Wrangell Sentinel -

Sentinel Illustration

Some 66 percent of Petersburg's sanitation customers pay for a 32 gallon cart and receive the recycling incentive rate of $28.19/month. Though this rate is among the highest of all communities surveyed, Petersburg is also the only municipality that offers curbside pickup of commingled recycling as part of its sanitation service. Juneau also offers curbside pickup for recyclables, though sanitation customers pay an additional $5.65 for the service, bringing their small-bin rates to $27.50/month, comparable with Petersburg's. Though not widely used, Community Waste Services (CWS) offers Haines residents a weekly curbside trash and recycling pickup service for $60/month. However, almost 90 percent of residents report self-hauling garbage and recyclables to one of two collection sites, CWS or Acme Transfer, at a cost of $0.25 per pound. That information comes from the May 2014 report Haines Waste Management Survey Results in which 91 percent of residents also reported self-hauling recyclables to Haines Friends of Recycling or CWS. A June 2014 report (Interim Solid Waste Management Plan Report) for the City and Borough of Sitka named investigating curbside recycling as a short term priority. Implementing a curbside recycling program has also been a topic of discussion in Wrangell in the past several years, though the initial investment-including the cost of purchasing a baler, which the sanitation facility does not currently have-has presented a roadblock especially in the recent fiscal climate.