By Nov. 1, nearly all the 300-gallon recycling tubs in Longview will be removed and each household will be issued a 90-gallon cart labeled with a bar code so inspectors can tell who isn’t following recycling rules.

Households caught repeatedly throwing trash in recycling bins with have their carts removed. Then they’ll be charged only for garbage collection, which is more than double the regular rate for a single-family home.

The Longview City Council last month approved the switch as part of its five-year contract extension with Waste Control, the private company that handles the city’s trash and recycling.

Apartment complexes with more than four units will keep their 300-gallon recycling tubs, but the same rules will apply.

All 300-gallon trash receptacles — the green ones — will remain in alleys.

About 770 large recycling tubs will be removed from alleys. Waste Control will provide roughly 4,620 households with the new 90-gallon carts at no extra cost. (Some areas of Longview already use individual carts for recycling, as well as garbage.)

Tags will be provided to customers telling the proper place to put the carts. There will be a three-month grace period in which Waste Control will collect all recycling containers, even if they’re not set out in the proper place or if they’re obstructed.

If inspectors find contaminants in a recycling cart, they’ll tag the container and re-inspect it within two months. If no trash is found, the case is closed. But if inspectors find contaminants again, the cart will be re-inspected within two months for a third time.

If the recycling cart still contains trash, the cart will be removed and the resident would be charged $36.38 a month for trash collection rather than $15.45. Regular service can be restored in six months.

Apartment complexes with repeat violations would have their recycling tubs removed and replaced with garbage tubs, and their rates would rise significantly, based on the number of containers they have.

Gregory Hannon, the city’s solid waste/ recycling manager, recommended the changes after spending two years attempting to reduce the amount of trash in recycling bins. But an extensive public education program and $30,000 worth of instructional stickers for the containers didn’t produce the drastic improvement in recycling contamination he’d hoped for, although they did help.

In February, six months after large labels were affixed to recycling and trash bins so people could easily tell them apart, recycling bins citywide contained an average of 35 percent trash, down from 52 percent before the program launched.

But it’s still a long way from the city’s goal of a 10 percent contamination rate, which doesn’t sound unreasonable when compared to the cities of La Grand, Ore., Kirkland, Wash, Bellevue, Issaquah and Tacoma, which have recycling contamination rates of 3 to 5 percent.

The city is concerned about contamination rates because it pays Waste Control to sort through the recycling. Because there’s so much garbage in it, the city’s revenues for selling recyclables are less than what Waste Control charges to handle them, and the recycling program is losing money.

When considering the Waste Control contract extension, the City Council debated changing the color of the recycling bins from brown to a distinctive color, such as blue. But the council rejected the idea after Hannon said the switch might cause confusion because Kelso’s garbage containers are blue. Also, he said, the city recently printed new recycling brochures that specify the colors of the recycling and garbage containers.

Related articles:

Recycling compliance rate getting better, but there's still room for improvement   (May 8)

Longview bin labeling begins  (Aug. 31, 2008)

City to spend $30,000 to label recycle bins  (June 29, 2008)