Miami County officials are distancing themselves from the county’s recycling provider after an investigation by the city found that the collected materials were no longer recyclable, had ignited three times, and were at risk of igniting for a fourth after being stored improperly, according to Peru Mayor Miles Hewitt.

Concerns from the city began after bales of collected recycling material began piling up at Recycling Recovery on North Broadway Street. According to Jenny Gatliff, executive director of the Miami County Recycling District, the company has been paid roughly $13,000 per month since 2011 to provide and service recycling collection boxes across the county.

Michael Rorvik, owner of Recycling Recovery, said the bales began collecting after the market for recyclable materials flipped about two and half years ago – instead of making profit off the materials he was collecting, he began paying to have them recycled.

“We took the material, we still processed it and sorted all the trash out of it, and we baled up the commodities and stored it until the market either came back or, you know, obviously it was building on me and I couldn’t get rid of it,” Rorvik said.

Mayor Hewitt said Erick Hawk, fire department chief, began investigating the company after a fire in Richmond, Ind. occurred at a facility that stored plastics. That fire forced residents within a half-mile radius of the facility to evacuate the area for five days – Mayor Hewitt said a fire of that scale at Recycling Recovery’s facility would cause the hospital and most of the city to evacuate.

The city presented their findings to the Miami County Recycling District Board at their meeting on May 15, which included drone photos showing approximately 3,000 bales of collected materials that had been stored outside Recycling Recovery’s building and posed an “extreme potential fire hazard,” according to Hawk.

However, Rorvik disagrees that the way he was storing the materials was unsafe.

“I don’t want to say that there was a safety hazard, in that there’s always a risk of anything that’s stored outside that somebody may be able to do something to light on fire,” he said.

Rorvik said the three previous fires had been caused by a cigarette that had blown into the facility, an employee who accidentally set a piece of wood on fire while trying to remove metal from a bale, and an ashtray that was emptied into a collection box.

“It’s a minimal risk, and you know people in every case did something that they shouldn’t do and didn’t think it through before they did it. But they were just careless incidents”, Rorvik said.

Mayor Hewitt says the building department contacted a recycling center in Kokomo to inspect the material that had been collected by Recycling Recovery, and had concluded that the material was “non-usable and was going to have to go to the landfill.” Ron Dausch, building commissioner, said the bales of collected material were mixed with trash and toxins.

Rorvik says his plan has always been for the materials to be recycled, but challenges in the recycling industry created setbacks he couldn’t overcome.

“I went to the director of the solid waste recycling district and said, ‘Listen, this isn’t working for me, and we need to do something with this program to sustain it,’” Rorvik said.

The solutions suggested to the previous director, Samantha St. John, included switching from single-stream recycling to source-separated recycling, increasing the budget by raising fees, reducing the frequency and complexity of the service, or creating a grant program to attract more funding.

Rorvik says he regrets not exiting the contract sooner after no solutions were implemented.

“I really should have insisted that if they weren’t going to put more money into the program, I should have put a stop to it a long time ago and insisted that it go back out to bid…” Rorvik said.

After the city presented the findings of their investigation at the recycling district’s meeting, the board terminated Recycling Recovery’s contract and notified Rorvik that his services were no longer needed via text message.

“There’s been a problem for two and a half years. Everybody that was involved knew it, and then all of a sudden, bam. They just put a bullet in me one day and sent a text message, you know, ‘Your services are no longer needed, pull your box effective today,’” Rorvik said.

The most recent contract between the Miami County Recycling District and Recycling Recovery expired Dec. 31, 2013. However, neither party has a copy of the agreement that would have contracted Recycling Recovery to continue offering their services to the county past 2013.

Gatliff says the previous director did not put a new contract in place, and Rorvik says he is unable to find a copy of the contract he was operating under. According to Gatliff, Rorvik has continued being paid for his services since 2013. He maintains that the contract he signed would continue to roll over every year unless he was notified otherwise.

Brenda Weaver, Miami County Commissioner, says the recycling district has signed a new contract with Waste Away, which is based in Elkhart, to provide recycling services to the county. Rorvik says he is relieved to be done with the contract.

“The fact that I’m not doing it anymore, frankly, is a huge relief because I’m not having to subsidize out of my own pocket what wasn’t working for the program overall,” he said.

Mayor Hewitt says the city took action because he believes the materials were not being recycled like they were supposed to, and was a potential hazard.

“We had to do something because the recycling part of it was not being done as it was supposed to be. To me, recycling means you recycle everything. You don’t store garbage that’s bundled up in the big bales that are sitting out there,” he said.

Rorvik maintains that the material was always going to be recycled, and says the city never asked the right questions or tried to figure out a solution.

“There’s plenty of faults to go around. I assume responsibility for my part, but the one thing I would tell you is that I never threw away anything that was intended to be recycled, because it’s my intention to recycle it,” he said. “I could have disposed of it and not had this problem, but that’s not what I did. I held onto it because it’s mine, and it has a value to it.“