City ponders WastAway offer
WastAway made a formal proposal to the city’s Streets and Sanitation Committee Monday, but city leaders said they need some time to ponder the proposal.
Bouldin Corp. vice president of industrial development Bob Brown told officials about how WastAway’s recycling process works, by essentially reducing household garbage into a product WastAway calls “fluff” and making useable materials out of it such as landscape timbers, fencing and even compost material.
WastAway officials proposed to take the city’s residential garbage with the potential of beginning to process it by Oct. 1, with the city transferring the garbage to WastAway for a tipping fee of $40 per ton.
City officials said they weren’t quite ready to jump on the bandwagon, saying that an assumption the city could close its transfer station and save money was not correct because the issue of commercial waste would still have to be addressed.
Vice Mayor and committee member Patti Nunley asked if what the city is doing now costs less than $40 per ton, and Public Works Director Bill Brock said the current costs are $32.81 a ton.
“That creates a problem in my mind,” Nunley said. “I understand what you’re doing. I like what you’re doing. I hope it works. But in a budget year as tight as this one, to add $8 a ton to the garbage we haul off is a formidable number.”
Brock said the proposal would cost about $70,000 and suggested a meeting between WastAway and city officials. City Administrator Herb Llewellyn said Thursday that meeting had not been set up yet.
As part of the proposal, Brown said ideally, Warren County could be the first county in the nation to recycle 98 percent of residential garbage. He said the city of San Francisco has a goal of recycling a large percentage of its garbage by 2010.
“We can achieve that by the end of the year with your cooperation. To me, that would really be a feather in our cap to say we’re the first government, city and county, that united to recycle,” he added.
City officials formally voted to accept the proposal for further study.