Thank you.

I want to welcome everyone to our August 15, 2023 recycling workshop.

Mr.

Manager, please, sir.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

So as you know, uh we made significant changes to the recycling program in the city last year, and we've provided council with quarterly reports per council's direction each quarter since that time.

So it's now time for our one-year review, so we'll give you a recap of uh how the recycling program is going here in Chesapeake, and then what we would like to do is close with talking to you a little bit about the future of recycling in the city of Chesapeake.

But we're going to start a little bit with some of the uh outcomes that that council desired to achieve, uh move into status report, then talk about the future of recycling.

So with that, I'll turn it over to public works director, Earl Sorry.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Manager, and good afternoon.

Uh appreciate the opportunity to share our recycling journey from the past year with you.

Um our agenda for today is to kind of give you the year in review, and again uh you've seen the quarterly data, you know, this will wrap that up.

Also to share some lessons learned that that we gleaned uh throughout this past year and to talk about you know what the future may hold for us in terms of recycling.

So we'll start by uh revisiting the desired outcomes that council has shared with us, and this has kind of been our guiding uh you know for us as we've gone throughout the process.

So uh reduced cost, improving the quality of the recycling stream, and providing additional choices, and we'll kind of talk about each in turn as we go through the presentation.

So the next series of slides are all slides that you've seen before, but uh I'll get through those quickly.

But you know, today in Chesapeake, we have eight recycling drop-off centers that are operating uh throughout the city, and we have one provider uh now providing subscription-based uh recycling uh services.

And you can see the map here.

Uh those sites are uh geographically dispersed to cover the city, and you know, we have the original seven, and then an eighth site was added at the animal services facility, uh they collect uh aluminum cans only at that location.

Uh the next series of photos shows uh the the drop-off sites, and you know what one of the things I'm very proud of is as you look at these sites, they're very presentable, they're very clean, and you know, I I uh you give give credit to staff for that.

They've worked very hard to to make sure that uh these sites are are clean and presentable and um you know in good operating order.

Uh also uh point you to the uh picture of the municipal center uh site.

So that is the relocated site that's on the west side of the uh facility uh over behind the uh Great Bridge Rec Center.

Uh and you know, since it's moved from the east side of the facility to the west side, uh pleased to report the activity is very similar to what we had previously, and the volumes collected are very similar as well.

So you know, we continue to track the performance at each site, and you can see that the municipal center site leads the way, followed by uh Russell Library and Western Branch and Duke Creek Park and so on.

And you know, we use this data uh to right size uh the number of containers at each facility and also to um inform us on the number of collections that need to happen uh at each site.

So again, we we talked about site maintenance, but you know these sites are uh visited daily by our waste management staff to include Saturdays and Sundays, our contract hauler GFL.

Uh they service uh each site on a regular basis, several times a week.

Uh they do not, however, provide Sunday service, and so we do provide uh again clean up uh if there are any overflows at any of the sites, and then they respond on demand whenever we see uh uh demand spikes.

Uh so again, when when we were setting these up, there were a lot of naysayers out there.

You know, a lot of people said nobody would use these sites, others said they would just turn into trash heaps, you know, by these concerted efforts.

Uh they haven't been trash heaps, they've been very presentable.

And uh the volumes collected far out far uh exceeded our original expectations.

So uh we were able to collect over three thousand tons of recyclables uh since July of last year, and in doing so uh we have been able to uh satisfy that goal of a cleaner recycling stream because the contamination rate is far less at the drop-off sites than what we had with uh curbside recycling.

And so again, the program was set up to where I, as the public works director, could authorize private contractors to contract with citizens for you know at-home recycling services.

We posted that information on the website.

We had three that were providing the service, and then we had a fourth providing uh compost uh collection.

Uh today we're down to uh recyclops as the uh sole provider.

Uh Happy Planet, uh, they raised their rates to $100 per month in March, and then as of this month, they're no longer providing service in Chesapeake, and then uh similarly uh TFC recycling uh ceased their subscription uh program in Chesapeake in July of this year.

So talk a little bit about a little bit about waste management operations.

Uh whenever we stopped curbside, we did have to plus up our waste management operations, and we did that uh to account for the additional materials that was no longer in the blue bins but was uh now in the brown bins, and so we expanded our routes uh citywide from 20 to 24, and we utilize existing staff to services new routes, and you know, our our timeliness uh is very similar to what we had you know previously, so you know that that is working for us.

Uh and certainly you know, we need to talk about our cost data.

So, you know, we've dug into that, and you know, this is a look at our um our last year cost for the drop-off center.

So to set the centers up, it was roughly 250,000, and that was to prep the sites to put in the concrete pads to get the electrical service to the fencing, uh the security cameras, and then we had uh ongoing operating costs, and you can see uh 478,000 dollars for our contract hauler, and that was for servicing and transporting the materials, another 136,000 dollars for our in-house labor to monitor the sites and do cleanups as necessary.

Uh I did include truck rentals for waste management.

So you can see that's uh nearly $770,000.

Uh that that's a cost that will eventually come down significantly as we uh update our fleet of vehicles.

Uh but since that was an actual cost, I included it here.

It does skew the numbers uh somewhat as we'll talk about in a little more detail later.

But you know, you certain certainly didn't want to include a cost uh and later be accused of of not accounting for everything that we incurred during the year.

You also see the tipping fee uh of eight hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars.

So basically that's the amount that we paid CIPSA for additional material that was uh carried to them.

So our total cost, you know, the all-in cost, including our capital startup cost was just over two and a half million uh the recurring cost, so excluding the startup cost was uh just at 2.25 million dollars.

So yeah, if you'll recall when we terminated the previous contract, the value of that contract was right at four and a half million dollars.

And I put a footnote here that uh if the contract would have continued that there was a contract provision that would have increased uh the amount of that contract by five percent in November, and that would have brought that amount to four point seven million dollars.

So kind of looking at how we did last year compared to the previous year.

So in the last year of our curbside uh recycling collections, uh it was reported that 12,389 tons were collected.

Now that's the gross tons.