Intervention record · CHANGE4PLANET

The intervention

TIMELINE

WHAT WAS DEPLOYED

Deltona, the most populous city in Volusia County, Florida [7], with a 2020 Census population of 93,692 [11], bought weekly residential kerbside recycling collection as part of a franchised residential collection contract with Waste Pro USA, funded by a solid waste special assessment collected through the property tax billing [4][7]. The City Commission voted unanimously to suspend the recycling component, effective February 1, 2019 [7]. The city states the reason as decreased market demand for raw recyclable material such as plastics, glass and paper, which processing countries such as China were no longer buying, and states that all material set out at the kerb now goes to the Volusia County landfill [1]. City figures reported at the time put the cost of processing recyclables at US$77.50 per ton against US$34 per ton to landfill, with removal of the service saving US$21 per residential unit per year and a total annual saving reported as nearly US$715,000 [7]; the same account records that the city had received no rebates for its recyclable materials since 2015 and had instead been paying Waste Pro under prevailing market conditions [7]. China's National Sword policy banned imports of mixed paper and mixed plastics from January 1, 2018, cut the permitted contamination level in other recyclables to 0.5% from March 1, 2018, and added tariffs on United States cardboard, fibre, metals and plastics in August 2018 [8]; China had taken 106 million metric tonnes of plastic waste since 1992, 45.1% of all cumulative imports, and 7.35 million tonnes in 2016 alone [10]. The suspension was presented as temporary in the contractor's notice [2], the city stating that it hoped the program could be revived [1], and it has not been reversed: the city's audited management discussion for the year ended September 30, 2022 records that the recycling program remains suspended [3], and the city's service page still described the program as suspended when fetched on August 16, 2026 [1]. When kerbside collection stopped there were no recycling drop-off sites inside the city limits, against 15 sites operated by the county elsewhere in Volusia [9]. No Deltona-level tonnage was published before or after the decision. The only measurement series covering the city is the county recycling report filed with the state, which is county-wide: between 2018 and 2019 Volusia County reported recycled tonnages falling for plastic bottles (1,884 to 714), glass (10,673 to 6,764) and newspaper (6,224 to 3,788), while the county's adjusted recycling rate rose from 45.71% to 48.82% and reported landfilled tonnage fell from 876,845 to 736,590 tons [5][6].

HOW IT WORKS

Physical: weekly kerbside set-out of household recyclables in city-issued bins, collected by a contracted hauler and delivered to a materials recovery facility for sorting and sale into commodity markets. Since February 1, 2019 residents place the same materials in the garbage cart for a single collection, and all of it is hauled to the Volusia County landfill [1][2][7]. Administrative: the city does not own collection vehicles or a processing facility; it buys residential collection under a franchise contract with Waste Pro USA, in which the residential pick-up price is tied to the Consumer Price Index [2][3]. The service is paid for by a special assessment levied on each residential unit and collected through the property tax billing, currently US$260.00 annually for the fiscal period October to September [4]. Because the recycling component of that assessment was separately priced at US$21 per residential unit per year, it was removed by a single commission vote [7]. No fetched document records whether an ordinance amendment, a contract amendment or any asset decommissioning was required. Commercial collection in the city is served separately by franchised private haulers, 13 of them at the time of the decision [7].

