Challenges more residents to get involved
Graphs from news conference attached at bottom of release.
Fort Wayne, Ind. – Year-end numbers show that the City of Fort Wayne's One Cart recycling program has been a huge success!
With city households participating at an average rate of 70 percent, the City has been able to save nearly $150,000 in fees by reducing the amount of garbage taken to the landfill. At the same time, a shared revenue agreement enabled the city to receive more than $425,000 for its recyclables in 2011.
"Recycling not only makes good sense from an environmental perspective, it also makes good economic sense," Mayor Tom Henry said. "Our recycling program is a prime example of how our city is doing more with less and using innovative methods to increase our efficiency, reduce our costs and maximize savings for our residents."
Mayor Henry is joining with Solid Waste Management officials to challenge all city residents to recycle. He's hoping to increase participation to 80 percent by the end of the year and he's asking residents who are currently not recycling to call 311 to register to have a cart delivered to their home.
When the One Cart recycling program was first launched last January, the goal was to provide residents with a more cost-efficient trash collection system and help preserve the environment by reducing the amount of garbage taken to the landfill.
That goal was achieved. In 2006, the City sent 103,500 tons of garbage to the landfill; an average 98,000 tons of garbage were sent to the landfill in five years before the new recycling program was launched. Last year, we sent 88,953 tons to the landfill.
As city garbage collection amounts have dropped, recycling participation rates jumped from 39 percent to 70 percent and recycling collection numbers skyrocketed. In 2006, we collected 10,100 tons of recyclables; we collected less than 10,000 tons in 2007, 2008 and 2009. In 2011, we collected 12,419 tons of recyclables – a marked increase over the 8,837 tons we collected the previous year.
Because recycling participation has increased while the amount of garbage going into the landfill has declined, the City of Fort Wayne has experienced a reduction in its monthly garbage user fees. As a result, city officials were able to lower garbage rates by $1 million – which meant passing on to residents two rate reductions in less than a year.
Under the rate decreases, the monthly fee for single-family homes dropped from $11.24 to $9.95.
The City has also been able to generate revenue from the program, thanks to a change in our recycling contract. A competitive bidding process employed last year enabled the City to sign a solid waste and recycling contract that allows Fort Wayne to share in the revenue from its recycled materials.
In 2011, the city generated $426,932 in revenue from the recyclables. City officials expect this figure to increase in 2012 because the launching of the One Cart program will have been in effect for an entire year. To date, Solid Waste Management has distributed more than 55,000 carts to residents; they continue to get an average of 20 new requests each day for recycling carts.
The City should receive an increase in commodity pricing from the sale of the recyclables due to the new Material Recovery Facility that Republic Services has opened in Fort Wayne. This facility will sort the recyclables locally, instead of shipping it to another community, and allow the City to receive more money from the sale of the material.
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