Recycling an old idea that gets a new beginning in Kokomo

“It just seems to make better sense, although there are certain people that this is going to inconvenience, my wife being one of them,” Trobaugh said of ending the program.

The final straw for the program back then was a demand by Waste Management for a 31 percent increase on a new, three-year contract.

Arguing against terminating the contract was then-Kokomo Common Councilman Greg Goodnight, to no avail.

Now that Goodnight is in charge, and his administration will be tasked with keeping a lid (sorry) on the cost of recycling. History suggests it won’t be easy.

To get a company to come to Kokomo and set up a materials recycling facility (also known as a MRF, a place where recyclables are sorted and stored), the city had to commit to a program for 10 years, and the Howard County Recycling District, which is sharing the cost of the program with the city, had to sign a five-year contract.

Hopefully, the contract will prove workable for all parties concerned and there’s no sticker shock when renewal discussions occur in a few years.

The main worry, however, is that public interest in curbside recycling will wane, as it did after the first year or two of the program back in the mid-1990s.

There were mistakes made back then, to be sure. One of them was all of the sorting which residents were required to undertake. Single-serving plastic water bottles could be recycled, but two-liter bottles could not. The list was rather extensive, and Goodnight said only certain neighborhoods received the service. The bins were small. They weren’t on wheels, and older residents had problems dragging them to the curb.

As a result, people got sick of the program. In 1995, city officials said between 50 percent and 60 percent of the city’s households participated in the program. Four years later, that number was down to 32 percent.

But that was also a time when one county official would make declarations at public meetings to the effect that recycling cost more than producing new plastic, glass and aluminum containers, that there was plenty of ore to be mined, space to be exploited for landfills, and trees to be pulped. He claimed that landfills in desert communities in the American West were begging to take our trash. He had plenty of people silently agreeing with him.

We’ve moved on a bit, and Kokomo’s failure to resume recycling puts the city more than a little behind the times.

Back then, recycling cost the city around $250,000 a year (on top of startup costs), and the cost could be similar this time around, unless participation is better.

The difference might be that residents now expect this service, just as they expect their trash to be picked up. There’s a collective guilt associated with throwing away so much which might be useful, and Goodnight is responding to it.

He also points out there are plenty of things expected of the government which have no obvious profitability component.

“Look at how much the new highway costs. Do you think that will ever make money?” he said.

“Landfill tipping fees just keep going up, and it only gets more expensive,” Goodnight added. “It costs money to haul away trash. To me, it’s a more responsible way to discard trash.”