The measurements

10 OUTCOMES

OUTCOMES

METRIC	VALUE	METHOD	MEASURED BY	INDEPENDENT	PERIOD	SRC
Weekly residential kerbside recycling collections provided by the city	0 collections per week since February 1, 2019 · baseline 1 (to January 31, 2019)	Operator and contractor service notices stating the suspension and its effective date, checked against the city's audited management discussion and the city service page as fetched August 16, 2026	City of Deltona; Waste Pro USA	○	February 1, 2019 to August 2026	[1]
Recycling drop-off sites inside the city limits when kerbside collection ended	0 sites inside the city limits, against 15 recycling drop-off sites operated across Volusia County at the same date, none of them within Deltona	Television news report on the week of the decision, stating that no drop-off sites existed within Deltona city limits while the county operated 15 elsewhere	WKMG-TV	●	January 2019	[9]
Stated annual saving per residential unit from removing kerbside recycling	21 USD per residential unit per year	City budget figures summarised in trade-press reporting; the underlying city documents were not obtainable	City of Deltona, reported by Waste Dive	○	2019	[7]
Stated cost to process recyclables against cost to landfill	77.5 USD per ton to process, against US$34 per ton to landfill · baseline 34 (disposal cost at the same date)	City figures summarised in trade-press reporting; the underlying city documents were not obtainable	City of Deltona, reported by Waste Dive	○	January 2019	[7]
Volusia County tons of plastic bottles recycled	714 tons recycled in 2019 from 14,650 tons collected (5%), against 1,884 tons recycled in 2018 from 9,168 tons collected (21%) · baseline 1884 (2018)	Annual county recycling report filed with the state; county-wide and not attributable to Deltona alone	Volusia County, published by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection	●	2019	[6]
Volusia County tons of glass recycled	6764 tons recycled in 2019 from 27,421 tons collected (25%), against 10,673 tons recycled in 2018 from 30,233 tons collected (35%) · baseline 10673 (2018)	Same annual county recycling report; county-wide	Volusia County, published by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection	●	2019	[6]
Volusia County tons of newspaper recycled	3788 tons recycled in 2019 from 10,766 tons collected (35%), against 6,224 tons recycled in 2018 from 30,168 tons collected (21%) · baseline 6224 (2018)	Same annual county recycling report; county-wide	Volusia County, published by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection	●	2019	[6]
Volusia County overall adjusted recycling rate	48.82 % in 2019, against 45.71% in 2018 · baseline 45.71 (2018)	Same annual county recycling report. The rate is dominated by construction and demolition debris and yard trash, which together account for most recycled tonnage, so it rose in the year Deltona's kerbside service ended	Volusia County, published by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection	●	2019	[6]
Volusia County landfilled tonnage	736590 tons in 2019, against 876,845 tons in 2018; total municipal solid waste collected fell from 1,615,010 to 1,439,180 tons over the same interval · baseline 876845 (2018)	Same annual county recycling report. Reported county landfilled tonnage fell in the year Deltona stopped diverting material, and the county series is not attributable to any one city	Volusia County, published by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection	●	2019	[6]
Solid waste fund balance movement, year ended September 30, 2022	142626 USD increase, with the special assessment unchanged	Audited annual financial report, management discussion and analysis	City of Deltona	○	year ended September 30, 2022	[3]

● independently measured○ operator-reported· not stated in any source

COST BASIS

CAPITAL: not published
OPERATING: not published
PER UNIT: 21 USD per residential unit per year, the recycling component removed from the solid waste special assessment on February 1, 2019 [7]
FUNDING: 7
7

The decision rested on a per-ton comparison reported from city figures: US$77.50 per ton to process recyclables against US$34 per ton to dispose of them [7]. The same account records that the city had received no rebates for its material since 2015 and had instead been paying Waste Pro under prevailing market conditions [7]. The underlying city budget documents carrying these figures were not obtainable, so all three are reported at one remove. The remaining solid waste service is charged at US$260.00 annually per residential unit for the fiscal period October to September, prorated for units receiving a certificate of occupancy mid-year [4]; that page carries no recycling line. The hauler contract price for residential pick-up moves with the Consumer Price Index, and the city recorded in the year ended September 30, 2022 that it was examining whether the special assessment needed to rise to keep pace [3]. For national context, an industry research body put the full cost of weekly kerbside recycling at about US$6.85 per household per month, of which about US$0.75, roughly 11%, was attributed to the National Sword shock [8].

