ANN ARBOR, MI – Going against city staff’s advice to OK an $11.2-million contract to haul the city’s recyclables to Lansing, City Council is setting its sights on reopening Ann Arbor’s own recycling plant.

Council heard an outpouring of support for the move Monday night, Dec. 2, after more than three years of hearing similar pleas.

Many residents, including former city employees who managed the city’s recycling and waste programs for over 20 years, are urging the city to hire local nonprofit Recycle Ann Arbor and get the Materials Recovery Facility off Platt Road up and running again.

It’s been over three years since the city halted operations at the single-stream recycling plant due to safety concerns.

The recyclables that residents place in curbside bins are now trucked 250 miles to Cincinnati for processing.

“This has been heartbreaking as a council member to sit here and watch us continue to ship recyclables off,” said Council Member Julie Grand, D-3rd Ward. “It just flies in the face of what we stand for as a community, what people want.”

Council voted 9-2 to direct city staff to negotiate an agreement with Recycle Ann Arbor to rebuild and operate the Materials Recovery Facility for an initial period of 10 years.

“The contract will include requirements that RAA submit timely and detailed reports as required to assess performance and that the city will receive a host municipality fee for all non-city materials processed and that the city will receive the best terms offered to any other entity processing materials through the MRF,” the resolution states.

The city administrator is directed to report to council on any budget changes needed to implement the agreement and council is expected to vote on the contract before it’s executed.

City staff had recommended council instead approve a five-year contract with Flint-based Emterra Environmental USA Corp., a division of Canadian firm Emterra Group, to haul the city’s recyclables to a new Emterra facility in Lansing starting next July.

Community members argued Recycle Ann Arbor’s proposal to equip and reopen the local plant is better financially and environmentally, and creates local jobs, while providing opportunity to once again use the plant as a community education center and for recycling tours.

City staff pointed to Emterra’s experience running recycling plants and marketing recycling commodities, raising concerns the Recycle Ann Arbor proposal may expose the city to financial risk.

The city’s existing hauling contract with Recycle Ann Arbor, which started Michigan’s first curbside recycling program locally in 1978, expires June 30.

Council Member Chip Smith, D-5th Ward, proposed negotiating with Recycle Ann Arbor to reopen the city’s plant.

“It’s extremely important to note that the Environmental Commission has, since I have been on it, had discussions and continued to recommend reopening the MRF,” Smith said. “We had the director of the Michigan Recycling Coalition come in and tell us that there is a shortage of material recovery facilities in Michigan.”

Ann Arbor was once a leader in recycling, Smith said, recalling the community passed an environmental bond in the 1990s and made significant investments in the city’s recycling plant.

“All of this has been the community saying time and time again we want to do this work here,” he said.

Council Members Jeff Hayner, D-1st Ward, and Jane Lumm, I-2nd Ward, were opposed.

Lumm said she thinks the city’s staff conducted a fair process and she supported the recommendation to hire Emterra. Doing otherwise, she said, makes a mockery of the process.

Emterra has capital resources that Recycle Ann Arbor may or may not have, Hayner said.

“RAA may be coming back to us for capital if the MRF needs to be redone every five years as packaging changes and stuff, and so that kind of exposes us,” he said. “My other concern is, with the volatility in the recycling markets, that a company like Emterra may have better market access than RAA might.”

The city’s scoring system used to evaluate the Emterra and Recycle Ann Arbor proposals didn’t given enough weight to pricing, said Council Member Jack Eaton, D-4th Ward.

“Only 30% of the score was associated with price,” he said. “And so looking at the figures in these bids, I really believe that RAA came in at a lower price, but because so little of the score was based on the price of the bids, they didn’t get the advantage that a low price should.”

There also wasn’t enough consideration of the carbon emission impacts of shipping recyclables to Lansing, Eaton said.

“Our carbon consideration was only like 3.5% of the total score. We’ve made a commitment to reduce our carbon to zero,” he said.

The community needs a local recycling plant not just for the materials that Ann Arbor generates, but for the broader area, Eaton said.

“Our MRF in the past has had greater capacity than the city of Ann Arbor all by itself could satisfy, and we took in materials from other collections,” he said. “And so having a MRF in our region allows other communities to use that facility without shipping it a long distance.”

Craig Hupy, the city’s public services administrator, suggested it doesn’t make that much of a difference whether recyclables are hauled to a local facility or to Lansing for sorting and processing, since that may be a small portion of the ultimate distance they travel.

For example, whether the city hired Emterra or Recycle Ann Arbor, both indicated much of the paper products processed would end up being used by Pratt Industries in Indiana, Hupy said.

“Emterra made it very plain and clear that they have eight people focused on marketing, and part of their marketing goal is to place the end use as close to the MRF that’s generating it as possible,” he said. “And when we asked that question of RAA, what is their marketing strategy, they had one person part-time doing it.”

There’s still some debate over just how much of the plant’s equipment is reusable and what needs to be replaced. Recycle Ann Arbor expects to use state grant funding to pay for some equipment.