FAIRHOPE – City Council members said they don’t like a proposed contract that calls for Fairhope to pay $15 a ton to recycle material that the city is now being paid $5 to have processed.
Fairhope takes recyclables to a center operated by the Emerald Coast Utility Authority in Escambia County, Fla. The facility is the only site in the area that takes recyclables, Richard Johnson, Fairhope Public Works director, said.
For the last three years, the charge for the material has depended on the price of recyclables. If the recyclables are in demand, Fairhope is paid. If the price is low, the city pays the ECUA, Johnson told City Council members at a June 25 work session.
“The worst it got for us, at one point in time we were paying $45 a ton for them to process recyclables,” Johnson said. “Come January of this year, we got to zero, meaning that we didn’t pay them and they didn’t pay us. Then, shortly after that, we got to $2 in our favor and right now, it’s $5 in our favor.”
The current contract between Fairhope and ECUA expires Sept. 30. The Florida authority has proposed a new contract in which Fairhope would pay a flat rate of $15 a ton, Johnson said.
Council President Jack Burrell said the city should attempt to negotiate the contract
“I think that we can negotiate with them and maybe find a middle ground and say we stick with the current arrangement or be net-neutral zero costs, but going from being paid $5 to paying $15 just like that, that doesn’t make good business sense to me,” Burrell said.
Councilman Jimmy Conyers also said Fairhope should work to get a better deal.
“I don’t like the deal and I’m not suggesting we take it,” Conyers said. “I definitely think we should go back to them with something, but that does ebb and flow, the valuation of it.”
Dale Linder, city sanitation supervisor, said Fairhope and other Baldwin municipalities do not have other facilities that will take recyclables. At one time, Baldwin County had four recycling vendors, but the last one closed more than eight years ago, he said.
He said ECUA primarily works with Florida cities and counties.
“They operate basically with Pensacola, Escambia County, Santa Rosa County,” Linder told council members. “That’s their main business. We’re just a small part. And, as we contribute our tonnage to their processing, it doesn’t have a big impact on their profitability, so they’re basically allowing us to use their facility.”
Linder said costs have changed in recent years. The center once paid $60 a ton for mixed paper. Facilities now charge $5 a ton to take the same material. Cardboard was once worth $145 a ton. That price is now $20.
Johnson said there is no other vendor who will take Fairhope recyclables at this time.
“Right now, we really only have one sole source for a buyer of mixed recycles and that is ECUA,” Johnson said. “There is no doubt that they have invested a lot into their operation. They had to shut down following Sally and Zeta, but they quickly got it back up and running. I think we were only out for two weeks.”
Johnson said Baldwin County is working to build a recycling facility of its own, but he did not know when that center would open.
“At this point in time, if we had a really good Plan B to offer you, we would offer it, but this is really the only buyer that we have a relationship with that will buy our mixed recycles,” Johnson said.
Baldwin County commissioners voted Tuesday, July 6, to approve using $3.5 million in American Rescue Plan Act COVID-19 relief funding to move forward with construction of a recycling center at the Magnolia Landfill. Officials said that work on that project would take an estimated 18 months to complete.
Johnson said recycling continues to be popular with residents and officials do not want to stop the practice.
“I know that during our recent recycle shutdown during the response to Hurricane Sally, for every one call we had about debris, we had at least three calls about when are you going to pick up my recycling again,” Johnson said.