The assessment

PRECONDITIONS

A materials recovery facility within economic haul distance willing to accept the city's single collection stream; Deltona owns no processing capacity and bought the whole service through a hauler contract [2][7]
End markets paying more than the avoided disposal cost. Deltona's comparison at the point of decision was US$77.50 per ton to process against US$34 per ton to landfill [7]
A funding mechanism able to absorb a negative commodity position rather than depend on rebate income; Deltona's rebates ended in 2015, after which it was paying its contractor for processing, four years before the service ended [7]
Contamination control at the kerb. Residue at materials recovery facilities nationally ran between 15% and 25%, and China's post-2018 limit for imported material was 0.5% [8]
A hauler contract in which the recycling component is separately priced, which makes the service auditable but also makes it removable by a single vote; Deltona's was US$21 per residential unit per year [7]
Drop-off capacity as a fallback if kerbside collection stops. Deltona had no recycling drop-off site inside the city limits when kerbside collection ended, against 15 county sites outside them [9]
A measurement series at city level. Deltona published no tonnage figure before or after the decision, so neither the diversion lost nor the landfill tonnage gained can be stated [1][3][5][6]
Political willingness to fund diversion as a service rather than as a revenue source once commodity prices fall below processing cost [7][8]

FAILURE ANALYSIS

The mechanism was commodity price, and the delivery mechanism that made the program cheap to run is also what made it cheap to cancel. (1) Revenue inversion. Rebates for Deltona's material stopped in 2015, after which the city was paying Waste Pro under prevailing market conditions [7], and by January 2019 processing cost US$77.50 per ton against US$34 per ton to landfill [7]. The driver was external: China's National Sword policy banned imports of mixed paper and mixed plastics from January 1, 2018, cut permitted contamination in other recyclables to 0.5% from March 1, 2018, and added United States tariffs in August 2018 [8], removing the destination that had taken 106 million tonnes of plastic waste since 1992, 45.1% of all cumulative imports, and 7.35 million tonnes in 2016 alone [10]. Nationally the same shock cut kerbside recycling revenues by about 50%, over US$400 million a year [8]. (2) Asymmetric visibility. The recycling component was separately priced at US$21 per residential unit per year on an assessment collected through the property tax billing, so cancelling it produced an immediate, quantified, per-household saving [4][7], while the diversion given up was never quantified by the city at all, before or since [1][3]. A benefit that is not measured cannot be defended in a budget. (3) No asset, no friction. The city owned no vehicle, facility or plant to strand; the service existed only as a term in a hauler contract, so no fetched document records that any ordinance amendment, procurement or decommissioning was required [2][3][7]. (4) No fallback. There were no recycling drop-off sites inside the city limits when kerbside collection stopped, although the county operated 15 drop-off sites elsewhere [9], so for residents without a trip out of the city the discontinuation was total. (5) Temporary framing that did not bind. The contractor's notice describes the suspension as temporary and asks residents to keep their bins [2], and the city states that it is watching the marketplace and hopes the program can be revived [1]; nothing in either statement set a price, a market condition or a date that would trigger restoration, and the program was still suspended in the audited FY2022 accounts [3] and in August 2026 [1]. (6) Absence of measurement is itself the finding. Neither the tonnage the program recovered nor the tonnage subsequently landfilled is published at city level. The only series covering Deltona is the county recycling report, which moved in both directions across the change: recycled tonnages of plastic bottles, glass and newspaper fell sharply between 2018 and 2019, while the county's headline recycling rate rose from 45.71% to 48.82% and reported landfilled tonnage fell, because the county rate is dominated by construction and demolition debris and yard trash rather than by household containers and paper [5][6]. An implementer should read that as a warning about which number a council will be judged on.

Stated positions, from the sources. The city [1]: it states that it is watching the marketplace, and says it hopes the program can be revived; it has published no restoration criteria, no price trigger and no date. The contractor [2]: residents were asked to keep their recycling bins against a revival. The city spokesman at the time of the vote said the program worked and the city did not want to scrap it [9]. The industry research body that studied the same shock across United States kerbside programs recommends resets rather than cancellation, and identifies two that it finds can more than offset the National Sword cost increase: moving kerbside collection from weekly to fortnightly, and moving glass out of kerbside collection to drop-off centres [8]. The same report puts materials recovery facility residue at 15% to 25% and the national cost of that contamination at over US$1 billion a year, and notes that the National Sword component of kerbside cost was about US$0.75 per household per month out of about US$6.85, roughly 11% [8]. Set against Deltona's own arithmetic, the US$21 per residential unit per year removed is US$1.75 per month, while the industry summary puts full weekly kerbside recycling nationally at about US$6.85 per household per month [8]. The two are not like for like, because Deltona's figure is the saving booked against its own assessment and the industry figure is a whole-programme cost, and no fetched document shows the commission testing either reset, or any restoration trigger, before it voted.

