Talking trash at town hall
The Boundary County Board of Commissioners field questions at an April 16 town hall event at the fairgrounds.
Photo by NED NEWTON
Starting June 1, Boundary County will recycle only aluminum and tin, joining other North Idaho communities scaling back programs amid rising costs and a collapsing global recyclables market.
The current cost exceeds $125,000 annually just to get rid of the county’s recycled materials such as plastics and paper. At the April 15 Bonners Ferry City Council meeting, City Administrator Mike Klaus said the expense is approaching $150,000.
“If everybody recycles 100 percent, it just costs us that much more,” said Boundary County Commissioner Ben Robertson at an April 16 town hall event at the Boundary County Fairgrounds. “We’re not getting anything in return.”
By cutting the recycling program down to just metals, commissioners said the savings could go toward the Landfill Closure Fund — an increasingly urgent need, as the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality expects the landfill to transition to a transfer facility within the next decade.
The Boundary County Landfill is expected to close in the next 10 years.The decision mirrors ones made in Bonner and Kootenai counties in recent years to eliminate most or all recycling in response to the declining global market. Bonner County stopped recycling altogether, and Kootenai County only recycles cardboard, said Boundary County Solid Waste Superintendent Richard Jenkins at a January commissioners meeting.
Recycling worldwide is down 21% over the last five years, despite waste materials increasing exponentially, according to the Circularity Gap Report 2024.
New plastic has become cheaper than recycled plastic due to widespread contamination. After China stopped accepting contaminated plastics in 2018, recycling shifted from a profitable venture to a financial burden for many U.S. facilities, according to the Columbia Climate School.
County Commissioner Tim Bertling said at the town hall that recycling cardboard stopped being lucrative in Boundary County about two years ago.
“There is no money in it for us to recoup now,” Bertling said. “In the future, can this program change? I would say absolutely, and I think future commissioners should be open to that.”
At the April 15 Bonners Ferry City Council meeting, Klaus said the city will have to draft a new contract with Frederickson’s Garbage, the city’s waste management partner, to account for the adjustment. Frederickson’s plans to switch its customers to a larger 96-gallon can, which is about three times the size of a regular can.
Both the city and Frederickson’s will notify city residents in the coming weeks of the changes to waste collection protocol in Bonners Ferry.