Mission Hills takes a pass on curbside recycling from Ripple

The convenience of having Ripple bins at the Village Shops and Corinth dissuaded the Mission Hills City Council from approving a curbside recycling program in the city.

In the end, the Mission Hills City Council decided it just couldn’t justify the cost.

The council on Monday ended discussions about whether the city might be the first in the Kansas City metro region to have curbside glass recycling provided by Ripple Glass. At the heart of their decision, said Mission Hills city administrator Courtney Christensen, was the fact that Ripple bins at the Village Shops, Corinth Square and in Brookside make it easy for residents to recycle their glass presently.

“If the Ripple bins hadn’t been so readily available to residents already, there might have been a different decision,” she said. “But the council felt that because the bins were in such close proximity, they couldn’t add the expense.”

Jeff Krum, one of Ripple’s managing principals, said the company hasn’t made a determination about whether they will actively seek out a new pilot site for the curbside program — but that, at present, there’s no rush.

“If another municipality or group of homes associations approached us and asked us to put together a proposal, we’d take a look at it,” he said. “There are no plans to find another test site yet.”

Krum said the idea of curbside recycling appealed to Ripple because curbside service increased recycling rates considerably. The proposal before Mission Hills would have netted the company a profit of just $4,000 a year, according to Christensen.

“The reason it appealed to us was that it looked like a good way to move the needle up on how many people were recycling,” he said, “but this isn’t a business line we feel we have to be in now.”