Brad Heinrich, owner of Tri-R, said several weeks ago the company made an initial proposal to one city councilman, Ted Hackworth, to replace the city’s curbside collection program, that is running at a deficit of around $1 million a year, with a program that would not cost anything to the city. At the present time the curbside collection costs around $1.6 million, with the city receiving about $500,000 in revenue from the sale of the recyclables.
He also adds that the move toward drop-off containers comes while the city is seriously contemplating the elimination of its money-losing curbside collection program.
Heinrich says that while the program has not yet been formally introduced to the city of Denver, the gist of the proposal is for Tri-R to place several hundred containers throughout the city in centrally located places. The containers, possibly between 300-400, would be added to the roughly 1,200 containers the company presently has disbursed throughout the city. While he mentioned the program to one councilman a few weeks ago, the idea has been forwarded on to other members of City Council, and he feels that the program is an ideal program for a city looking to reduce its expenses.
The material taken in through the program would be most paper grades except old corrugated containers. Heinrich says the problem with OCC is the volume of material would reduce the actual amount of material collected through the program.
Despite the move toward strictly fiber recovery, from the existing curbside program which collected fiber and containers, Heinrich feels that the company should be able to collect, on average, around the 1,100 tons per month volume that the city is presently collecting. This would be accomplished, Heinrich says, through adding on a number of other paper grades such as telephone directories and magazines.