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Consultation has concluded
Input phase has concluded.
The City of Stillwater's recycling program is faced with a nation-wide issue. Your input and ideas are needed.
Cities across the United States, including Stillwater, are facing a lack of market for their recycling waste. Many recycling products are no longer profitable or feasible to process in a cost-efficient way. As a result, the City is looking into other options.
Stillwater needs your input. The City is exploring all options regarding this issue, though many options come with undesirable, yet unavoidable consequences. Have an idea? Share it below!
In the midst of starting Stillwater's recycling program and resolving contamination issues, the markets for recyclable waste crashed. This was mainly due to China stopping acceptance of recyclables from the United States. China determined they had a pollution problem and put measures in place to correct it.
Since then, China has begun to accept items again. However, they have strict guidelines that make shipment of recycling difficult. Currently, the United States does not have the facilities needed to create a product that meets the new guidelines set by China.
Consequently, Cities across the United States are facing the issue of having large amounts of recyclable waste with little place for it to be processed or shipped.
The City of Stillwater's current recycling process is strained, due to a high contamination of residential recyclable waste and a lack of profitable outlets for the waste to go. As a result, the City is urging residents to focus on being more responsible with what products they place in their recycle carts, while advocating for public input on the future of Stillwater's residential recycling.
Moving forward, what should our City do? Many options exist, but they each come with their own undesirable consequences. Here are some options that have been discussed:
Recycling has been performed in some capacity in Stillwater for many years. It began with unmanned sites. The City had three locations: Babcock Park, Boomer Lake and Skyline Elementary. These locations served as an unmanned recycling stop for Stillwater residents to drop and sort their recyclable waste. The unmanned locations did not work as planned, and were often used as dump sites for non-recyclable material.
In 2008, Stillwater open a manned recycling site, known today as the Convenience Collection Center. The center offers an outlet for common recyclable items (cardboard, paper, plastic, tin, aluminum, glass) and other items like electronics, motor oil, antifreeze, cooking oil, fluorescent bulbs, and latex paint. The center has become very popular with Stillwater residents, averaging around 4,000 visitors to the center per month.
In 2011, there was a push for a curbside recycling program by a local citizens group, Sustainable Stillwater. The group wanted the City to provide a more convenient way for residents to recycle. Staff researched and gathered public input for a year in order to build the best curbside recycling program for Stillwater.
In 2012, the City began a four-month recycling pilot in order to test the program before implementing the whole City. Once the entire City was implemented into the recycling program, residents were given options to opt-in to the program and sign up to receive residential carts.
Approximately 40 percent of the City's waste collection customers opted in to the program. Today, City-wide participation is at 70 percent, with 55 to 60 percent of customers having their carts emptied each week.
In 2016, a problem with contamination became apparent. Contamination is any item not accepted in the City's program and affects recycling processes negatively. The city conducted an audit of the program and found that 41 percent of the City's material was contaminated. City staff then increased education efforts, added a recycling auditor to the program, and reduced the types of accepted plastics from 1 through 7 to 1, 2 and 5 only.
Since that initial audit, our community has made notable progress concerning contamination. A 2019 audit revealed only 22 percent contamination. The City is still working towards educating residents how to recycle responsibly in order to safeguard the future of the program.
This page is meant to function as the hub of civic engagement for this project. Feedback is shared with City Council and city staff. Comments made on this page, as well as any comments made to city staff through email, are considered public documents. For questions about this, click on "Who's Listening."
Please ask us questions regarding the City of Stillwater's recycling program.