Portage may soon be ending curbside recycling pickup. Due to the amount of trash being put in recycling toters, the city's contractor put the recycling program on suspension in 2021. That means nothing going in the recycling toters is actually being recycled, according to a Facebook post last week from Mayor Austin Bonta.
Streets and Sanitation Superintendent Randy Reeder told the city council that he plans to propose ordinances to discontinue the suspended program — but not recycling altogether. "We need to think outside the box," Reeder said during last week's council meeting. "We need to think about this differently about how Portage recycles, maybe recycling centers throughout the city, something. We need to come up with a better solution to what we're facing today in this suspended program."
Reeder said other Region communities are facing similar struggles, but none of them have put in as much effort to get curbside recycling back on course. He said Portage has confiscated more than a thousand recycling toters to try to enforce compliance — but to no avail.
"We do take recycling trucks — trucks that go out into the neighborhood, pick up only recycle cans — and we take that to Republic Services. They dump it on the pad, and they look at our contamination. And it is still contaminated with trash," Reeder said.
Bonta said part of the issue stems from China's decision to ban recycling imports in 2018. That's caused the cost of recycling here to go up and led contractors to crack down on their municipal customers.
Bonta said he planned to meet with department heads last week to discuss potential next steps. "I'm just very excited that we are moving in a direction to be doing real recycling, rather than making what I think is the easy but expensive choice to, basically, just pay more to pretend," Bonta said at last week's council meeting.
In other Facebook posts, Bonta said he hoped to refund or credit any fines paid by residents deemed noncompliant, since their items weren't being recycled either way. He also announced that, starting Friday, Portage will no longer let residents take trash to the Sanitation Department's dumpsters free of charge, due to increasing costs to the city and challenges limiting their use to Portage residents.
However, Bonta also announced the creation of a beautification and sustainability committee that will help explore and fund various green programs.
