“What’s old is new again,” Pocatello cuts ribbon on newly renovated recycling center
Chris Nestman
With the floors clean, the paint dry, and the ribbon cut, Pocatello’s city-owned recycling center is officially fully operational.
It’s a far cry from what at one point threatened to become a shuttered and locked building. Last summer, Western Recycling/Republic Services had announced it was no longer financially feasible to do recycling with the city and would be leaving town.
“We were told it was going to close,” said Tom Kirkman, Pocatello’s Public Works Director. “And so we had to make a decision of whether or not we were going to stop recycling or going to purchase facility and keep it moving.”
With a recycling rate of more than 70 percent among its citizens, cancelling recycling all together did not seem like a valid option. It meant the city would have to buy the facility and its associated monthly losses.
“So what we’ve done, once we purchased this facility, we were able to broker a lot of our own materials. Now. within the first month, we dropped our operating costs from about $20,000 a month, down to under $5,000 a month” said Kirkman.
Losing less than $5,000 a month for recycling is good by national standards for a city of its size, but some like Kirkman still saw opportunities to drop that rate even lower.
“[In] June, we started a commercial curbside cardboard route and we were able to actually, send that straight to a paper mill and get paid,” said Kirkman. “So it lowered the total out the door costs by by quite a bit.”
Both Kirkman and Pocatello’s mayor Brian Blad said the city now makes a small profit on recycling, something that’s very rare in today’s market.
“I think the ultimate goal was to keep recycling available to our citizens, and we’ve been able to do that,” said Pocatello Mayor Brian Blad. “Now the ultimate goal is to watch it continue to pay for itself. Ideally, it won’t cost our citizens anything to recycle.”
While the new facility is fully operational and operating efficiently, sanitation leaders and workers ask Pocatellans to review the standards of what’s recyclable and what’s not. Landfill trash in the recycling system slows it down and ultimately costs taxpayers more money.
A link to what’s allowed in the city’s blue bins can be found HERE.