Henderson’s recycling program is a failure.
It doesn’t take a consultant or any other pseudo-expert to see the truth in that statement. Three years after a popular uprising of fewer than two dozen people compelled the City Council to give recycling a second chance, participation is as bad as ever. Public Works Director James Morgan says 42 percent to 43 percent of city households manage to put that green bin by the roadside at least once a month, and, in a sign of indifference as much as capability, only 19 homes have made special arrangements with Morgan’s staff to put out the recycling for them.
As part of the program’s extension in 2002 the City Council enacted a $2-a-month fee in the sanitation charge to pay for its recycling contract with Waste Industries. That fee doesn’t cover the $142,000 Waste Industries wants in return for collecting recyclable goods in the year beginning July 1, but it’s close enough to consider a decision on recycling to be revenue-neutral from the city government’s perspective.
In other words, unless the council decides to cancel the program but keep the monthly fee, the city’s bottom line won’t change; for those of us at home in Henderson, we’re looking at $24 per year per household, roughly one night out at the movies for a couple.
That amount won’t break anyone. And because the cost of the recycling contract is far less than 1 percent of the city budget, it alone won’t determine whether Henderson regains its fiscal footing.
Morgan has proposed abolishing the program. His reason is simple: The program isn’t worth what it costs. In his view, a majority of city residents are voting against the program by not participating. And those who do participate will recycle regardless of whether the city picks up their glass, aluminum, plastic and newspaper.
City Council member Elissa Yount led the charge against Morgan’s idea at a budget session April 7, and in a memo of fund-balance-building overhauls she has floated, she argues that recycling is one of the few city programs that should be off-limits to budget cutters.
Yount makes a compelling argument for the program. We all have a responsibility to future generations to conserve where we can, including landfills. As Yount asked several times, what happens when the landfills are full? And what kind of message do we send to our children and the rest of the world if we give up on recycling?
Yount is right in principle. We must conserve this world’s limited resources and move beyond a disposable society. Recycling saves what we want and avoids more of what we don’t want: waste piling up in landfills. Recycling isn’t an option; it’s a necessity. But her arguments apply to recycling in general, not to Henderson’s program in particular.
Morgan is right in practice. This recycling program simply doesn’t work. People didn’t participate enough before the City Council specified that $2 from every monthly sanitation bill would go to recycling, and they don’t participate enough knowing that they’re paying for the program. Most people don’t seem to care; those who do will take their recycling to one of Vance County’s manned convenience sites if necessary.
So we have a situation where we’re doing the right thing in Henderson, running a recycling program, but it’s disastrously unsuccessful. In our view, the status quo is not an option. Instead, Henderson has two choices: Abolish curbside recycling, or expand it.
We agree with Morgan that almost all of the 42 percent of Henderson homes that now use curbside recycling would recycle even without curbside pickup. Those people (we’re among them) are true believers in recycling and are willing to drive a few miles to do it.
There’s another group in Henderson that wouldn’t recycle even if gnomes popped up to collect every can, bottle and piece of paper as soon as it was used. There’s probably no hope of reaching that group.
But roughly half the city falls into a third group: people who accept and even appreciate recycling, as long as it’s not too difficult.
The current program cannot reach that group. Yes, our recycling program keeps things simple by throwing all recyclable goods in one bin, rather than forcing people to split the cans from the paper and the green glass from the clear. Almost everything else, however, discourages participation. First, once every two weeks isn’t often enough for the recycling truck to come around. It’s too easy to forget whether this week is the right week, and it’s too hard to cram even two weeks’ worth of stuff into that bin, let alone the load that accumulates if you miss a recycling day. Just the newspapers that pile up in two weeks will fill the bin.
Once you miss one recycling pickup, the frustration sets in. Now it’s even harder to remember when the next pickup is, and you can’t fit everything in the bin anyway. So you have to choose whether to throw the overflow away, to find some additional, potentially messy storage, or to make a trip to a manned convenience site — thus defeating the purpose of curbside pickup.
Many people put their recycling out every week to avoid missing the correct pickup day.
The lousy service we get from Waste Industries complicates matters. We never know whether the truck will come on the appointed day. Even if it does, we don’t know what time. If it’s windy, the recyclable goods tend to wind up scattered around the neighborhood and not in the truck. If it’s raining, the newspapers become an unholy mess as they sit outside for days, which they do because we can’t be sure whether the Waste Industries truck is late or isn’t coming until next week.
All of which is a long-winded way to say that the city should not renew the Waste Industries contract as it stands. Either we should eliminate curbside recycling altogether and urge people to do their recycling at the county sites on Brodie Road, Warrenton Road and N.C. 39, or we should up the ante. At a minimum, the pickups must be weekly. And the City Council should seriously discuss mandating participation, with fines possible for those who insist on throwing everything in the garbage.
We’re not excited by the prospect of doubling the monthly recycling charge to $4 to cover weekly collection. And we hate the idea of digging through people’s garbage for a stray Coke can or scrap of The Daily Dispatch. But those are the kinds of steps Henderson will have to take to make curbside recycling work. The only reasonable alternative is to follow Morgan’s recommendation, abolish the program and hope for the best.