On Your Dime: Contaminated recycling costs Rhode Island taxpayers millions

Residents tossing trash into the recycling bin is costing taxpayers big bucks.

Every week, truckloads of recycled waste are dumped into a landfill after getting rejected at Rhode Island Resource Recovery for having a contamination level of 10% or more.

Roughly 29,000 tons of rejected recycling ended up in Rhode Island’s landfill last year, enough to fill 895 football fields. That represents 4,900 more tons than 2023 and over 23,000 more tons than 2019, indicating the problem is getting worse instead of better.

Each rejected load chalks up a $250 fee for the city or town the truck came from.

The NBC 10 I-Team crunched the numbers throughout the state.

Over 2 million pounds of rejected recycling cost East Providence taxpayers more than $91,000 last year.

Cranston spent nearly $332,000 in 2024, while Warwick spent over $24,000.

In Providence, nearly 18,000 tons of rejected recycling cost taxpayers $1.14 million in 2024, where 1,422 tickets were handed out to residents for the offense.

“It’s not acceptable and sadly we are on track to spend about the same in 2025,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said.

Providence has spent $4.2 million on rejected recycling since 2021.

Smiley believes taxpayers don’t realize the bill for rejected recycling ultimately comes back to them.

“In Providence, we provide trash pick-up as part of their property taxes, so this is something that they don’t see an itemized bill for,” Smiley said. “Our total trash budget is about $10 million, so about 10% of our trash budget is going over budget because of this.”

Smiley says while the city needs to do better with recycling, Rhode Island Resource Recovery uses an antiquated process that unnecessarily rejects items.

“If moisture or rain gets into a barrel, cardboard or paper materials get soggy, they will reject that,” Smiley said. “For example, with soggy cardboard, it can get into the gears of the sorting materials, but there are other more advanced sorting facilities that have solved this problem.”

A spokesperson with Rhode Island Resource Recovery says the agency is working to resolve issues like that by replacing its current system.

RIRRC plans to release a request for qualifications for facility design and support services by early summer.

“RIRRC will be looking for a design that increases its ability to handle higher levels of inbound contamination whether those are driven by material type, size, compaction, moisture concerns, etc.,” an RIRRC spokesperson said.

Other cities have found other solutions to cut back on rejected recycling.

Canada-based Prairie Robotics has a program that installs smart cameras on recycling trucks to identify contamination, then educate residents.

“The way the technology works is we have collected millions of images, and we have manually identified things like black garbage bags, Styrofoam, and we fed that through our AI, so now when it sees a new image that it hasn’t seen before it can automatically pick out undesirable items,” Prairie Robotics CEO Sam Dietrich said.

Greensboro, North Carolina, is one of 40 cities across the U.S. and Canada that uses the program.

Greensboro Waste Direction Supervisor Tori Emerson says they’ve seen a drastic reduction in rejected recycling since they signed onto the program in 2023.

“We’ve actually reduced contamination by nearly 40% in four years, so we have cut the amount of trash and recycling almost in half in four years,” Emerson said.

Dietrich wouldn’t release the cost of the service.

Providence currently has no plans to invest in an outside program to curb the issue, but hopes to find other ways to reduce rejected recycling.

“We are doing intensive education in the neighborhoods in the city that have the lowest rates of recycling,” Smiley said.

Providence also plans to upgrade recycling bins over the next year in hopes larger bins will help families properly dispose of waste.

Smiley says the city has provided grants to people who want to compost in their own backyards and has expanded neighborhood compost collection spaces to cut down on trash.

“We have invested heavily in composting to try to keep people’s organic waste, food, scraps, out of the trash,” he said.

Next to Providence, Pawtucket, West Warwick, and Cranston have the most contaminated recycling per household.

If the rejected recycling numbers don’t improve, Rhode Island risks losing landfill capacity sooner rather than later.

Currently, RIRRC’s Central Landfill is expected to reach capacity in 2046.

No decision has been made on how the state will handle waste once that happens, but a study notes the alternatives may require 10 to 12 years to plan, design, permit and construct.

Some of the potential options include an expansion of the Central Landfill, a new landfill, and hauling waste out of state by rail.

Capital costs for potential alternatives range from $33 million to $980 million.

In the meantime, Rhode Island Resource Recovery has been working with the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns to provide solutions to the financial strains of improper recycling.

Starting April 1, 2025, Resource Recovery will use a new fee structure of $20 per rejected ton with a max of $250 per load.

That means instead of a flat rate of $250 per rejected load, cities and towns will be charged $20 per rejected ton with an additional $63 tipping fee for a total of $83 per ton.

The tipping fee covers the cost of bringing the contaminated tons to the landfill as trash instead of being recycled.

Resource Recovery has also approved grants to enhance recycling and education in Coventry, Warwick, Smithfield and East Providence.