CLEVELAND HEIGHTS, Ohio — Things are looking up — potentially way up — in the recycling market for the city, with a new deal inked Monday (Sept. 19) through the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District.
Introduced earlier by Mayor Kahlil Seren, City Council approved a two-year contract with Waste Management of Ohio that takes effect next month. The new contract not only allows additional materials to enter the recycling stream, but also puts some money back into the city coffers for a change.
“For some things that we are not able to recycle under our current contract, we will be able to very soon,” Councilwoman and Municipal Services Committee chair Josie Moore announced.
“We can also incentivize really good habits as a city, not only through strong and even more environmentally sustainable recycling.”
For starters, polypropylene — a plastic used in tubs for butter and whipped toppings, fruit and yogurt cups, and sour cream containers — will be soon allowed, as will single-use plastic cups from McDonald’s and Starbucks.
Solo brand-name cups remain on the “wish-cycling” list of contraband, although there is a move afoot toward aluminum cups that could be recycled, noted county Solid Waste District Executive Director Beth Biggins-Ramer, who attended Monday’s council meeting.
“The recycling market has recovered, with a great deal of domestic development” in the wake of Asian markets shutting down imports around 2018 due to high levels of contamination, Biggins-Ramer said.
In 2021, Cleveland Heights collected 1,626 tons of recyclables, for which the city paid $73 per ton for processing at the Kimble Company’s “material recovery facility” in Twinsburg — a total cost of over $118,000. The city’s contract with Kimble expires Sept. 30.
Enter Waste Management, which will be offering a graduated scale of incentives for “clean” recyclables — the cleaner, the better:
— For levels of contamination between 31 and 40 percent, Cleveland Heights will make $9.44 per ton
— When contamination gets reduced to the 21 to 30 percent range, the city gets back $19.44 a ton
— Should contamination levels fall below the 20 percent mark, the city stands to make $29.44 on the ton
City officials remain optimistic that tonnage will increase now that automated curbside recycling started in April, with blue carts replacing the old blue bags that used to be stacked on tree lawns.
Asked what the city gets if contamination levels in its recyclables exceed 40 percent, Biggins-Ramer said that likely won’t happen, since Cleveland Heights has its own transfer station at the City Public Works Garage.
That grandfathered asset allows the city to weed out obvious non-recyclable contaminants from the good stuff that will be transported to Waste Management’s MRF in Akron — at least for now.
“Waste Management had a facility in Oakwood Village that they outgrew in recent years,” Biggins-Ramer said, resulting in the move further away to Akron. “But they are expanding the Oakwood MRF and could be reopening in the first or second quarter of 2023.”
That not only cuts the trip down, it also puts the facility back in Cuyahoga County.
Glass recycling
There will also be a “new end-market” for glass that is collected for recycling — it will actually be recycled as glass for containers and other uses, rather than being crushed and used as a road base aggregate.
Through the motto of “reduce, reuse, recycle,” the ground-up glass roadway filler was an allowable use by Kimble as a “reduction activity.”
Biggins-Ramer noted that another hauler does the same thing, and the applicable roads were generally confined to the landfills themselves.
This practice already caused some stir in Shaker Heights, where council is expected to sign on to the new Waste Management contract — with two one-year options to extend.
Shaker officials noted earlier that in the meantime, residents could drop off their clean glass recyclables at The Dealership on Lee Road, the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Cleveland on Shaker Boulevard and the Nature Center at Shaker Lakes on South Park Boulevard, as well as at Rising Star and Scorpacciata Pizza on Lee Road in Cleveland Heights.
Those recyclables are then picked up by Repeat Glass, which processes them for reuse as glass products, not for road paving purposes.
Shaker Heights Public Works Director Patti Speese and Sustainability Coordinator Michael Peters informed council in July that the county Solid Waste District was working on a new contract for the two cities.
Shaker Heights has been paying about $112,000 a year to have its recyclables processed.
Back in Cleveland Heights, Moore noted that an ongoing baseline data and public education process should help the city lower its percentage of contamination — and make more money on its recyclables.
Also thanking Cleveland Heights Public Works Director Collette Clinkscale, Biggins-Ramer added that the new system requires an audit on recyclables every year, providing “definitive counts and total transparency” showing residents the environmental strides that can be made.
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