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On Tuesday, the LaGrange City Council discussed a request from Amwaste to take over the city’s recycling operations.

The request was presented by Steven Green, Director of Recycling for Amwaste. The city is considering the proposal due to the costs of recycling.

City Manager Patrick Bowie said the city is currently losing funds to operate recycling, so the move could save the city some money, explaining recycling is more profitable at a larger scale.

“We just have a small recycling center, and it’s really hard to make the numbers crunch. We’re about $180,000 in the hole in this year’s budget for recycling, which that [loss] would go away,” Bowie said.

Public Works Director Chris Prather said the biggest issue is getting rid of the recycling material because they don’t get much for it.

“There’s not a big return for it,” Prather said. “We just took a load of tin cans that we had probably a month of bailing those cans and made $500 off of it. It cost us $150 to haul it down there.”

Green said they recently acquired C&C Recycling, so they have three locations in LaGrange. He said they are planning to use their Hutchinson Mill Road facility to bail the recycling and they will have two additional sites to drop off recycling. The company also has drop-off locations available on Greenville Road and Pegasus Parkway.

Amwaste is also planning to add glass and Styrofoam recycling to provide more options for those who wish to recycle them.

“We see it as a win, win. We see it as a win for Amwaste. We see it as a win for us in terms of saving in our budget. We see it as a win for the citizens in terms of being able to recycle more different types of products and having multiple drop-off locations,” Bowie said.