Groups Petition CalRecycle To Stop Overpaying Haulers For Contaminated Material, Says Consumer Watchdog

SACRAMENTO, Calif., Nov. 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Consumer Watchdog and the Container Recycling Institute have petitioned the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle) to take regulatory action to address the significant overpayment to curbside programs for a "commingled rate." 

"The overpayment results from an outdated and today flawed procedure used in calculating the 'commingled rate' to curbside programs that includes payment for the contamination contained in mixed loads of CRV and non-CRV containers from curbside bins and other collection programs," the petition reads. "The funds are paid from unredeemed consumer bottle deposits in the Beverage Container Recycling Fund and amount to a waste of millions of dollars of consumers' money.

"California's current process assumes that 100% of the materials are sorted perfectly, but studies—including your own—show that is not the case," the petition states. "In 2017, the Container Recycling Institute (CRI) reported CalRecycle's own 2016 estimate of how much contamination in loads was costing in payments to curbside programs. 'Based on its measurements of the amount of contamination in bales from curbside programs, CalRecycle estimates that the current system of providing CRV and other payments based on bale weights, coupled with the quantity of non-CRV items in bale, results in over-payments of $10 million per year,' CRI stated. 'That is, these payments are being made not for the recyclable metal and plastic, but for the contaminants themselves present in bales of PET, HDPE, and aluminum.'"

The petition recommends "the Department should follow the procedure outlined under Title 14 Regulation 2930 (d) to calculate the commingled rate by having the loads 'presented to processors' purchasing the materials sampled. This means the materials must be sampled after they have come out the other end of Materials Recovery Facilities (MRF) sorting lines. They should be sampled at the point at which they have not yet been baled and prepared for sale instead of at the front end. This way the weight of the contamination can be accounted for and payments can be reduced accordingly."

"Curbside operators should not be paid extra money amounting to a bonus for garbage," the petition concludes. "The new commingled payments that some curbside programs are demanding—without a new procedure to exclude payment for garbage—unfairly adds to existing state payments and profitable waste hauler municipal contracts, franchise agreements and scrap market sales."

SOURCE Consumer Watchdog