Metro’s garbage policies may be pulling $2 million from citizen pockets to subsidize corporate garbage collection, according to two vigilante recycling processors.
Eric Wentland and Terrell Garrett of independent contractor Greenway Recycling say that one of Metro’s waste processing policies is unfair to the private households — and to their business.
Wentland and Garrett spoke at the Thursday, March 15 Metro Council hearing regarding Metro’s practice of combining the prices two different kinds of garbage: “wet” waste and “dry” waste. The hearing in question is meant to rubber stamp the suggested pricing for consumers dropping off waste, and the pricing is set to take effect in July.
According to Tim Collier, Metro director of finance and regulatory services, wet waste is also called “the goo.” It’s your common kitchen garbage: banana peels, coffee grounds, and other nasty stuff. It’s too icky to make workers handle it, so it doesn’t go through a process to find recyclable materials.
Dry waste, on the other hand, is typically construction debris, which go through a recycling process to get useable materials before sending the rest to the landfill.
According to Metro documents, it costs Metro $91.58 per ton to process wet garbage and $106.79 per ton to process dry garbage. That’s because the recycling and recovery tools used to process dry trash requires more (and more expensive) manual labor than needed to process wet trash.
But Metro plans on charging a combined rate of $97.45 per ton starting July 1, 2018 for both wet and dry loads. Metro has historically charged a combined price (which rises each year and is voted on) but the Greenway guys are hoping to change that.
Garrett, the owner of Greenway, argues that charging the public the same price for both types of waste will damage Metro’s competitors, like Greenway.
Garrett said that Metro’s move also unfairly impacts private homeowners and renters, since most dry waste (the costlier kind) comes from businesses. Households, then, are paying more to subsidize the costlier trash coming from businesses. Garrett says that kind of inequity goes against Metro’s own charter.
Garrett says that the public is essentially spending an extra $2 million per year because of the the combined pricing. Collier says it’s more like $1.8 million, “which equates to about 30 cents a month to a resident.”
Pricing is set that way, Collier argues, because it’s very easy for companies to turn a dry load into a wet load to get that cheaper price, which would increase the burden on landfills.
“I’m not sure that Mr. Wentland and Mr. Garrett and I see eye to eye on all these things,” he says. “We’re trying to ensure is that we don’t incentivize anybody to turn a dry load into wet because then you can’t sort it or recover it, and if you have that big of a price difference then that could potentially happen.”
Collier is implying that construction companies would throw garbage into a load of dry waste to save some money. Garrett thinks that’s a load of garbage— or, in his words, “bullshit.”
“Is it economic for a contractor to go scrounge up 5 or 6 bags of wet garbage, throw it in the drop box to save 40 bucks?” he told the Mercury after the meeting.
Collier says the cost difference would be closer to $45-$60 for a typical dry load of 3 to 4 tons, which he thinks is significant enough to incentivize mixing wet garbage with dry garbage to get a cheaper price. He also points out that many non-Metro facilities that process both wet and dry in the area have similar pricing structures to Metro: combined pricing for both.
But when asked for evidence that companies were likely to ruin a dry load to get a cheaper price, Collier said he didn’t have any factual or anecdotal evidence that people do so.
Metro Council is set to vote on the waste pricing on Thursday, March 29.