The Athens-Hocking Solid Waste Management District and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency are working to increase the amount of recycled material – and it's hurting them financially.
Roger Bail isn’t against recycling.
The operations coordinator for the Athens-Hocking Solid Waste Management District agrees that material should be reused rather than tossed in landfills. Bail has a mandate from the state government to increase recycling, and he said he does what he can.
“But I’m working against myself,” he said. “Every ton of waste I move to recycling, that’s less revenue for the district.”
The Athens-Hocking Solid Waste Management District, which handles trash for the two counties, does not operate off taxpayer money.
“We operate off of fees instead of taxes,” Bail said. “The average person will never find that out.”
Those fees are only collected on waste headed to the county landfill, not on recycled materials. Waste to be reused is instead sent to the Athens-Hocking Recycling Center, which broke off from the Solid Waste Management District in March of last year.
Limiting the amount of waste dumped into landfills is the goal of the Athens County commissioners and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, both of which oversee the Athens-Hocking Solid Waste Management District. But at the same time it is hurting the funding of both the Athens solid waste district and the state EPA by limiting the amount of fees collected.
For Athens-Hocking Solid Waste Management District, there is the generation fee and the disposal fee. The generation fee is a flat $3 per ton of waste ($4 beginning in 2018), and the disposal fee is $1 per ton for garbage from Athens or Hocking county, $2 per ton for garbage from elsewhere in the state and $1 per ton for garbage from out-of-state.
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The Ohio EPA collects $5.75 per ton of landfill waste, which goes towards the Environmental Protection Fund and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources' Soil and Water Conservation, among other projects.
Though $4 or $5 per ton of waste does not seem like a significant amount of money, the joint waste management for Athens and Hocking counties took in 60,057 tons of garbage in 2014.
That number is more than three times the amount taken in by the recycling center — 20,007 tons in 2014 — but the two types of waste are trending in different directions.
Prior to 2014, the amount of waste going to landfill had declined over the previous three years, from almost 65,000 tons in 2011 to 58,394 tons in 2013. Bail said the jump in 2014 was due to a strengthening economy (an assertion supported by the Ohio EPA).
Over that time, recycling has increased steadily, from 11,442 tons in 2010 to over 20,000 tons in 2014. The biggest increase came in 2011, when Athens-Hocking Recycling Center saw a 7,000-ton increase in recycling.
“Thanks to a grant from the EPA, we were able to expand service in 2011,” said Chris Chmiel, a commissioner for Athens County and a member of the Waste District’s board of directors.
“It’s kind of a long story, how we got to this point,” Chmiel said. “We got a board of directors that was committed to recycling, we made sure we had the money and the people. We expanded our routes so we could reach more customers and improved our relationship with the community.”
Following 2011, the growth of recycling slowed. Recycling has increased by just over 1,000 tons between 2011 and 2014.
Chmiel considers what the county has accomplished so far a success, but admits it could create funding issues for Bail and the Solid Waste Management District.
“The more successful they are at recycling, the less money they receive,” Chmiel said. “It’s counterintuitive.”
Chmiel’s statement also applies to the Ohio EPA, who will see funding erode as fewer fees are collected from landfill. But Ohio EPA spokeswoman Heather Lauer does not see that as a bad thing — if the EPA is successful in eliminating waste, they won’t need as much funding.
“It would be a nice problem to have, for things to be the way it is supposed to be,” Lauer said. “If things were perfect, we wouldn’t need an EPA.”
She admitted that the EPA does not currently have a plan for where funding would come from should waste be eliminated. She said the state is not close enough to eradicating landfill to warrant such a plan.
“People will continue to throw things away, so we’ll continue to have jobs,” she said. “Fees are a large part of our funding, but we have other sources of revenue.”
Lauer added that although landfills bring in revenue, they are incredibly costly to build and maintain. She also said recycling could make money.
“Ohio’s manufacturers need more recycled glass, so there’s a market for that,” she said.
But the recycled glass market is not an option for Bail ever since his board of directors separated the recycling center from his Solid Waste Management. Bail admitted things are fine for the time being — after all, he still is bringing in about 60,000 tons of waste per year. But he is skeptical of the claim that recycling can be very profitable.
“When you drive through Ohio, how many recycling centers do you see compared to dumps?” Bail said. “Not many.”
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