If you recently passed by the recycling drop-off on Camino Real, across the street from Mingus Union High School, you may have been disappointed to no longer find recycling drop-off there, being greeted instead with a sign:
“Starting Wednesday, July 3rd this recycling center will be closed. The recycling center located at 1500 W. Mingus Ave will remain open, but limited to the hours of Mon-Fri, 7-5.”
The recycling pick-up there was never operated by the city of Cottonwood nor by Patriot Disposal Inc., the contractor that handles the rest of recycling processing for Cottonwood.
For years, it was maintained by the nonprofit Sedona Recycles, and according to Jill McCutcheon, its executive director, the site no longer made sense for them.
“The site had doubled in size and service requirements in the last four years with no increase in funding to offset the service increase,” McCutcheon wrote in an email.
“Because of the location the site was being dumped on regularly and Sedona Recycles was responsible for picking up the dumped items and paying to have them taken to the Transfer Station.
“In the last two weeks that the site was there we removed 18 mattresses as well bags of yard debris and construction debris. This type of dumping was a regular occurrence.”
The original implementation of the site had been through program with Yavapai County to handle recycling for unincorporated areas in the Verde Valley. However, since the site is actually within the city limits of Cottonwood, when seeking more funding, Sedona Recycles contracted with the city of Cottonwood. The city did not express interest in funding recycling pickup there, feeling instead that the transfer station on Mingus Avenue is adequate for the town’s recycling needs.
“We’ve already got a center that’s working, and we don’t check residency there,” Cottonwood City Manager Ron Corbin said. “Patriot runs that and they have not mentioned any capacity problems.”
According to McCutcheon, the costs of operating the Camino Real site well outstripped what they could make on the site, especially with it so far from the company’s base in Sedona.
“Pricing on recyclable materials has taken up to a 90% plus drop in the last year in the case of cardboard and we are losing as much as $1,000 per load that we send out and could not continue to haul the material from so far away without proper funding to cover the service and processing cost,” McCutcheon wrote.
