Residents will pay more as Phoenix continues recycling
Recycling will continue in the nation’s fifth largest city, but Phoenix residents will have to pay more to maintain their trash services.
The Phoenix City Council voted Tuesday to increase the solid waste rate fee for residential customers by $7 over two years.
Beginning in April, Phoenix residents will pay $30.55 per month for trash. In January, the rate will increase to $33.80. After that, the rate will increase 2% per year to address inflation.
For the past 11 years, all single-family households have paid a $26.80 monthly fee, which includes weekly curbside trash and recycling pickup, in addition to bulk trash pickup four times a year.
But Phoenix Public Works Director Ginger Spencer said that rate is no longer enough to cover the city’s trash services.
Spencer said that if the city did not increase the rates, the department would have had to make $36.5 million in service cuts, which could have meant reduced or canceled recycling and composting in addition to the elimination of 135 staff positions.
The council approved the phased rate increase 7-2, with Councilmen Sal DiCiccio and Jim Waring opposing it.
Recycling woes drive rate increase
Although the costs of waste disposal have increased over the past 10 years because of inflation, the city hasn’t needed to raise the rate because it was bringing in substantial revenue from its recycling program.
That changed about two years ago,
Public Works Assistant Director Joe Giudice said.
China, which was purchasing 6070% of Phoenix’s recyclables, announced that it was going to scale back on recyclables allowed into the country.
“This international policy decision has really upset the market,” Giudice said.
The decline in demand for recyclables has driven down the price of recyclables in the U.S. and beyond.
In Phoenix’s recycling heyday just a few years ago, it was bringing in $13 million annually in recycling revenues, Spencer said. Now, it’s about $3 million.
That is not enough to subsidize the increasing costs of trucks, facilities and other infrastructure, which led the department to ask the City Council to consider a rate hike, Spencer said.