NE City Set to Roll Out Single Stream Program

The city of Omaha, NE will be officially beginning its single stream curbside program with Deffenbaugh Recycling Jan. 2, 2006. One big change with the program will be the elimination of glass as one of the items to be collected. The recyclables will be processed and brokered through First Star Fibers, an Omaha-based recycling company.

The change will result in the collection trucks moving from a compartmentalized vehicle with seven different containers, to a packer truck where all the collected recyclables will be delivered.

The materials that will be collected through the revamped collection program are old newspaper, old corrugated containers, aluminum cans, tin cans, plastic, and paper. According to Robert Sink, Environmental Services manager for Omaha, there is some flexibility on the part of the collector and the processor to add other materials to the mix.

While glass will not be collected through the single stream program, the city and some private companies have located a number of drop-off locations for glass.

Sink says that the curbside program will go citywide beginning Jan. 2. There are approximately 122,000 households that participate in the collection program. Last year around 17,000 tons of recyclables were collected through the source collection program. Of that amount, Sink says that around1,500 tons were glass containers.

Starting the beginning of December the city, through Deffenbaugh, has discontinued the collection of glass containers.

In addition to the degradation of the ONP through the inclusion of glass, surveys performed by the city in 2004 found that the collection program that was used created a much larger litter problem, one that the single stream program is expected to reduce.