Virginia Region Changing Recycling Program

The Southeastern Public Service Authority (Virginia) is making changes to the way it collects recyclables, and it is unlikely that the previous method of curbside collection will be a part of the new collection method.

The Southeastern Public Service Authority, a Virginia-based agency that is responsible for the collection of recyclables for 157,000 houses and more than 1 million people is instead looking at a number of other options.

The SPSA is expected to have a fairly good idea of the direction they want to go by this November, said John Groh, a spokesman for the SPSA’s recycling department. A key reason for the need to switch is the costs that the Authority will have to pay to update the equipment needed to continue the curbside program. These costs would include the need to purchase roughly 25 new trucks at a cost of around $95,000 per truck.

The Authority will continue its existing program until next June. However, after that date, the Authority is looking at four possible scenarios.

The first is establishing a subscription service. Under this plan, interested parties would pay a monthly fee of around $5 per month to take part in the service. The Authority has looked at a similar program that took place in Bakersfield, Calif., for the success of this program. According to Groh, people not taking part in the subscription service would dispose of their recyclables with the rest of their waste.

Households taking part in the service would receive a 95-gallon recycling bin, and would see collections every two weeks.

Other options being examined include the following:

  moving toward a total drop-off service that would boost the number of centers from around 50 to 170;

· creating a fully automated service that would collect material in a single-stream method, similar to what is being done in Chesapeake, Va.; and

· recovering recyclables at the Authority’s refuse derived fuel (RDF) plant.

SPSA's board of directors -- officials from Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Suffolk, Franklin and Isle of Wight and Southampton counties -- met earlier this week to discuss the options for the future of curbside recycling.

The program now costs more than $2 million, even though participation rates continue to decline, to about 30 percent regionwide. SPSA only regains about $300,000 by selling commodities, but offsets expenses by charging localities $1.05 per household per month, according to local press reports.