Seattle sues King County in garbage fight

We’ve got a real garbage fight on our hands here.

The city of Seattle has sued King County, seeking nearly $3 million in fees related to the waste that you put out in the alley behind your home.

The dispute is over who should get the proceeds from about 1,980 tons of “recyclable residuals” collected each month outside of Seattle by King County but processed at facilities within Seattle.

The city and the county have been haggling over the trash cash for more than two years. Since February, they’ve been splitting the money, about $170,000 a month, 50/50.

But Seattle has had enough of that and wants a court to rule that the refuse belongs to the city and for the county to pay back $2.99 million in proceeds it has collected over the course of the dispute.

The city filed the suit Thursday in King County Superior Court.

Contacted separately, the Seattle City Attorney’s Office (which filed the lawsuit) and the King County Department of Natural Resources (which oversees county waste management) responded with a joint statement.

“Seattle and King County share a commitment to appropriately reduce waste and its impacts on the environment, and frequently collaborate on these efforts,” the two agencies wrote. “However, in this matter, there are conflicting code language interpretations that require independent review.”

“After considerable good faith conversations, Seattle and King County concluded a neutral, third-party decision maker was needed to provide clarity and resolve the difference in the interpretation of each jurisdictions’ regulations.”

The fight here is not over actual recyclables, for which there is a robust resale market. Rather, it’s for the garbage that’s left over after the recyclables are sifted and sorted.

Both the county and the city hire contractors to collect the garbage and recycling that gets put out on the curb and in alleys by homes and businesses. The garbage goes to a landfill. (If you’re in Seattle it goes by train to Arlington, Oregon, and if you’re elsewhere in the county it goes to Cedar Hills landfill in South King County).

Recyclables go to massive processing facilities, where Rube Goldberg-like assembly lines of conveyor belts, air gusts, screens, filters, infrared lights and optical sensors sort your bottles, cans and newspapers into bales of plastic, glass, metal and paper.

Those giant blocks of refuse are then resold. Prices for recyclables have rebounded significantly in recent years. Prices plunged in 2017 and 2018, after China, the leading importer of recyclables, implemented stricter quality controls for some materials and outright bans on others. The price drops forced local processors, unable to find buyers, to send hundreds of tons of recyclables to landfills.

Since then, new domestic markets have emerged, and India, Mexico and Vietnam have increased their recycling imports. U.S. exports of recycled paper and plastic increased last year for the first time since 2018, according to Resource Recycling, a trade publication.

But not everything that ends up at the city’s two recycling facilities — Rabanco Recycling Center and Recology Recycling Center, both in Sodo — is recyclable.

What’s left is known as residuals, but it is, essentially, garbage. Every time you throw a dirty takeout container or a used mask or an old garden hose in the recycling it ends up becoming a “residual,” aka garbage.

And the city and the county then charge the recycling facilities a fee — the same way you pay a monthly garbage fee — to take that garbage to a landfill.

Those fees add up. And the city and county would both like to keep collecting them.

The city’s argument cites the state constitution, state law, and city and county code to argue that waste disposal within a city is the realm of the city, regardless of whether the waste may have originated from outside the city.

“The State of Washington’s regulatory framework for the disposal of solid waste assigns primary responsibility to cities within their limits,” Seattle writes in its lawsuit. “King County has no authority to direct the handling, collection of, or disposal of solid waste within the limits of the City.”

King County has previously told the recycling facilities that waste from outside the city — from unincorporated areas and from smaller cities it contracts with for waste removal — should stay in the county system.

There is, however, one thing both sides agree on: Recyclables, when you put them in your bin, should be empty, clean and dry. And, please, no plastic wrap or loose plastic bags; they tangle in the processing equipment, resulting in costly shutdowns and repairs and driving down everyone’s proceeds.