Dive Brief:

• A recycling center in Greeley, Colorado is closing its doors due to high cost of operations, which exceed the revenue the facility is capable of generating.

• Residents in the town are not willing to pay haulers an additional fee necessary to include recycling pickup added to their residential collection.

• Gallegos Sanitation acquired the center in 2012 after the previous recycler, National Recycling, went under.

Dive Insight:

The company which owns and operates the facility is not able to sustain the business even though its dumpsters are overflowing with recyclables. Depositing illegal materials such as e-waste and household trash created an additional expense to the rising cost of operations.

Greeley's Natural Resources manager, Karen Scopel, said that "the commodity market for recyclables has been down for a while. The operator hasn't been able to make a profit." This statement is reminiscent of what Waste Management CEO David Steiner said in November: "Recycling is not profitable. We have lost money in recycling over the last one and a half years." 

Greeley isn't the only town experiencing a loss of profits in recycling. After new, stricter recycling regulations were implemented in China, various towns in Northern New Jersey have lamented a loss of up to $500,000 in revenue from recycling. Industry professionals have stated that China's "Green Fence" is "a serious situation that can have major repercussions for the future recycling industry in the U.S."