Leelanau County Eyes Bunting's Cedar Market For New Public Recycling Drop-Off

The saga of the Cedar recycling site could finally get a happy ending next week, after years of strife and uncertainty.

At 8:30am next Tuesday, the Leelanau County Board of Commissioners will convene for a special session to address a single agenda item: a request from the Leelanau County Solid Waste Council to sign a new recycling site agreement with Bunting’s Cedar Market. Barring any opposition from the commission, Leelanau County Planning Director Trudy Galla says Cedar’s public recycling bins could be at the Bunting’s site within a matter of days.

“Bunting’s Cedar Market stepped forward and said they would take the recycling bins there, on the back side of their lot,” Galla says, noting that Greg Bunting, the market's owner, has already signed his part of the new recycling site agreement with the county. The five-year contract would make Bunting’s Cedar Market the new public drop-off site for recycling in Cedar, just days after the village's former recycling site shut down. The one big step remaining, Galla says, is for the County Board of Commissioners to approve the site and sign its side of the agreement. 

That’s a quick change in fortunes for public recycling in Cedar. Just last month, the Leelanau Ticker delved into the lengthy saga of the Cedar recycling site, which has been at risk of shutting down for years. Until this year, Cedar's public recycling center had been located near the boat launch at Victoria Creek Community Park. Despite the popularity of the site, though – Cedar ranks as the third most-used of Leelanau County's nine recycling locations – the Solon Township Board repeatedly took umbrage with the site for how it affected the aesthetic of Victoria Creek Community Park, among other issues.

When the Leelanau Ticker last checked in, the county’s recycling site agreement with Solon Township was nearing its December 31 expiration. At the time, the Solid Waste Council was still trying to convince the Solon Township Board to grant a month-to-month lease agreement for the site. That approach, Councilmember Andy Gale explained, would have allowed the Solid Waste Council to look for a new drop-off location without interrupting public recycling services in Cedar. But those talks  went nowhere, and on December 27, Galla issued a notice informing the public that the recycling site at Victoria Creek Community Park would be permanently closing at the end of 2022.

Gale's big concern in December was that it might take months for the Solid Waste Council to set up a new recycling site in Cedar. The prospective locations the council was considering at the time all had drawbacks that would have added considerable time or logistical challenges to the process. The top candidate, for instance, was a privately-owned slab of vacant land near the Cedar post office, which would have required both a property purchase process and approvals from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE), due to its wetland terrain.

“It might be three months, or six months, or even a year before [a new Cedar recycling site] is set up,” Gale told the Leelanau Ticker last month. “And we just don't want to see the recycling site go away. That's going to put more strain on all the other sites in the county, and those are already super busy.”

As it turns out, it won’t be a matter of months before Cedar has a new recycling center, but likely a matter of days. For Galla, Bunting’s Cedar Market emerging as a potential site was a perfect aligning of the stars. Leelanau County won’t need to acquire the property, there are no environmental issues to trigger the involvement of EGLE, and the site doesn’t even require any buildout or improvement work to get it ready. Furthermore, many of the hoops the county will need to jump through to establish a new recycling site at Bunting’s are already out of the way – thanks, Galla says, to the tireless work of lifelong Cedar resident Ray Pleva.

“Ray has been instrumental in this process, and has been working practically nonstop to find a site,” Galla tells the Leelanau Ticker. “Over the weekend, we had phone calls and discussions, and Ray met at the site with Bunting and with our recycling hauler, GFL, to look over the site and see if it would work. And then Ray also got someone to put in the sketches that the county zoning administrator needs for approval.”

The new site “isn’t a done deal yet,” Galla stresses. County commissioners still get to weigh in on the matter, and there are a few other paperwork and approval steps to go before everything is copacetic. Overall, though, Galla is hopeful that Cedar will have its new recycling location sooner than anyone expected.

“Once we have the approvals from the county, we’ll be able to give the green light to GFL to move the containers,” she says. Those containers, for now, are still at the old recycling site in Victoria Creek Community Park, less than half a mile down the road. “We talked to the people at the Solon Township Board, and we’re just going to leave the containers there until Tuesday when we find out whether this is a go. We didn’t want to haul the containers all the way back to GFL in Traverse city and then turn around and haul them back to Cedar again.”

To view the notice for next Tuesday's meeting, click here.