With the county losing about $100,000 a month related to costs of recycling at the landfill, the Lycoming County commissioners are investigating ways to alleviate the drain on county resources.

Stressing that the county is definitely not going to stop its recycling program, Commissioner Marc Sortman said that one option that is being considered is doing away with recycling glass in the single stream program.

Single stream recycling is when all materials that are able to be recycled are placed in the same container for pick-up and then sorted at the landfill’s recycling center.

“Don’t get everybody get crazy that we’re no longer recycling glass in Lycoming County, but it’s going to be separated, so glass will still be able to be dropped off at any of the facilities, but as we move forward, we most likely will not allow that as part of the single stream,” Sortman said.

“We will probably no longer allow glass into that. That final decision will be made in the next week or two, if that can help fix some of the problems,” he added.

He pointed out that the problem came to the commissioners attention after the new management team took over at the landfill, a move that came when it became clear that the landfill was operating at a loss.

Cody Alexander and his father Jay, of the Clinton County Solid Waste Authority, were hired by the county earlier this year and tasked with turning around the losses at the county facility.

The younger Alexander told the commissioners at their meeting this week that a lot of the loss comes from the “facility, the machine, this industry itself.”

The recycling facility, he noted, was opened at a cost of $15 million, which included about $800,000 in grant funding, but the rest came from county funds.

“Recycling is a tough industry,” Alexander said, adding that single stream recycling is more conducive to a larger metropolitan area where there is a larger population with more items to recycle.

The county’s recycling program services about 350,000 residents.

“It’s really hard to make money off of that with a single stream,” he said.

The recycling market has also decreased significantly since the facility opened around 2015.

“Once China put a stop to taking in all the recycling-that was in 2018-the market has just diminished since then,” Alexander said.

Another thing that Sortman pointed out was that the county has never charged restaurants and bars that utilize glass containers.

“Most likely we will end up having a charge there,” Sortman said.

“You look at things and a lot of the stuff is service, so people’s garbage is not only a service, but there’s got to be a fee that goes along with it. The same thing has to happen with recycling. We can’t expect the county taxpayers alone to continue to pick up $100,000 a month loss or a million dollars a year loss to recycle. We have to put some fees in place and make some changes to at least maybe get that cut in half at this point. Ultimately, the goal is that it breaks even. That’s a big challenge,” he said.

The short term goal is to cut the losses in half this year. The long term goal is to at least break even.

“There’s a lot of money spent on a machine to do the recycling, the building to do the recycling, the staff to do the recycling. As everybody knows, none of that stuff comes for free. There’s costs involved with all of it. We will continue to work to get those numbers down, so the taxpayers aren’t picking up that bill, but there will be pain in those changes,” Sortman said.

He indicated that an announcement will be made hopefully within two weeks to the public, the haulers, the bars and restaurants about the changes as they get finalized. A vote on the changes will follow before anything takes effect.

“I just kind of wanted to give everybody the heads up as we look into the latest losses at our RMS (Resource Management Services), which is the recycling program. I think anybody probably realized we had to get there eventually,” he said.

“We’re not a board that’s looking at eliminating recycling in Lycoming County, so please don’t go down that path. It is a service, but all services have a cost that we have to control. We’re not looking to not recycle in Lycoming County…That is something that is, I think, near and dear to a lot of people’s hearts, and what they want to be able to do. The container service that sits around in many locations is not going away. We still expect our residents to recycle what they can, and where they can, and how they feel they want to,” Sortman said.