City Council hears presentation on North Platte recycling program


RecyclingMonster - A presentation about the future of recycling in North Platte was heard before The North Platte City Council at their work session on Wednesday evening.

City Public Service Director, Layne Groseth, opened the presentation by saying, "As you’re all aware in the past 12 to 16 months, the recycling industry has been pretty much in flux with China closing up most of the markets for recyclables."

Keep North Platte and Lincoln County Beautiful conducted a survey to find out who in the community is utilizing the recycling program and what type they use most, whether it be curbside or taking their items to a roll-off container.

"The community recycling survey was born out of the community meetings," said Executive Director of Keep North Platte and Lincoln County Beautiful, Mona Anderson, "We had two community meetings that we invited everybody from the community to attend to come and just voice their opinion’s on our recycling program, current recycling and what some options might be for future recycling programs."

Wednesday night Groseth and Anderson, along with Pam Pacheco of ABC Recycling, presented six different options for the future of city recycling based on what they found from the community survey.

"We did the survey because we knew our current program is very hard to sustain because the prices are always changing it’s hard to budget for that and it’s also hard to predict for the consumers what it’s going to cost the citizens to have the service," said Groseth.

The six different plans presented included:
1: Maintain all aspects of existing program
2: Sorted residential collection
3: Increased drop-off locations/no residential collection
4: Limited city sponsored recycling
5: Sorted curbside and drop-off at a single location
6: No city sponsored recycling

Groseth said the city council will now take the information they have been given and make a decision at a city council meeting sometime in the next two months.