Not enough garbage: Montgomery has trouble recycling
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Montgomery is not producing enough trash to make a recycling program sustainable, according to officials who have studied the issue.
Four major Alabama cities have a similar population size — Huntsville, Birmingham, Mobile and Montgomery. The capital city is the only one without recycling and the only one facing doubts about its ability to maintain a recycling program, Montgomery Advertiser reported.
Montgomery owns a recycling facility, but it has been closed for 17 months since a private company suspended operations. The city’s residents have been without recycling services since then.
City Finance Director Barry Crabb said the facility required about 150,000 tons of trash a year. In its final year, it received only 78,000 tons from the city and about another 24,000 tons from north Florida and areas around Montgomery.
“The city is too small,” Crabb said. “We’ve got information from recycling associations that talk about the city. Draw a 50-mile radius around the city, and even taking that into account it’s hard to hit those numbers.”
In Montgomery, recyclable materials were not sorted at home. Instead, all trash was collected together and a system of machines and workers sorted the glass, paper and plastic from the pizza, diapers and chicken bones.
Bins may be the next step for Montgomery. Also known as single-stream recycling, any recyclable trash such as water bottles or newspapers would be collected in the same bin.
Clean City Commission Program Director Susan Carmichael said she prefers to have residents separate trash at home, and Mayor Todd Strange said he is open to considering any proposal received. Even if Montgomery implements a bin system, it may still face a recycling shortage.
Most experts estimate an average of 25 percent of a city can be expected to participate in recycling. Crabb said about 25 percent — 20,000 tons — of Montgomery’s trash is recyclable. If Montgomery receives a quarter of that, 5,000 tons a year, that’s only 416 tons a month.