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Summit County Talks Trash Services

KPCW

Summit County Council talked trash at their meeting Wednesday.

The county’s waste collection contract is up for bid.  Currently the county collects trash for 19,000 customers. And the costs appear to be going up, according to county council chair, Doug Clyde. But there could be some cost savings, according to Clyde, especially if the county stopped collecting the trash for multi-family units, which are four-plexes or larger.   

“With multifamily units we’re primarily concerned and focused on those units that make up the lion’s share of our resort economy; the Canyons, all the various nightly lodging units we have throughout county,” said Clyde. “Those are the areas we’re talking about.  Normally - and I should say normally meaning when we look throughout state at how other counties or jurisdictions handle this, those sorts of units are handled by commercial haulers. In our case, we have serviced them through our county contract, the difficulty being that you could make a strong case that we are supplementing that service. In other words, it costs us more to service one of those multifamily units than the revenues we receive from them.”

Clyde said the county could save 800-thousand dollars by eliminating trash pickup at multi-family units. Another idea was to go to weekly recycling pickup, instead of every-other-week pickup. Clyde said there wasn’t much enthusiasm for that idea because the recycling market isn’t strong right now and because of that, a large part of recycling is going into the trash any way.  But Clyde said the county could save even more money, and help save the environment, if more people took action at home. That’s why the county is looking at programs for composting and food waste.

“If you have a yard of any size whatsoever and you’re a citizen of county, you should be composting green waste, there’s just no reason not to do that,” Clyde said. “You shouldn’t be throwing that stuff either down your garbage disposal, which just aggravates the cost of sewer treatment.  And you shouldn’t be throwing that stuff in the trash because if you bury in landfill it produces methane gas and that of course is one of our worst greenhouse gases. If you don’t have food waste composter, you need to get one.” 

Clyde also said some restaurants in the county are composting waste now, and the county is looking at ways to make that more economical so more restaurants will start the practice.