Within a year, property owners in Boulder will have to provide recycling and composting services. And within 15 months, businesses in the city will need to provide the ability to separate materials into trash, recycling and composting and train their employees to do so.
Those are the requirements of a wide-reaching recycling and composting ordinance that the Boulder City Council adopted unanimously Tuesday night with the goal of increasing diversion of waste from landfills.
“This is a huge step,” Councilwoman Lisa Morzel said. “We’ve never been able to do this.”
Because the ordinance was changed from its original version, it will require a third vote June 16 to be final.
However, the ordinance drew broad support from recycling advocates and businesses.
“Businesses, this is good,” said Louise Garrels of McGuckin Hardware, which has been recycling for 16 years. “This is a good thing for you. This is easy. It’s not burdensome financially.”
The Boulder Chamber of Commerce supported a longer phase-in period, and Councilman George Karakehian, who owns a downtown business, asked about exemptions for small businesses with very limited space.
City officials said they plan to work with businesses to come into compliance, including finding ways for them to share bins to save space.
The ordinance includes a requirement that all homeowners have trash service or demonstrate that they haul their own trash or share with a neighbor. Owners of apartment buildings and multi-tenant commercial properties will have to provide recycling and composting services for their tenants, and businesses will have to make provisions for recycling and composting within their businesses.
The ordinance also requires that all city events be zero-waste.
The city plans to provide incentives and rebates to help businesses comply, and enforcement will focus on providing assistance, not tickets, officials said.
The commercial recycling requirement is part of the city’s larger “zero-waste strategy,” which seeks to increase landfill diversion rates.
All trash haulers in the city must offer recycling and composting to their residential customers, but many commercial customers, who have individual contracts, have not participated in recycling or composting.
The requirements have been under development for more than a year and received strong support from the City Council at a study session earlier this year.
The most significant point of disagreement was over a provision that requires all recycling materials to go to the Boulder County Recycling Center.
Bryce Isaacson of Western Disposal said the ability to sell some materials for higher prices to other processors allows Western to offer rebates to its commercial customers.
But Darla Arians of the Boulder County Recycling Center said that as a public facility that accepts all materials, including low-value materials that are not profitable to recycle, it’s necessary to also get high-value materials to offset those costs.
City Manager Jane Brautigam plans to issue a city manager’s rule that sets a threshold for the price difference at which haulers could sell materials to an outside processor.
Erica Meltzer: 303-473-1355, meltzere@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/meltzere
