Curbside or depot? City Council mulls over recycling proposals

CASPER, Wyo. — On Tuesday, the Casper City Council heard proposals from city staff on developing a curbside recycling service to double the amount of recyclables sent to the city’s recycling facility, where they are processed and sold to brokers.

Tom Brauer, the city’s chief operating officer, and Cindie Langston, the solid waste division manager, told the council the realized proposal could also help reverse the loss the city currently takes on selling poorly sorted plastics.

City staff laid out a menu of options for rates and charging schemes in the memo, but they favored one: Each of the city’s 19,300 residential households would pay about $9 per month, whether they use the service or not. That would not be a straight increase considering the $2.50 customers already pay for maintenance of the city’s 10 recycling depots, Langston said. 

The proposal also calls for a $10 million upgrade to the Material Recovery Facility, most of which could be paid for with grants, according to the memo in the council’s work packet.

With two dissenting votes, the council agreed to invest in the development of a business plan and consumer-interest survey during its regular work session on Tuesday, Sept. 24.

Loads from the depots do, in fact, get recycled, Brauer assured the council, citing public suspicions about the recycling trucks’ resemblance to trash trucks and the fact that they pick up the trash from small bins at the depots.

“People say, ‘Oh, you guys just bury it.’ Nothing could be further from the truth,” Brauer said. 

On the fear that plastics just end up in the ocean, Langston said, “Our broker is very, very responsible. They sell it to mills that put it back into the original resins.”

Brauer and Langston said white office paper is the most valuable recycling commodity. Metals and cardboard also make money.

“We absolutely do not make money on plastics,” Langston said.

Langston said the MRF isn’t staffed to sort the contaminated loads of plastics, so they are sold as “mixed plastic” loads at a loss to brokers. Langston said the curbside recycling program should ensure the purity of the plastic #1 and #2 loads.

“If you have a clean stream on those, you’ll make money,” she said.

For now, they are focusing on a picture-heavy public education campaign at the depots to help people, for example, not put plastic clamshells in the Plastic #1 bin. The curbside service would also decommission the depots.

Langston said the business of selling recyclables requires an economy of scale, so staff want to upgrade the recycling facility to become a regional hub. “The bigger it is, the more money you recover and the more efficient it is,” she said, adding that most of the grants available are targeted toward rural areas.

The proposal Tuesday was to formally endorse a plan to spend up to $152,000 on a consultant to flesh out staff’s estimates and do a robust community-interest survey. The last time the community was asked about curbside recycling was in 2007, with a little over half expressing favor, Langston said.

The memo includes several proposals with different rates, including options where only the users pay the monthly fee. Langston said Gillette was using such a model and seeing only 10% usage and not much overall success. Cheyenne charged everyone and had probably the most success of any municipality in the state, with about 80% of customers using the service, she said.

Councilor Lisa Engebretsen voted no on the proposal, saying, “I can’t advocate for adding anything more to someone’s bottom dollar.”

Councilor Kyle Gamroth also voted no, citing the mandatory price increase and his estimation of the public’s appetite for one. He was also not impressed by the assurance that the plan would result in the city having to build only two landfill cells instead of three over the next 35 years.

According to the city packet, there are 300–500 customers of the private recycling collection company Recyclops, which charged $18 a month in 2023.