TRANSFERABILITY ASSESSMENT

AXIS	SCORE	RATIONALE
CAPITAL INTENSITY	●●	No capital. The service was a line in a contracted collection service priced at US$21 per residential unit per year and carried inside an existing solid waste special assessment [4][7].
GOVERNANCE DEPENDENCY	●●	Existing powers sufficed throughout: the city ran the service under its existing franchise contract and its existing special assessment, and ended it by a single commission vote [7]; no fetched document records any legislative change accompanying that vote [2][4].
ENVIRONMENTAL SPECIFICITY	●●	Kerbside collection of household recyclables carries no climate or geographic constraint; the binding constraint in this case was access to a processor and an end market, scored under funding repeatability rather than here [7][8].
SKILLS AND MAINTENANCE	●●	Operated entirely through the contracted hauler; the city needed no specialist staff, owned no vehicles or processing plant, and no fetched document records any decommissioning when the service stopped [2][3][7].
FUNDING REPEATABILITY	●○	The funding line was recurrent and budgeted, a per-unit special assessment collected through the property tax billing, but the service was not self-funding: rebates ended in 2015, after which the city was paying its contractor rather than being paid, and by 2019 processing cost US$77.50 per ton against US$34 per ton to landfill, a gap the assessment would have had to absorb [4][7].
POLITICAL DURABILITY	○○	Ended by unanimous vote of the sitting commission effective February 1, 2019, and still recorded as suspended in the audited FY2022 management discussion and on the city service page in August 2026 [1][3][7]. The rubric's 0 band reads Ended at transition; this service was ended mid-term by a budget vote of the sitting commission rather than at a change of administration, and 0 is applied because the service did not survive politically rather than because a transition ended it.

TOTAL 9/12 · T2

POLITICAL TEST

The program failed the political test outright, and the transferability score records why that is not the same as being hard to deploy. Nothing about the intervention was difficult to run: no capital, no municipal staff, no site. Its whole exposure sat in one place, the gap between what processing cost and what the material was worth, and when that gap inverted the service had no constituency inside the budget. The commission voted unanimously to remove it, effective February 1, 2019 [7]. The city spokesman quoted at the time said of the program, "We don't want to scrap the program. The program works" [9]. The vote was still taken. Residents objected publicly in the same week [9], and no drop-off site existed inside the city limits to absorb them, though 15 county sites existed outside them [9]. The contractor described the suspension as temporary [2]; the city page does not use that word [1]. It has now outlasted the shock that caused it by more than seven years: it is recorded as still suspended in the city's audited management discussion for the year ended September 30, 2022 [3], and the city's own service page still described the program as suspended, with the city watching the market and hoping for a revival, when fetched on August 16, 2026 [1]. Over the same period the remaining solid waste assessment rose to US$260.00 annually and the solid waste fund balance grew by US$142,626 in a single year [3][4].

