As fallout continues to impact Alger County after North Country Disposal pulled its recycling services, a new concern is challenging local business owners regarding responsible waste removal.

Commercial recycling is at a complete standstill in Alger County as businesses have no way to get recyclable materials from their locations to transfer stations. Some companies were recycling more than others and some larger businesses were not recycling at all, but the roughly 30 businesses with a recycling dumpster are unable to recycle in effective ways.

GFL made headlines by winning the City of Munising’s new residential garbage contract, which included curbside recycling. The request for proposal from the city however, did not include any commercial activity, so the exodus of North Country Disposal puts a strain on the resources of the company remaining.

“We are getting some calls ordering containers for recycling,” said GFL’s Adam Thompson. “Right now, we have a personnel shortage and a container shortage. We’ll have to figure out another way to get those containers and driver to run the route.”

At some businesses, old Great American Disposal (GAD) dumpsters marked with a sticker on the side saying “RECYCLABLES ONLY” were placed. Purchased as part of GFL’s acquisition of GAD in 2020, these containers are roughly half the size of the taller and longer red dumpsters once scattered across Munising at banks, restaurants and campgrounds by North Country.

When the new recycling container was brought to Eh Burger, it took approximately 18 hours to fill it with mostly corrugated cardboard and tin cans. The container still sits full over a week later, just like every other commercial recycling dumpster in town.

As GFL and the City of Munising continue to finalize the residential contract, residential recycling will not start until sometime this Fall at the earliest. With that being the actual collection service GFL bid on while responding to the commercial recycling crisis after the fact, it could be months before commercial recycling is back to normal.

While that happens, businesses will be left with tough decisions on disposing their recyclables. Most businesses would not have the liability insurance to protect an employee if a worker taking a load to the landfill was involved in a serious accident.

That’s only possible if the business had the staffing to send someone off property during drop off times anyway.

Just throwing it away can also cause problems in many ways. While the environmental impact is obvious, the increased trash load is also a strain on GFL resources. If a business is filling up a recycling container and a trash dumpster once a week, standard business operations will still be producing two containers full of waste, regardless of that waste going to a recycling center or a landfill.

Chris Case said that this will be tough for many businesses moving forward. The Munising resident has worked with various community organizations promoting recycling for 30 years and he believes that it will take a group effort to try and find any shortterm solution to this recycling problem.

“This is going to be an issue for the next three to six months. We’re going to need to brainstorm to find a solution,” Case said. “The issue is the challenges with feasibility, because we have a situation where we’re stuck in place, but there’s an overwhelming amount of (recyclables) going into dumpsters.”

While there’s no quick solution to disposal, Case said businesses can prioritize storing certain recyclables over others.

Corrugated cardboard is the easiest to store, according to Case, while the bulkiness and increased risk of contamination makes storing plastics more difficult. If possible, those service industry businesses with large amounts of tin and aluminum cans could work with local scrap metal collectors for effective and environmentally friendly disposal.

“There’s a market for corrugated cardboard right now and it’s easier to keep clean when storing it for the long term,” Case said. “I would focus on cardboard first, then tin can go to scrap metal.”

While Thompson said that he did not think there was anything the public could do to immediately deal with the situation, he said GFL is working to address the situation.

“I don’t know if there’s anything that could be done to make the situation easier, but I hope there’s an understanding that there’s a shortage.

We are going to get the job done and want to make sure I can give the service everybody is wanting,” he said.

The Munising Beacon left a phone message with North Country Disposal but did not receive a call back from the company.