Skokie residents will have to have to dig a little deeper to pay for their recycling service as the continuing turmoil in the recycling industry is driving up prices, according to village officials.
The Skokie Village Board voted June 7 to renew two one-year contract extensions with Lakeshore Recycling Systems. The company has provided recycling services to the village for the past five years. Under the contact now in place, the monthly price of recycling is going up from $4.85 per household to $5.78 in 2022, and $6.01 in 2023.
“It’s been a super challenging environment,” said Public Works Director Max Slankard. “It’s in that backdrop that the cost factor for (recycling) processors has changed a lot.”
In the last five years, Lakeshore was limited in its ability to increase costs because the annual increase was capped, Slankard said.
“This is their first opportunity to have a cost increase that was anything greater than essentially an inflationary type increase,” he said.
Representatives of Lakeshore Recycling Systems could not be reached for comment.
Skokie is renewing the contact without going out for other bids because there’s so much turmoil in the recycling industry, Slankard said. He said that the company has also provided quality service to the village and has proven it’s in the industry for the long haul.
It’s a “tricky time” to negotiate recycling contracts because the village would be asking contractors to bid pricing for a five to seven year periods, Slankard said.
“That’s not a recipe, in our estimation, to get good pricing because you’re asking the contract marketplace to look at a crystal ball that’s really uncertain,” he said. “It didn’t seem like a very good time for us to go out there and get good pricing. Even now, the pricing for our extension was a bit higher than we might like to see. We didn’t like the roll of the dice of looking at it in a more long-term basis.”
China took much of the world’s recycled materials until 2018, when it implemented a policy banning the import of many plastics and related materials from the U.S. and other countries. China took that action after recycling programs in many countries were changed and consumers were no longer required to separate paper, plastics, cans and bottles for recycling.
Instead “single stream” recycling was implemented, allowing consumers to deposit all recycled materials into a single blue bin, which resulted in contamination from food and waste. That makes significant amounts of recycling material unusable.
“The processing costs escalated dramatically, so the marketplace just sort of dried up and it was made worse by COVID,” said Slankard. “Many communities in the U.S. left recycling altogether.”
Brian L. Cox is a freelance reporter.
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