The file

11 SOURCES

SOURCES

[1] operator_web_page · Solid Waste · City of Deltona, Florida · accessed 2026-08-16 · en · PRIMARY · www.deltonafl.gov Full page fetched and read on August 16, 2026. States that as of February 1, 2019 the city suspended weekly residential recycling pickup, gives the reason as decreased market demand for raw recyclable material such as plastics, glass and paper no longer purchased by processing countries such as China, states that all discarded materials set out kerbside are taken to the Volusia County landfill, and states that the city is watching the marketplace and hopes the program can be revived. Undated page, so published_on is null. The linked Solid Waste Division FAQ page was also fetched: its 17 questions cover collection schedules, bulk items, hazardous waste, yard waste and disability accommodations, and contain nothing on recycling, costs or savings.
[2] contractor_web_page · Deltona (residential collection service page) · Waste Pro USA · 2016-11-08 · en · PRIMARY · www.wasteprousa.com Full page fetched and read. Carries the notice that effective February 1, 2019 the city would temporarily suspend weekly residential recycling collection, gives the same market-demand reason, and asks residents to keep their recycling bins against a hoped-for revival. Also gives current service: household garbage once per week, yard waste once per week with up to 15 bags or bundles at 50 lb each, bulk and extra bags once per week. The page carries a publication date of November 8, 2016, which precedes the 2019 notice it displays, so the date is recorded as the page's own stamp and not as the date of the notice. The notice uses the word temporarily.
[3] audited_financial_report · Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, fiscal year ended September 30, 2022: Letter of Transmittal and Management's Discussion and Analysis · City of Deltona, Florida (published through OpenGov Stories) · 2022-09-30 · en · PRIMARY · stories.opengov.com Two pages of the same report fetched and read: the Management's Discussion and Analysis at this URL, and the Letter of Transmittal at https://stories.opengov.com/deltonafl/published/kkPEJS_jt. The management discussion states that the recycling program remains suspended, that the solid waste fund balance increased by US$142,626 in the year, that the solid waste assessment did not change while population growth increased assessment revenue, and that the residential hauler contract is tied to the Consumer Price Index with the city examining whether the assessment must rise. The transmittal letter gives an estimated 95,782 residents in 2022 and lists solid waste management among city services. published_on is the fiscal year end stated in the documents, not a separate publication date, which the pages do not carry. Only these two sections were fetched, not the full statements.
[4] operator_web_page · Impact and Special Assessment Fees · City of Deltona, Florida · accessed 2026-08-16 · en · PRIMARY · www.deltonafl.gov Full page fetched and read. Gives the solid waste special assessment as US$260.00 annually for the fiscal period October to September, with a prorated schedule for new residential units by month of certificate of occupancy. The page names no recycling component and carries no fiscal year label, so the year the US$260.00 applies to is not stated and published_on is null.
[5] government_statistical_return · Florida DEP County Reports, County Overview Report: Volusia County, 2018 · Florida Department of Environmental Protection · 2018 · en · PRIMARY · INDEPENDENT · floridadep.gov Full 3-page PDF downloaded and text-extracted, all three tables read. Population 529,160; landfilled 876,845 tons; recycled 738,165 tons; total 1,615,010 tons; 16.72 lb per capita per day; overall adjusted recycling rate 45.71%. Material lines used here, tons collected then tons recycled: newspaper 30,168 and 6,224; glass 30,233 and 10,673; plastic bottles 9,168 and 1,884; office paper 25,898 and 1,923. Participation table reports 179,857 single-family kerbside units at 95% and 31,653 multi-family at 70%. This is the pre-suspension baseline year and it is county-wide, so it contains Deltona but cannot isolate it. published_on records the report year stated in the document; the PDF carries no printed publication date and its own creation date is September 2020.
