Syracuse, N.Y. -- The cost for haulers to bring trash to Onondaga County's incinerator will rise nearly 7 percent next year.
The "tipping fee" charged by the Onondaga County Resource Recovery Agency will increase by $6, from $89 to $95, in 2019, the agency board voted recently.
Private haulers will likely pass on the increase to their customers by raising rates. Municipalities that pay for garbage hauling with property taxes will face the choice of raising taxes or cutting costs elsewhere. Syracuse's garbage disposal costs will rise by more than $200,000 next year.
The main factor behind the fee increase is the exploding costs to recycle paper after China stopped accepting it from the U.S. That caused the prices received for some types of paper to drop as much as 98 percent.
OCRRA also signed a new contract last week with Waste Management, which runs the Recycle America center in Liverpool that takes the county's recyclables. Waste Management had canceled the contract after the price the company received for paper plummeted this summer.
The old contract capped OCRRA's cost for recyclables at $10 per ton. The cap in the new contract is $49 per ton, raising OCRRA's maximum cost by nearly five times. With about 38,000 tons of materials recycled, OCRRA could pay Waste Management nearly $2 million next year.
"We see this as an important stopgap measure to keep things moving forward and to look at making recycling even better while we hold on tight during this very very rocky time," said Dereth Glance, OCRRA's executive director.
OCRRA had planned to raise the tipping fee by $7 a ton to cover the shortfall, but the agency board lowered that to $6 and used $340,000 in savings to balance the budget, approved Wednesday, Glance said. The agency also raised the cost of dumping construction debris from $46 to $52 per ton.
Tipping fees are OCRAA's main source of revenue, providing about $30 million of the agency's $36.8 million annual budget. The other major source is the sale of electricity from the incinerator, which will be about $4 million next year.
Glance urged residents to keep putting recyclables into their blue bins.
"Everything is still being recycled," she said.
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