LEXINGTON, Ky. (LEX 18) — It’s been four months since the city of Lexington told its residents to stop recycling paper. Residents of a few other counties have been impacted by this as well. But we all might be a little closer to a solution to this problem. RFPs, or Request for Proposals are currently coming across Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton’s desk.
“These RFPs aren’t endless,” Gorton said regarding the time frame for receiving bids, “so I think sometime between October and December,” she continued.
The problem first came to light in May, when we were told that there was nowhere for the paper to go, and no one to haul it away because the cost of doing so wasn’t worth the free paper the city offered in exchange for simply removing, and taking it to some other recycling facility. So, we were told to send all of our paper products to the landfill with the other trash. This was not an outcome that sat well with the newly elected leader of the city.
“To be honest, we keep a box at my home and it’s not the trash,” Gorton said. “We put all of our paper in there (for the week), because you never know what day we might start recycling again,” she added.
Gorton hopes to have those RFP bids in place before the holiday season, and when asked if recycling paper by the new year would be possible, she didn’t say no.
“I think we’ll remain optimistic that it’ll be soon” she said, “and once we got the bids in, we will look at them and see which works best and move on.”
So for now, keep recycling the cardboard, plastic, cans and bottles. But until a contract is awarded, and a deal is in place, you won’t be seeing paper coming back in some other form, at least not for a few months.
