Garfield.
Ann Arbor residents were told single-stream recycling would double collections (it didn’t) and save taxpayers millions over the next 10 years (revenues from the sale of single-stream baled materials have dropped).
According to the Five-year Solid Waste Plan recently adopted by City Council, a plan shaped by the same city staffers and Environmental Commission members who pushed the multi-million dollar single-stream recycling plan, the number of tons of material sent to the city’s landfill has risen significantly since 2010.
In addition, single-family diversion rates remain stalled at 50 percent, where they were in 2006, when residents paid just half of what they pay now for solid waste service.
Most importantly, say some local environmentalists and residents, the new 5 Year Solid Waste Plan reveals the city’s overall diversion rate plummeted from 40 percent in 2009 to 30 percent in 2012.
Susan V. Collins heads the Container Recycling Institute. She explains who pushes single-stream recycling and why: “Single-stream was created by the waste management sector in an effort to reduce their high collection costs.”
In July of 2011, it was revealed that single-stream collections projections made by consulting company RRS, which employs long-time Ann Arbor Environmental Commissioner David Stead, were off by some 40 percent. Tom McMurtrie, Solid Waste Coordinator for the City of Ann Arbor told the media, “the actual tonnage collected is still a 20 percent increase over the number of tons that were collected in the previous year with two-stream recycling.”
In 2002, shortly after Mayor John Hieftje took office, officials announced a goal of diverting 60 percent of solid waste collected from the landfill. Eleven years and almost $100,000,000 million solid waste tax dollars later, the city’s most recent Five Year Solid Waste Plan “Waste Less” reveals, “The city’s (2002) diversion goal of 60 percent has not yet been reached, as the single-family diversion rate remains around 50 percent.” That diversion rate has remained at 50 percent since 2006, with minor ups and downs.
There is one area where there has been a dramatic increase with respect to recycling: the amount of money taxpayers spend on our solid waste millage, and the amount spent to pay Recycle Ann Arbor to haul recyclables. That amount has skyrocked since 2004, when the City of Ann Arbor granted the non-profit a 10-year contract.
That 2004 contract called for the City to pay Recycle Ann Arbor $766,000, according to minutes from the December 15, 2003 City Council meeting. Ann Arbor taxpayers pay for the trucks, fuel, and repairs of Recycle Ann’s Arbor’s collection vehicles.
Look again at the chart, above, at the number of tons recycled. In 2012, taxpayers purchased new trucks for Recycle Ann Arbor to use. By 2008, the cost to taxpayers to have Recycle Ann Arbor haul virtually the same number of tons of material to the MRF that the company hauled in 2003, had risen from $766,000 to a whopping $1.6 million dollars. City Council approved the payment of $1.8 million dollars to Recycle Ann Arbor for fiscal year 2010.
While Ann Arbor’s single-family diversion rate remains stalled at 50 percent, cities large and small have moved well past that (now modest) goal. In 2011, Seattle’s diversion rate for single-family homes topped 70 percent.
In Boulder, the single-family diversion rate is 60 percent. San Francisco diverts 80 percent of all of its waste from its landfills. To be fair, a diversion rate above 40 percent is laudable. However, the drop in total diversion to 30 percent puts Ann Arbor at the bottom of the recycling food chain.
Knoxville, Tennessee has a total diversion rate of 67 percent, and cities in the south don’t push recycling nearly as aggressively as cities in the Greal Lakes region.
To rub salt in some wound somewhere, Ohio State University reports that its football stadium, a venue that seats 105,000, people diverts 98 percent of the waste produced from local landfills.
[…] in the state. What is surprising to many is that the city’s 40-year-old recycling program is embroiled in controversy and allegations of financial misdeeds, as uncovered by A2Politico, an independent investigative […]
Perfect timing for an obsessive article on the topic and how timely…..but whoa whoa whoa! Chill, those bottles are worth something to everybody. I do prefer 2 streams.
Oops…that should read hopping *mad* LOL.
Single stream recycling is like candy, it looks good and it’s too tempting to resist. In the end however it’s going to rot your teeth. I was disappointed when we switched over in 2010 and after reading this I am hopping made. They want a new building? We should pay for garbage collection? Good grief Ann Arbor what will it take before voters rise up and throw all of these charlatans out of office? I voted against the millages, and will vote against any candidate for City Council who tries to tell me that charging for garbage collection will increase recycling. It would be a tax increase. For heaven’s sake people will just do what they do now – throw everything into the recycling container.
@Jane you hit the nail right on the head. Slapping on fees for services is a tax increase. The Solid Waste Dept. doesn’t need anymore money. In fact, the dept. has a surplus each year that they hide away until just the right outlandish idea (switch to single-stream!) or project (let’s build a new recovery facility!) pops up. That money could and IMHO should be returned to taxpayers. Then again, I am also of the opinion that Tom McMurtrie should have been fired for his part in the single-stream debacle. Instead, he was allowed to point fingers. The City Administrator needs to get a spine and hold his staff accountable.
I think using tonnage gives an inflated value to the recycling program. Most of the materials I recycle, measured by weight are glass. I do not buy many products in metal cans and glass is much heavier than plastic.
I suspect all of the glass is considered to be recycled, but none is in the sense of being reused in a product. It is sorted, cleaned, crushed, and then sent to the Westland landfill. There it may be used for road beds or drainage but the city does receive any payment.
I think this is what most people would consider recycling, yet it is a large percentage of the AA program by weight.
@Glenn, our city contributes less than 20 percent of the materials processed at our recovery facility. We are subsidizing recycling for other communities, and have paid tens of millions to create a large program where one wasn’t needed. Expanding recycling keeps RAA in business and Tom McMutrie as one of the highest paid Ann Arbor city staffers. It does not, however, benefit our community ecologically or financially. The mantra is REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE. In Ann Arbor, it’s RECYCLE, REYCLE SOME MORE, EXPAND RECYCLING. What if we plowed $8M into more reuse centers, and partnered with U of M to reduce its waste (17,500 tons, 1.5 times the total amount Ann Arbor recycled)? U of M, however, is setting up its own parallel recycling system, I think.