Curbside recycling in Baker City probably won’t start until 2026, according to the president of Baker Sanitary Service.

Stephen Henry said on Monday, Feb. 10, that state grants that will help the company pay for start up expenses, including buying trucks and rollcarts, and hauling recyclables to a sorting plant, probably won’t be available until August.

Based on that, he said he expects that Baker Sanitary, which has a franchise agreement with Baker City to collect trash in the city, will not be able to start curbside recycling until 2026.

The Baker City Council approved the plan in July 2024. Henry said at the time that he hoped to start curbside recycling either in the second half of 2025 or in 2026.

Now, city residents who want to recycle items such as plastic milk jugs, cardboard and paper have to bring them to Baker Sanitary’s self-serve recycling center at 12th and Campbell streets.

When curbside recycling starts, customers will place those items in a rollcart. These will be “co-mingled” containers, Henry said, meaning customers won’t need to sort the items but can place all of them in the same container.

Some items won’t be eligible for curbside collection, including glass jars, motor oil, spray cans and large metal pieces, Henry said.

Residents will still be able to recycle those items at the recycling center, which will stay open after curbside pickup starts.

(Glass containers can break, contaminating other recyclables, according to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.)

Baker City is one of just six Oregon cities with a population of more than 4,000 that don’t offer curbside recycling, according to a letter Henry sent to the city in 2024.

The Oregon Legislature in 2021 passed a law that imposes new requirements for curbside recycling starting July 1, 2025.

Henry said that isn’t the firm deadline for Baker City to begin curbside recycling, however.

Without weekly curbside recycling, Baker City would struggle to meet the state requirements, particularly since the city surpassed 10,000 residents in the 2020 federal census, City Manager Barry Murphy wrote in a report to city councilors in July 2024.

Baker County has failed to meet its state recycling target of 25% of the total weight of trash produced in the county, averaging about 19% over the past three years.

Henry said it has been harder to meet the state target since China stopped taking plastic items several years ago.

Henry said Baker Sanitary doesn’t plan to offer curbside recycling outside the Baker City limits.

Curbside recycling will boost customers’ bills

Henry said last year that although he didn’t have a firm figure, Baker Sanitary likely would need to increase residential rates in the 30% range to cover the additional cost of curbside recycling.

Baker Sanitary charges residential customers $20.90 per month for weekly garbage collection.

Henry said on Monday that he hopes to present a proposed rate schedule to the Baker City Council in March. He didn’t cite a projected range for the rate increase.

Henry said the state grants will help for start up costs for curbside recycling, but not for most long-term operational costs, such as wages for drivers. The state reimbursement is supposed to continue, though, for trucking recyclables to a sorting facility.

The franchise agreement that gives Baker Sanitary the exclusive right to collect garbage within the city also gives the city council the authority to approve or reject rate increases by Baker Sanitary, with one exception — the company can boost rates by up to 5% each year without Council approval.

The company boosted collection rates by 4.8% in May 2023 and by 5% the previous year. Baker Sanitary didn’t request any rate hikes between 2007 and 2019.

Henry said he plans to propose that curbside recycling rollcarts would be emptied every other week, rather than weekly as with garbage. The bi-weekly pickup of recyclables is easier logistically for the company, and Henry believes that given the larger size of the new rollcart, that schedule should be suitable for most customers.

(He said about 95% of customers have their trash collected weekly, with about 5% choosing bi-weekly pickup.)

Henry said the recycling rollcarts will have a capacity of 90 or 95 gallons, compared with the current garbage rollcarts, which have a capacity of 65 gallons.

The larger size of the recycling carts make it easier for people to place bulky items such as corrugated cardboard, he said.

Besides buying rollcarts, Henry said Baker Sanitary will have to buy a new truck to pick up recyclables and construct a new building connected to the recycling center at 12th and Campbell to accommodate the expected large increase in volume of recycled material once curbside collection starts.

Henry said the co-mingled items in the curbside rollcarts will be hauled to a facility, likely in the Portland area, where the materials will be separated.

Recyclables left in the individual bins at the recycling center in Baker City — there’s one for cardboard, another for newspapers, another for milk jugs, for instance — will continue to be baled separately and trucked to a recycling facility.

Henry said it’s not financially feasible, in small markets such as Baker City, to sort co-mingled recyclables. The “massive” sorting facilities cost tens of millions of dollars to build and are typically in metropolitan areas, he said.

Henry said Baker Sanitary occasionally hauls recyclables to the Boise area, which is closer than Portland, but Portland is typically the most affordable option.