Miami-Dade County’s recycling program faces a messy challenge: sticker shock. After prices locked in from a 2008 processing contract expired in the spring, Miami-Dade saw recycling costs instantly double when county commissioners agreed to a two-year deal with Waste Management and private haulers.

An extra $13 million a year for recycling services is helping drive a proposed 7% increase in the $509 fee that nearly 345,000 households pay each year for twice-weekly trash collection and recycling pick-ups every other week across Miami-Dade “That pricing was extremely favorable to the county,” said Dawn McCormick, a spokesperson for Waste Management, which runs a recycling plant in Pembroke Pines used by local governments in South Florida. “The current extension rate is fair pricing given the increase in costs over those 15 years.”

AN EXTRA $36 PER YEAR FOR TRASH AND RECYCLING?

Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s $11.7 billion budget includes an increase to $545 per household for trash and recycling, a rate that would mean an extra $36 per year for homes outside of city limits that rely on the county for municipal services. The trash fee is also paid by residents of the 10 municipalities with contracts for county trash and recycling routes. When Levine Cava tried to pass the higher fee in July, county commissioners balked and voted to take up the issue again at their next meeting on Sept. 6. That’s setting up a showdown over the future of recycling in Miami-Dade. At the July 18 session, Commissioner Kevin Cabrera tried to cancel the Waste Management contract altogether as a way to avoid the higher fee. He didn’t have the votes but said he needs to be convinced the recycling fee is worth the money.

“If we’re going to be investing in any sort of program, we’ve got to make sure it makes sense,” he said. “We should not be recycling old ideas and old contracts.” Ending recycling would mean halting a weekly service for about half of the county as Levine Cava and seven commissioners head into reelection campaigns next year.

MIAMI-DADE WITHOUT RECYCLING: ‘SLIGHTLY TERRIFYING’

“That’s slightly terrifying, to be honest,” said Amanda Prieto, a neighborhood activist in West Kendall on the end-of-recycling proposal by Cabrera, who represents an adjoining district and is up for reelection in 2026. “There’s going to a large number of people who would still want to recycle. What would I pay if I end up doing this myself?” Ending county recycling also would complicate Miami-Dade’s compliance with state recycling requirements, though some local governments across the state have halted curbside recycling as costs increased. But most continue charging residents for a service that typically represents a sliver of the expenses governments absorb for collecting and disposing of household trash.

Even at the new cost of $22 million a year for pick-up and processing, recycling only accounts for about 12 cents of every dollar in trash fees homeowners would pay the county under Levine Cava’s proposal. The higher fee also wouldn’t fix the financial problems facing the county’s Solid Waste department, where recycling accounts for only about 3% of the $686 million budget. The solid waste system generates revenue from trash fees as well from payments municipal and private-sector haulers pay to use county landfills and the incinerator plant in Doral before it was shuttered by a fire in February. That fire thrust the system into turmoil because the incinerator burned about 44% of the 2 million tons of trash, yard waste and other debris that runs through the county’s solid waste system each year.

Most of the trash that would go to the Doral plant now is being shipped to a Waste Management landfill in Central Florida under contract with Miami-Dade, along with a county-owned landfill in South Miami-Dade.

Levine Cava hasn’t announced her plan for the future of the incinerator, which Doral leaders want moved. Last month, the county’s Solid Waste director, Michael Fernandez, resigned in a split with Levine Cava and warned Miami-Dade would have to halt suburban development if the commission didn’t approve a long-term plan for trash disposal after the fire. In a recent interview, Levine Cava said she expected to release that plan ahead of the vote on the trash fees for the 2024 budget year, which begins Oct. 1.

Elected to her first term in late 2020, Levine Cava emphasized that Miami-Dade has under-funded Solid Waste Management for years and that keeping fees flat would mean changes in what residents currently expect when they put their green and blue bins outside each week. “If we don’t have that fee increase,” she said, “we’re going to have to cut services.”

