Skip to content

FAYCO dropping recycling

Vandalia residents who get their water from the city are gaining $12 a year but losing one of the two local recycling programs.
In a letter sent to Mayor Rick Gottman late last week, Kim Taylor, executive director of FAYCO Enterpises, notified the city that the sheltered workshop is ceasing its recycling operation this summer.
That means that FAYCO does not wish to extend the two-year contract with the city that expires at the end of July.
Through that contract, which was drafted by FAYCO and approved by the city council, the city added a $1 monthly surcharge to the bills of city water users.
That surcharge would help to cover the cost of maintaining the program through which city water users could recycle items such as magazines, newspapers, cardboard, plastic, and steel and aluminum cans at the FAYCO facility at 2022 Wagner St.
At the same meeting at which it approved that contract with FAYCO, the city council agreed to add a monthly 25-cent surcharge to support the electronic recycling program operated by the Fayette County Soil & Water Conservation District.
That surcharge will remain on water bills after the one for the FAYCO recycling is dropped at the end of June.
In her letter to Gottman, Taylor said the decision to drop the recycling came “after much deliberation and research into the downward trend of the recycling industry both locally and throughout the United States.”
In an attached introductory letter to Gottman and City Administrator LaTisha Paslay, Taylor said, “Our decision was based on the unpredictable and consistently low market prices for recycled materials.
“We work with two very reputable brokers and have reached out to other recycling centers, and the story is the same everywhere,” Taylor said in the letter.
As an example, Taylor said that in February 2018, the price for cardboard was $105, down from $150. It then dropped to $75 in April of last year, to $60 February of this year and to $35 in May.
“Other products have dropped the same,” Taylor said in the letter. “We have three loads of product that we are unable to sell, because mills are not accepting.”
In closing, Taylor said, “The members of the community who use the recycling center have been great to work with, and we will miss seeing them.”
 

Leave a Comment