Recycling in unincorporated Ada County may cost you a bit more in the near future – or be curbed indefinitely.
Ada County commissioners may choose to stop collecting mixed paper after China – the former top importer of recyclables in the world – recently placed heavier restrictions on what materials they’ll buy.
“It’s kind of put everybody into a, ‘What are we going to do?’ kind of mode,” says Dave Case, chair of the Ada County Commission.
He says residents living in unincorporated areas of the county have a few options: you can still recycle mixed paper, which includes junk mail and newspaper, but it’ll cost an extra $1.25 month.
You’d pay another 90-cents a month to keep recycling services without mixed paper.
There's also a third option: Halting curbside recycling altogether until the recycling market recovers. Customers would pocket an extra dollar a month under that plan.
Commission chair Dave Case says the county has been weighing its options carefully for a reason.
“I don’t want to have to go before the public and say, ‘Oh, well, yeah we’re raising your rates here because of plastic,’ and then come back two months later and say, ‘Well, now we have to raise them again because of paper,’ and then two months down the later something else comes up,” he says.
Boise and other municipalities are still considering their own options when it comes to mixed paper, but have made changes to what kind of plastic they’ll accept.
Residents can let commissioners know how they feel through an online survey or during a public hearing scheduled at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 18 at the Ada County Courthouse.
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