The extra $36 in the yearly trash fee would generate about $12 million in new revenue. That roughly matches the $13 million in new recycling expenses the county commission approved in March when it endorsed two-year deals with Waste Management and two haulers that service blue recycling bins on all county routes. Ending those contracts would save $22 million, though Miami-Dade would still need to pay to pick up and dispose the roughly 60,000 tons of recycling that residents put in the blue bins each year.

TRASH IN MIAMI-DADE EQUALS FINANCIAL STRAIN

Commissioners last year approved Levine Cava’s plan to use $11 million in COVID stimulus funds to narrow a gap in Solid Waste’s budget. Commissioners also approved a $25 fee increase for 2023. This year, the shortfall is $39 million.

While the higher fee would cover about a third of the revenue gap, Levine Cava wants to borrow about $27 million from Solid Waste’s reserves to fund the rest. That means delaying a reckoning on higher fees or less service that can only be deferred for so long. In a June 21 memo, Levine Cava said Miami-Dade will need extra cash to pay for expanding its two landfills in the coming years. Without commission approval for the expansions, which could mean higher landfills near residential areas, Miami-Dade would lose disposal fees from private-sector and municipal trucks. Levine Cava wrote that the resulting revenue squeeze means the county’s Solid Waste coffers would “ultimately be financially bankrupt, unable to support the services they once provided.”

While Solid Waste’s financial woes have been simmering, the higher recycling costs came all at once when commissioners approved the new Waste Management contract on March 7. The old deal delivered Miami-Dade a yearly rebate of about $700,000 from Waste Management. The new deal flipped that dramatically, with Miami-Dade paying the company about $8.6 million. Contracts for recycling pick-up services by Waste Connections and Coastal Waste also increased by nearly $4 million per year.

A 2008 RECYCLING CONTRACT COMES TO AN END, SPIKING COSTS

The old Waste Management contract signed in 2008 mostly shielded Miami-Dade from big shifts in the recycling market when, in 2019, China ended its practice of buying raw materials from Waste Management and its competitors. That sent prices plunging as the market shifted to the higher standards of domestic buyers of plastic and other recycled material in the U.S., such as PepsiCo and Coca-Cola.

While not as profitable for recycling companies, demand remains high for plastic, aluminum and paper as consumer companies try to meet self-imposed and regulatory targets for using recycled material in their products. California, the largest market in the U.S., requires products sold there to use 15% recycled plastic, climbing to 25% in 2025. Recycling gets a cool reception from some environmental groups, who see the emphasis on reusing materials as masking the larger issue of too much plastic being used for consumer goods. Laura Reynolds, an environmental consultant who is part of the Plastics Free Initiative of Dade County, said Miami-Dade needs to continue curbside recycling but also work on reducing plastic consumption in general.

“We do need to eventually move to something other than recycling,” she said. “Which means we have to recycle for now, but we need to push to end single-use plastics.” Levine Cava said her overall trash strategy will pick on that theme, with a focus on “zero-waste” to reduce the amount of plastic Miami-Dade purchases. Another long-term change could set up Solid Waste for more stable funding. Though it can’t happen before the 2024 budget gets approved, Levine Cava said her administration is working on a proposal to shift garbage and recycling funding from flat fees to a new property tax. Miami-Dade already funds its Fire Rescue and Library departments with their own property taxes, which are charged only to homeowners and businesses in parts of the county without city fire or library services.

MIAMI-DADE COULD GET A SOLID WASTE PROPERTY TAX

A Solid Waste property tax, or “millage,” would free commissioners from having to increase fees yearly to keep up with inflation.

New construction and rising taxable values are usually enough to generate ample extra dollars without raising tax rates. This year, Miami-Dade’s fire and library tax rates remain flat in Levine Cava’s proposed budget, but generate a combined $70 million in additional revenue. Paying for trash collection through property taxes would also shift costs to more affluent households because the millage is charged against a property’s value rather the current system in which each home pays the same $509 fee to fund trash collection and recycling. “There’s a way to accomplish it in a much more progressive fashion than a flat rate,” said Jimmy Morales, chief operating officer under Levine Cava.

The article was updated with the correct frequency of recycling service by Miami-Dade County’s Solid Waste Management Department, which is every other week.