Georgia City Cuts Recycling Program

Starting in July, the city of Macon, Ga., will stop picking up metals, glass and plastics for recycling at residents' curbs. Newspapers and magazines still can be placed in recycling bins for pickup.

The city is cutting back on its recycling program to save money during a budget crunch. Recycling trucks will stop running, leaving garbage trucks to pick up the recyclable papers in specially attached bins.

This allows the city to cut the recycling department's entire $465,000 budget, which was expected to rise to almost $500,000 this year. However, the majority of those costs will continue as staff salaries in other departments because workers are being transferred, not laid off.

Laura Jackson, Macon recycling coordinator, said the city is maintaining the program's largest component: newspaper and magazine recycling, which makes up about 70 percent of what the city collects now.

Without the cuts to the city recycling program, garbage fees would have increased, Jackson said.

Currently, no private companies offer curbside recycling in Macon. Neither companies nor local governments offer drop-off sites for recyclables besides paper products. People who want to keep recycling soup cans, milk jugs and other items will have to take the goods to a recycling company like Macon Iron on Seventh Street.

Before the curbside program began, drop-off bins for all kinds of recyclables were kept at the city's fire stations. When the bins were full, residents sometimes left their recyclables on the ground, causing problems.

Jackson said the city will not offer drop-off stations, because those wouldn't cost much less than curbside recycling. The city still would have to maintain the drop-off areas and also package and transport the goods.

Roughly 40 percent of homeowners have recycling, Jackson said, and many of those people are upset. "The people who don't like it are very emotional about it," she said, noting that she is receiving 15 to 20 phone calls a day about the decision.

Jackson said the city is hoping to partner with a private company to offer drop-off points for some recyclables at no cost to the city. In addition, the city is interested in finding a company to set up recycling cans with garbage cans in public places. Jackson said the cans can be used as advertising space, creating revenue for the city. For both partnerships, the City Council's Engineering and Public Works Committee would need to issue a request for bids.

Although curbside was cheap and convenient for residents, it was expensive for the city. Cities rarely break even on recycling because the used glass, metal and other commodities don't command a high price - an average of $10 to $15 per ton for the city's 120 tons a month. Jackson said curbside recycling costs 86 cents a month per family, a price she called the lowest in the Southeast for comparable programs.

"The worst thing we could do for the environment is a program poorly planned in the face of financial adversity," Jackson said.

Seven of the nine recycling trucks probably will be sold at auction, Jackson said. The two newest can be converted to backup garbage trucks.

The new bins to be attached to garbage trucks for carrying the recyclable newspaper and additional recycling bins will add up to a one-time cost of about $37,000. Macon Telegraph