[6] government_statistical_return · Florida DEP County Reports, County Overview Report: Volusia County, 2019 · Florida Department of Environmental Protection · 2019 · en · PRIMARY · INDEPENDENT · floridadep.gov Full 3-page PDF downloaded and text-extracted, all three tables read. Population 538,763; landfilled 736,590 tons; recycled 702,590 tons; total 1,439,180 tons; 14.64 lb per capita per day; overall adjusted recycling rate 48.82%. Material lines used here, tons collected then tons recycled: newspaper 10,766 and 3,788; glass 27,421 and 6,764; plastic bottles 14,650 and 714; office paper 12,292 and 10,417. Participation table reports 223,926 single-family kerbside units at 100% and 34,336 multi-family at 100%, in a year in which the county's largest city had no kerbside recycling from February 1; that inconsistency is recorded in confidence_notes and is the reason this series is not treated as a measurement of the Deltona decision. published_on records the report year stated in the document; the PDF carries no printed publication date and its own creation date is September 2020.
[7] trade_press · Deltona, Florida suspends curbside recycling indefinitely · Waste Dive · 2019-01-09 · en · INDEPENDENT · www.wastedive.com Full article fetched and read. Source of the unanimous vote, the February 1, 2019 effective date, the US$21 per residential unit annual saving, the total annual saving reported as nearly US$715,000, the US$77.50 per ton processing cost against US$34 per ton disposal, the cessation of rebates in 2015 and the city paying Waste Pro thereafter, the 13 commercial haulers, and the description of Deltona as home to more than 90,000 residents and the most populous city in Volusia County. The article attributes the cost and saving figures to city documents; those documents were not obtainable, so these figures are carried at one remove. The page carries the line Published Jan. 9, 2019, under the byline of Katie Pyzyk, Lead Reporter.
[8] industry_research_report · Resetting Curbside Recycling Programs in the Wake of China (Executive Summary) · SWANA Applied Research Foundation, Recycling Group · 2019 · en · INDEPENDENT · swana.org The 2-page executive summary PDF was downloaded and text-extracted in full and read. The full report is behind subscriber access and was not obtained, so only the summary's figures are used: National Sword banned mixed paper and mixed plastics from January 1, 2018, cut permitted contamination to 0.5% from March 1, 2018, and added United States tariffs in August 2018; about 65 million United States households have kerbside recycling, diverting about nine million tons a year; revenue from sale of kerbside recyclables fell by about 50%, over US$400 million a year; kerbside recycling costs about US$6.85 per household per month, of which about US$0.75, roughly 11%, is attributed to National Sword; materials recovery facility residue runs 15% to 25%, costing over US$1 billion a year nationally; the two named resets are weekly to fortnightly collection and moving glass to drop-off. Deltona is not named in the summary; it is used here for the national mechanism only.
[9] news_report · Residents trash Deltona's decision to scrap recycling program · WKMG-TV (ClickOrlando) · 2019-01-10 · en · INDEPENDENT · www.clickorlando.com Full article fetched and read. Source of the statement that no recycling drop-off sites existed within Deltona city limits, that the vote was unanimous and taken on the Monday before publication, and of the quoted remarks of Lee Lopez, described in the report as a Deltona spokesman, and of two named residents. The report gives no tonnage and no per-ton figures. The report's figure of 46,000-plus homes refers to the kerbside recycling program continuing in the unincorporated area of Volusia County, not to Deltona, and is not used in this record. The report also states that Volusia County had 15 recycling drop-off sites, none within Deltona city limits.
[10] peer_reviewed · The Chinese import ban and its impact on global plastic waste trade · Amy L. Brooks, Shunli Wang, Jenna R. Jambeck · Science Advances, 4(6), eaat0131 (doi:10.1126/sciadv.aat0131) · 2018-06-20 · en · PRIMARY · INDEPENDENT · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Open-access full text fetched and read via PubMed Central. Analysis of 28 years of UN Comtrade data, 1988 to 2016, across four polymer classes. Figures used here: China imported 106 million metric tonnes of plastic waste since 1992, 45.1% of cumulative global imports, and 7.35 million tonnes from 43 countries in 2016; about half of all plastic waste intended for recycling, 14.1 million tonnes, was exported by 123 countries in 2016; an estimated cumulative 111 million tonnes will be displaced by 2030, 47% of all plastic waste imported globally since reporting began in 1988. The paper concerns global trade, not Deltona, and is used for the mechanism only.
[11] encyclopedia_entry · Deltona, Florida · Wikipedia · accessed 2026-08-16 · en · INDEPENDENT · en.wikipedia.org Fetched and read for four facts only: the city coordinates 28.88611 N, 81.21528 W; land area 37.32 square miles; 2020 Census population 93,692; and the Koppen classification Cfa, humid subtropical. The census count is reported here at second hand and was not fetched from the Census Bureau, whose QuickFacts page returned 403. This is a tertiary source and is used for nothing else in the record.

