News

The Arcata Resource Recovery Center — better known as the spot on 10th Street where you can drop off your recyclables and get your deposit back on glass bottles and cans — is closing. 

As the Mad River Union first reported, Rick Powell, the general manager of Eel River Resource Recovery  — which owns and operates the Arcata center — told the Humboldt Waste Management Authority at its January meeting that the company wasn't earning enough at the Arcata site to justify keeping it open. The prices for resources are down, he said, and not enough customers were using the site.

Arcata has mandatory curbside recycling for residences in city limits. The city's relationship with recycling has been in flux since the Arcata Community Recycling Center — a nonprofit — shuttered in 2011 and sued the HWMA on the grounds the multi-government agency had sabotaged its business. That lawsuit was settled in 2015.

Meanwhile, curbside recycling in Arcata will not be affected, and ERRR says people seeking redemption values on recyclables can bring them to the company's Samoa Processing Plant (there are also centers in Eureka and McKinleyville).