The crash that occurred a year ago in the global market for recylable materials may be about to hit Western Massachusetts, as well, with towns in Franklin County and beyond being forced to pay to get rid of their plastics, glass, cans and paper for the first time in decades.
Communities that have been protected from a 2018 Chinese ban on what had been 40,000 shipping containers a day from the United States are facing the end of their contract for the state’s Springfield Materials Recovery Facility at the end of June 2020.
The contract, arranged through the Franklin County Solid Waste Management District and other entities with the state Department of Environmental Protection and Waste Management Inc., allowed towns that pre-sort their materials to receive $8 per ton for recylables.
For the 19 towns in the solid waste district, that meant more than $11,000 in revenue for the first six months of 2018 for the 1,400 tons of recycled materials. Orange, the only town in he district that does not pre-sort its reyclables, does not receive the $8 per ton base revenue.
Those payments may seem paltry compared to the $15 per ton that towns were receiving before a five-year extension was negotiated after the original 10-year contract expired — or compared to the monthly revenue-sharing that towns had been getting based on better market prices for recyclables.
Yet, it’s far better than the $50 to $85 per ton that Communities in Eastern and Central Massachusetts have been paying to get rid of their recyclable materials, says waste district Executive Director Jan Ameen.
“Towns getting $8 a ton for everything that goes over the scale is unheard of,” says Ameen, who is a member of the Springfield Materials Recovery Facility Advisory Board, along with district Program Director Amy Donovan. “It’s pretty sweet, because other towns are paying to have their recycling processed. Our towns were making a lot more money before, but now at least they’re not losing money.”
Ameen, a member of the panel that reviewed the specifications for a new contract that will be reviewed this spring, says the contract should be signed this summer, and will take effect in July 2020. She says she assumes it will include a processing fee of maybe $40 to $60 per ton — for which they’ll need to begin budgeting about a year from now.
Montague, which recycled more than 274 tons from January through June 2018, earning nearly $2,200 for those recyclables, instead would pay $10,000 to $16,500 to process that material. Greenfield, which received $5,647 for its nearly 706 tons, would instead pay $28,240 to $42,360.
Offsetting those payments, though, could be revenue sharing for towns that pre-sort. Towns in the past have received a share of the amount that Waste Management gets for recycling the material, but those overall prices are below the threshold for revenue sharing.
Ameen, who expects there will be three or four contract bidders, says, “We’re hoping that because a processing fee will be paying them for their costs, that towns could be getting 60 to 80 percent of that revenue,” based on what the market for materials is around the Northeast. “My hope is that because we’re still dual-stream,” largely pre-sorting materials, “their expense is on the lower side, so towns could be getting 20 to 30 bucks a ton back.”
And if there’s a new pricetag for recycling – originally seen as a way for municipalities to extend the lives of their landfills and offset trash costs – Ameen says recycling’s economic advantage remains, apart from the state law banning recyclable materials from trash disposal.
“The cost for trash disposal for most towns is $77 per ton and will climb to almost $80 per ton next fiscal year,” she says. “As capacity becomes more and more limited, that fee is expected to increase towards $90 per ton in the coming years. It is anticipated that the new recycling contract will have a processing fee less than the trash tip fee. So towns are still saving money by diverting recyclables from disposal.”
The glut of recyclable materials that’s built up in this country since the Chinese government shut the door on buying recyclables from the outside could be turning a corner, Ameen said, since China’s giant Nine Dragons Paper is buying paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin that plan to ramp up production of cardboard containers for Chinese products.
“They figured their work-around was if paper wasn’t coming to them, they’re coming to the paper,” says Ameen, adding that a new glass factory is also starting up in Connecticut, and there are new markets emerging here for plastic, as well — all promising a renewed market for the recyclable materials.
“We’re in a completely brand new world,” she says. “We just keep going around and around.”