Elkhart County, IN Trash & Recycling: Recycling Rules (2026)

The County Recycling Incentive Program, added by Ord. CO 2023-11 and amended by Ord. CO 2024-10, defined RECYCLING SERVICES under § 50.40 as the periodic curbside collection of recyclable solid waste by a Qualified Recycling Hauler (QRH) from a person and subsequent transfer of that waste to a material recovery facility or transfer station. A QRH was any hauler that submitted an application to the Elkhart County Solid Waste Disposal Department and received the Manager's written approval and a signed QRH contract.

Under § 50.41(A), the county paid each QRH a $25 subscription award for every qualifying subscriber, defined as anyone who signed up for curbside recycling with that hauler between April 1, 2023 and December 31, 2025 and had not already had that service location's subscription funded before April 1, 2023. Each QRH could collect up to $150,000 in awards per calendar year.

To keep QRH status, § 50.41(B) required a hauler to pass the subscription award through to the subscriber, collect recyclables through a designated solid waste hauler that does not comingle them with unrecyclable trash, report subscriber data to the county monthly, and prove that collected material actually reaches a Material Recovery Facility permitted or excluded from permitting by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Section 50.41(D) built in a hard stop: except for obligations that arose earlier, both § 50.40's definitions and § 50.41's incentive program 'expire on December 31, 2025.' Nothing in the chapter obligates a resident to recycle or subscribe to a QRH; the incentive ran through the hauler, not as a mandate on households. Separately, the county's e-waste bins at the landfill remain part of a voluntary recycling program under § 50.30(E) for a $10 per-unit fee.