HERMISTON — In December 2022, the Hermiston City Council held a work session to hear about the Recycling Modernization Act, which requires all cities in Oregon with a population of 4,000 or more to implement curbside recycling by July 2025.

At the time, there were a lot of unknowns — particularly in terms of the cost to cities, producers and consumers.

Seventeen months later, not much has changed. The council held a recent work session to hear an update on how implementation is going.

“There’s still a lot of things to work our way through before we get to picking up people’s recycling from their house,” Hermiston Assistant City Manager Mark Morgan said.

The Oregon Legislature in 2021 passed the Recycling Modernization Act with the goal of increasing recycling across the state and reduce harm to the environment and public.

The bill requires producers of packaging and paper products to share in the cost of responsible recycling. The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality said producers of covered products, which include packaging, printed paper and food service ware, will make payments to a producer recycling organization, or PRO.

Morgan said any producer that makes their way into Oregon would join one of these PROs, which would then collect revenue from those materials producers, remit that to the state, and those funds would then be used to help pay for the cost of collecting, sorting, shipping, and recycling the materials locally. The consumer will still have to pay to have it hauled away, but now the producer will share in some of that cost of recycling that material.

Morgan said the DEQ has been conducting a needs assessment of each city to determine what each community will need to implement curbside recycling. Hermiston, for example, will need to purchase two new trucks and 6,000 new recycling carts for Hermiston customers. In December 2022, Morgan estimated it would cost the city about $2 million for those investments.

“It’s still probably six to 12 months out before we know how much revenue we’ll be getting from the PRO,” he said. “Additionally, we won’t know until after the PRO has done all of its work in accumulating all the needs assessments from all around the state before they tell us what capital and operational costs they will help to pay for and how much that’s going to be.”

Another unknown is whether a regional reload facility will need to be constructed and how much financial assistance will be available for that facility. Then there is the lag time between when a city orders new recycling trucks and when they actually receive them — which could be up to a year, Morgan said.

Hermiston City Councilor and Mayor-elect Doug Primmer said that information also is critical to Hermiston residents.

“We know this is going to cost our citizens,” Primmer said. “Giving them some sort of lead time of knowing how much this is possibly going to impact them is going to be very beneficial to our citizens.”

Councilor David McCarthy said it appears Hermiston will not be ready for implementation by the July 2025 deadline.

Morgan agreed.

“My hope is that if we don’t know those numbers until February or March next year, we’re not going to actually start rolling this out until potentially the following year. My hope is we’re going to have significantly more time after July 1 to implement this.”