Homes and businesses in the Northeast Kingdom will be paying more for their trash and recycling after the regional solid waste district increased a number of fees to stave off a looming fiscal crisis.
The Northeast Kingdom Waste Management District’s board this month voted to increase the fees for picking up recycling from the town recycling centers, as well as compost pickup fees and the cost for dropping off appliances with freon, such as refrigerators and water coolers.
District executive director Chris Thompson told the board at its last meeting that the district was losing money every month and has been using cash out of its reserve to cover its costs.
“This is not nickel and diming anything. This is whether or not we’re going to be able to afford to continue as a district going forward,” he said at a May 12 meeting, first reported on by the Caledonian Record. “It’s dire. It’s not something that we take light.”
Thompson told the board that the district has been seeing a steep decrease in the amount of trash coming through the solid waste facility. And since a big part of the district’s revenue comes from a surcharge on trash, Thompson said they’ve seen an approximately $100,000 drop in revenue.
At the same time, diesel fuel, health insurance and machinery costs are up, which Thompson said has been forcing the district to use up its reserves.
“Our 2026 budget was built using projections for surcharge revenue,” Thompson said. “In the past the surcharge has grown slightly in the majority of the years, and we assumed that would be the case again. And certainly did not expect such a drastic decline in such a short amount of time.”
Thompson said he did not know exactly why the district has seen such a sharp drop in the amount of trash coming through.
But Department of Environmental Conservation Solid Waste Program Manager Josh Kelly said while every district operates a little differently, they mostly depend on trash haulers paying them to drop off trash.
And while solid waste districts seek to reduce the amount of trash going into the landfill, doing so can create financial problems for them.
“Essentially these districts are formed with a mission to reduce waste, and in that mission it is trying to work yourself out of a job because the less waste that is generated, the less revenue will be created.”
The Northeast Kingdom Solid Waste District is the state’s largest district in terms of geographic size.
It works across 49 towns, so Kelly says a steep rise in fuel costs can quickly impact the budget.
He has not heard of other solid waste districts facing the same financial predicament but warned that these entities are at the mercy of economic factors that are often beyond their control.
“Riding markets is always hard, and the model of putting the financial revenue on the waste side does have an impact to Vermonters,” Kelly said. “But it also incentivizes the right thing by keeping recycling more affordable, as opposed to the other alternative, which is to just throw it in a landfill.”
