AUBURN -- Recycling in Maine's fifth largest city could be getting tossed.

Auburn's city council voted unanimously Monday night to take the program's budget away, though that could be reversed during a council meeting later this month.

Residents like Amber Scruggs have recycled for years.

"You know you make all this trash, you hope that it gets recycled, you hope that boxes get turned into something," Scruggs said.

But without as much of a market for recycled materials, it just becomes trash.

"If the commodity market isn't strong enough to support reselling those recycled products, be it cardboard, plastics or glass, it's actually being compacted and then sent up to landfills in northern Maine," Auburn Mayor Jason Levesque said.

Levesque says collecting this uses a lot of gas and manpower for the roughly 7 percent of residents who are recycling.

Another option would be to bring it to Maine Waste-to-Energy, which is in the city.

"So when you're looking at what has the best environmental impact, it truly is going through the incinerator, having it turn into green electricity," Levesque said.

The mayor says the change would save the city $230,000 annually.

It comes as Auburn will be required by Casella to get new bins for automated pickup.

"We're going to take this money and we're going to actually offset the purchase of those receptacles," Levesque said.

For residents like Scruggs, she gets it.

"I understand sort of the cost of wanting to pay for trucks and getting a better system for workers to pick up trash and make it easier," Scruggs said.

She wishes there was more demand so her trash could be turned into something renewed.

"We really need the policies and laws in place to make it practical to do recycling," Scruggs said.

If approved later in May, recycling would go away sometime in the late spring or early summer.