Cardboard doesn't pay off

Alexis Barker
NLJ News Editor
 
City-provided cardboard services are in need of adjustment, according to City Engineer Mike Moore, because Specific Steel has discontinued recycling cardboard taken to its Rapid City location by city employees. 
The Newcastle City Council’s sanitation committee had previously discussed the topic, Moore said, and the consensus was that it would be appropriate for the city to end the cardboard service. Moore said that the decision was primarily financially driven. At a later council meeting, Mayor Deb Piana expressed interest in continuing the service as a paid program. 
Officially, according to Moore, the city has not determined a plan to address cardboard recycling. 
“Right now the city is looking at trying to get a handle on what it would have to cost for those services. Once we have an idea, we can tell current users about what cost they would have to pay if we want to a paid service,” Moore said. “We can then see if there is an interest in that.” 
According to Moore, there are two components in the cardboard disposal cost: whether or not the cardboard can be taken somewhere and the cost for getting it there and the cost of gathering the cardboard around town, whether it is bailed or not. 
“We had a full-time public works employee for the cardboard program, and that has been replaced by two part-time employees. The cost for the cardboard program is the wages of those employees and the fuel for the vehicle collecting it,” Moore said. “This program is being fully subsidized by the garbage enterprise account and costs $30,000 to $40,000 a year.” 
Moore said that the private individuals will likely not have an issue with getting rid of their cardboard if the program is discontinued. Those people, he said, can dispose of it with their normal trash. Businesses, he said, may have a problem because they generate more cardboard. 
“Those are the ones that will be most impacted by this change. Commercial users do have the option of getting another can, and they can cut their cardboard up and break it down to more efficiently
use those cans. It can be treated like any other garbage,”
Moore said. 
City employees now pick up cardboard from businesses. Moore said that most of the city employee time spent on cardboard recycling is the business collection. 
When the program started, the city collected cardboard from certain businesses and
residents used designated trailers around the city to dispose of their cardboard. Moore said that there was a “fair market” for recycled cardboard and RENEW had assisted in the program. 
 “We would take the cardboard in for them to bail it. That helped on part of the program; it was a lot of work. Then, the RENEW program went away years ago and we lost that component,” Moore said. “More recently, just a few months ago, Specific Steele informed us that they can’t take cardboard anymore because there was no longer a market for it.”
Moore said that it is hard to predict what the future of cardboard recycling will look like because of the current prices and the saturated market. 
“The prices would have to really increase to be attractive, and the reality is that the program had to be fully subsidized for it to continue,” Moore said. 
Because of the lack of a place to take the cardboard, the city has had to place the collected cardboard in the landfill, along with other household trash. 
“It doesn’t take up too much space. We estimate about 3% of the total garbage every year is cardboard,” Moore said. “There is legitimacy to the thought that it helps
save landfill space, but our landfill was not designed when it was permitted for that concept. There is no concern that we won’t have the space for the cardboard.” 
The future of cardboard disposal becomes an even bigger issue when the landfill is closed in two years when the permit expires, Moore said. 
“Once the landfill closes, there is less incentive to do cardboard because not only would we have to pick it up, but then we would have to pay to take it somewhere and pay to dump it,” Moore said. “There are just a number of factors driving the reasoning behind wanting to discontinue the service.”