Plastic Bag Tax Funds New Lovettsville Recycling Center

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): Revenue from the county’s five-cent plastic bag tax will be used to build a new recycling drop-off facility in Lovettsville, an estimated $780,000 project that the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors approved at a business meeting Oct. 17. The tax has garnered about $785,000 since it went into effect July 1, 2022, county staffers said.

The Finance, Government Operations and Economic Development Committee voted in support of the project 4-0-1 at its Oct. 10 meeting.

The Lovettsville Recycling Center, currently on North Berlin Pike, will be relocated to a new facility at the Lovettsville Community Park. The new facility will be large enough to accommodate glass recycling, which the current facility does not have.

The current recycling center serves an estimated 500-700 people each week. That includes some Hillsboro residents, as the Hillsboro recycling center closed in 2020 and a new one has not been built, according to Oct. 10 meeting documents.

The existing facility is also the only county recycling center not located on county-owned property, which can cause problems if the property changes ownership or use, meeting documents said. Residents will still be able to use the current facility until the lease expires in August 2025.

The county’s plastic bag tax fund is specifically designated for projects like these, as the Code of Virginia specifies that the fund may only be used for “environmental cleanup, providing education programs designed to reduce environmental waste, mitigating pollution and litter, or providing reusable bags to recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Women, Infants, and Children Program (WIC) benefits.”

The plastic bag tax garners about $50,000 to $70,000 per month in revenue, according to Tony Hayes, the county’s recycling specialist. But the fund was not created to be a long-term source of revenue, he said.

“If this tax actually works as it’s designed, it will be a diminishing fund because people will stop using plastic bags,” county staffer Ernie Brown said. “... So we’re being very strategic about the projects that we do employ these funds for.”

As the fund builds back up, Brown said, it will be used for “additional electronic recycling programs, additional events of that nature that we’re already scheduling to add. But we’re going to add specific projects that do not cause the programs to become reliant on” the fund.

Supervisor Juli Briskman, D-Algonkian, said that $780,000 “seems like so much money to build something like this. And it’s giving me just a little bit of heartburn because I know which part of the county actually probably paid the plastic bag taxes.”

“We’ve asked about glass recycling in the eastern part of the county several times,” she continued. “… The glass is stacking up, like, higher than my car right now in my garage because it is like a 20, 25-minute drive from my house to get to a glass recycling bin. And I know that there’s probably a lot of people in the county who wouldn’t do what I’m doing.”

Brown said that a glass-recycling center at One Loudoun is currently in the design phase but that the Lovettsville recycling center was chosen because the community currently does not have access to glass recycling.

“We do not know where the tax revenue comes from within the county,” he said. “… But we are objectively looking at trying to create an equal opportunity for all the citizens of Loudoun for glass [recycling].”

 Courtesy: www.loudountimes.com