Recycling halted for Sunrise, Deerfield

Cities negotiating for better deal with Waste Management

If you live in Deerfield Beach or Sunrise, the stuff in your recycling cart is going to be treated like trash — dumped in a landfill or burned in an incinerator.

Rather than have the material sorted and prepared for reuse as has been the case, Deerfield Beach will bury its recyclables and Sunrise will take its material to a waste-to-energy incineration plant.

The blow to recycling in the two cities came because they did not approve new recycling contracts to replace ones that expired Monday.

Sunrise’s plan to burn its recyclables will still count as recycling in Florida, because the material is being used to produce electricity, but that’s not what people who sorted the materials from their regular trash expected for their efforts.

“It’s horrendous. It goes against everything that anybody who cares about this planet is trying to do,” said Jack Shifrel, a Coconut Creek resident active in county environmental issues. “Being turned into energy, that’s better than nothing, but at the same time, that’s not

what should be done.”

Deerfield Beach is suspending its decades-long curbside recycling program until further notice. Residents are being told not to use their blue recycling carts. All materials — including recyclable glass, aluminum cans, plastic and paper products — should be placed in the city-issued brown garbage cart.

Sunrise residents should keep sorting materials as they have been, officials there said. They are anticipating only a temporary disruption to the city’s program before it can reach a new agreement for processing its recyclable materials.

The two cities were among 17 that had been using the Sun-Bergeron Joint Venture to handle their materials. Most of the cities turned to Waste Management, but Sunrise and Deerfield Beach officials were uncomfortable with the company’s offer and have been negotiating to get better terms from Waste Management.

The cities have been paying $51.15 a ton under the previous contract for the material to be processed. Waste Management now wants $96 a ton. The company also says it will reject truckloads of recyclables that have been “contaminated” with too much nonrecyclable material.

“Waste Management knows they have the leverage, and they’re using it,” Shifrel said.

Deerfield Beach will no longer be recycling, except for clean cardboard, metal, Styrofoam and shredded paper that residents can bring to the city’s waste dropoff.

Mayor Bill Ganz said Waste Management’s offer that the commission rejected 3-2 Monday night was unacceptable. He said the city will try to come up with a solution in keeping with its goal of recycling and long-term sustainability.

“The bottom line is that I felt the offer was tantamount to extortion and that’s never a good position to be in when you are trying to make a decision,” Ganz said.

Sunrise and other cities want Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to step in to force Waste Management to lower its price.

They point to a confidential 2015 memo written by Bondi’s office that said the cities would be able to renew their deals with the joint venture at the original pricing. The memo was in response to Waste Management’s purchase of parts of Sun Recycling/Southern Waste Systems, which was part of the joint venture. The memo came at the end of the state’s antitrust investigation into the sale.

The memo, uncovered by the Florida Bulldog online news site, was included as a document in an ongoing court case involving the joint venture — Bergeron Environmental and Recycling vs. LGL Recycling (formerly Sun Recycling). It was mistakenly left unsealed when it was filed in Broward Circuit Court, but is now sealed.

The Attorney General’s Office has told the cities the letter is being mischaracterized, and it carries no legal obligation for Waste Management.

Waste Management officials point to the subcontract agreement they signed when they bought some assets of Sun Recycling/ Southern Waste Systems. That subcontract indicates it could raise prices when the contracts were renewed.

“As the subcontractor, we were not required to provide the same pricing,” said Dawn McCormick, spokeswoman for Waste Management. She said the higher pricing can be attributed to changes in the global recycling market — in particular China no longer accepting loads of mixed plastics and mixed paper — as well as that country requiring less contamination in the recyclables it does accept.

Sun-Bergeron had been formed in part to give cities an alternative to Waste Management.

Bergeron says the Sun partners betrayed their agreement by selling to Waste Management, allowing that company to control recycling in the county through its subcontract agreement. Waste Management purchased one of the recycling facilities the joint venture was using to provide services to the contracted cities.

Patricia Conners, Bondi’s chief deputy, sent a letter to all Broward mayors saying the office has been “closely following” the events in the county “and collecting relevant publicly available information regarding the current state of the recycling market generally and in Broward County in particular.”

“Determining anew whether a potential violation of the antitrust laws has occurred requires a significant amount of fact-gathering, among other things, to rule out lawful explanations for the conduct in question,” Conners wrote. “Price increases alone are not evidence of an antitrust violation.”