Inweekly has reviewed the Tarpon Paper Co. invoices for the first six months of 2017. The City of Pensacola sent Tarpon 2,683,558 pounds of recyclables and $16,490 to have it processed. Had ECUA processed them, the cost would have about $6,708—a savings by not that big of a deal.
However, you have to dig deeper. The City of Pensacola didn’t bring all of its recyclables to Tarpon and paid a higher rate to dump them in the landfill.
The Tarpon invoices indicate that a full week of recyclables is four loads with an average total for the week being 140,620 pounds. Only nine of the 26 weeks of the first half of 2017 had four loads delivered to Tarpon. As much as 881,562 pounds of recyclables may have been diverted to Perdido Landfill – costing ratepayers $21, 911 instead of $2,203 if processed as recyclables by ECUA.
We can estimate the cost to the city of not properly processing recyclables from Oct. 1, 2017-June 30, 2018 to be about $109K.
By the way, I spoke with my ECUA board member Dale Perkins comparing the level of sanitation services provided by ECUA versus the City and the costs. We discussed recycling. One thing I learned is that ECUA picks up both the regular trash and the recycle can on the same day. From the customer’s standpoint, it requires customers to only put out their cans once a week. That is how we used to do it in Sacramento and how they still do it based on what I saw when back vising my parents. Interestingly, Dale (who is a city resident) believes that ECUA customers recycle at a higher rate because putting both cans out at the same time makes them more aware of the importance of recycling. He could be right. It would be interesting for the City to adopt the ECUA can pick-up practice and see what happens. If city customers begin to recycle at a higher rate, the policy change that would cost the city no more might be the difference.