Ending a service

A Bargersville area farmer will no longer make his routine trip to bring his recycling to a nearby church, after the county ends its recycling service.

Instead, Charles Stewart worries he may need to instead start putting his paper and cardboard into the trash, since curbside recycling isn’t an option at his home.

Stewart is one of the residents who recycled more than 1,400 tons of items last year by dropping them off at one of the Johnson County Recycling District’s sites throughout the county.

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After a significant increase in the cost, the county is planning to end that service at the end of the month.

Each of the sites in Franklin, Bargersville, Edinburgh, Prince’s Lakes and Greenwood will close after July 31, when the county recycling district’s current contracts for recycling services expire. The decision to end the service was made due to increased costs and one site being asked to close because of issues with people dumping non-recyclable items, said Jessie Biggerman, the executive director of the Johnson County Recycling District.

“We hate that we don’t have an outlet for these people. This isn’t a choice we came to lightly, but fiscally we can’t move forward,” Biggerman said.

The issue is one that is impacting recycling services across the nation due to changes in the recycling industry, said Allyson Mitchell, the executive director of the Indiana Recycling Coalition.

China, which until recently was a major buyer of recyclables, has placed new restrictions on purchasing them from the U.S. and other countries. With fewer buyers for recyclables, that has reduced their value and increased the cost of collecting them, Mitchell said.

For the Johnson County Recycling District, new contracts would have increased the cost of shipping recycling from $80 to $174 per ton on average, she said. Last year, the recycling district collected about 1,423 tons of recyclable materials, according to their annual report. That number was up from 1,381 tons in 2016, the report said.

In Indianapolis, Republic Services increased its rates from $48 to $99 per year, the maximum it was allowed to do under a contract with the city. Republic Services officials cited rising recycling costs and issues with contamination as the reason for the higher costs, which will also be coming to customers in the central Indiana area beginning in August.

For Whiteland, which uses Republic Services, those rate increases won’t be an immediate issue, as the town’s contract with the company won’t expire for several years, town manager Norm Gabehart said.

The issue with rising prices isn’t limited to a single company or community, Mitchell said. Johnson County residents should expect to see increases in recycling costs in coming years as municipal recycling contracts expire and get replaced by ones that factor in recent price changes, she said.

Now, the county recycling district is exploring other ways to provide recycling services, including opening one or two manned sites as early as the start of next year. Employees would be able to screen items to ensure that they are recyclable and better educate the public about what can and can’t be re-used, Biggerman said.

The recycling district faced challenges with its recycling program in recent years. A site in Trafalgar had to be closed at the beginning of 2016 because of people dumping trash. Emmanuel Church also recently asked that the recycling district no longer use its parking lot as a location for recycling bins, which routinely were overflowing with items scattered across the parking lot and nearby yards, Biggerman said.

Employees from the recycling district would go to the site when they could to keep it clean and remove non-recyclable materials from bins, but that effort wasn’t enough, she said.

But for residents who have made dropping off their paper, cardboard, plastic and other recyclable materials at one of the county-run locations part of their routine, they aren’t certain what they’ll do next.

Center Grove area resident Laura Galoozis makes the weekly trip across State Road 135 to the Emmanuel Church to drop off her recycling once a week. Her family works to make sure that every possible item that they can recycle isn’t being thrown in the trash, an effort they feel is important to protecting the environment, she said.

Now that she is looking to move to a new home, one priority will be looking for a spot that has recycling services, Galoozis said.

“I hope people will find a subscription service where it is available, and we can bring sites online to help with the southern part of the county,” Biggerman said.

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The Johnson County Recycling District is closing its six recycling sites at the end of the month. Here’s how many tons of recycling community members dropped off each of the past three years:

2015: 1,559

2016: 1,381

2017: 1,423

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