RECORD

PUBLISHED: 2026-08-16
LAST VERIFIED: 2026-08-16
REVIEW DUE: 2027-02-16
RUBRIC: v1.0
STATUS HISTORY: 2026-08-16 · discontinued political · Record published.
RIGHT OF REPLY: Not yet exchanged. The account of the decision and its continuing effect rests on the City of Deltona's own service page, its contracted hauler's service notice, and its own audited management discussion, together with the annual county returns filed with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. The city's decision-level budget documents could not be obtained and are quoted at one remove. Right of reply will be offered to the City of Deltona before this record is promoted or distributed, and any response received will be published here in full.
LANGUAGE: All sources are English-language publications of United States municipal, county, state and federal-adjacent bodies, one contractor page, one trade publication, one television news outlet, one industry research body and one peer-reviewed journal. Tonnages are United States short tons and currency is United States dollars as published, except in source [10], which reports metric tonnes; the distinction is preserved wherever those figures appear.
CONFIDENCE: Solid: that the service was suspended, when, why the city says so, and that it has not returned. The February 1, 2019 effective date and the market-demand reason appear identically in the city's own service page [1] and in the contractor's service notice [2]; the continuing suspension is recorded in the city's audited management discussion for the year ended September 30, 2022 [3] and on the city page as fetched August 16, 2026 [1]. The county recycling tonnages and rates for 2018 and 2019 were read from the state PDFs directly, not from summaries [5][6]. The US$260.00 assessment, the US$142,626 fund balance movement and the CPI-indexed hauler contract were read from city documents [3][4]. Thin, at one remove, or absent: (a) The decision figures. US$77.50 and US$34 per ton, US$21 per residential unit, and the total saving reported as nearly US$715,000 all originate in city budget documents that could not be obtained, and reach this record through one trade-press account [7]. The city's legislative portal at deltona.legistar.com refused connections on every attempt, the city's agenda archive returned no results for 2019, and every direct URL tried for a January 2019 agenda packet returned 404, so no minute, agenda item or resolution was read. The vote date is therefore not entered in any structured field: it is reported as unanimous in a trade-press article published January 9, 2019 [7] and as taken on the Monday preceding a television report published January 10, 2019 [9]; no fetched document gives the date in figures, so no vote date is entered. (b) No Deltona tonnage exists in any fetched source, before or after: the record cannot state how much material the kerbside program recovered, nor how much extra went to landfill. That absence is the record's central evidentiary finding and sets the E4 grade. (c) The county series is not a substitute. It is county-wide, and between the two years it moves in ways the reports do not explain: office paper recycled rises from 1,923 to 10,417 tons, total municipal solid waste collected falls by 175,830 tons, and reported landfilled tonnage falls even as the county's largest city stops diverting. The 2019 report states 100% single-family kerbside recycling participation across 223,926 units for a county in which Deltona had no kerbside recycling from February 1 that year, against 95% across 179,857 units in 2018; that is a reporting inconsistency, not a measurement, and it is the reason the series is presented as context and not as an outcome measurement of this decision [5][6]. (d) The number of residential units assessed in Deltona is not stated in any fetched source, so no household or assessed-unit count is entered in any field. The television report's figure of more than 46,000 homes refers to the kerbside recycling program continuing in the unincorporated area of Volusia County, not to Deltona [9], and is not used here. (e) Population. The 2020 Census count of 93,692 is used [11] and was read from a tertiary source, the Census Bureau's own page having returned 403; the city's own 2022 estimate is 95,782 [3] and the trade-press description is more than 90,000 [7]. (f) Timeline. No source states when Deltona's kerbside recycling began, so commenced_on is null. (g) Status label. discontinued_political is used because the service was technically functioning and was ended by a funding decision of the elected body, with the city's own spokesman stating the program worked [9]; degraded was considered and rejected because collection stopped entirely rather than declining, and unmeasured was considered and rejected because the status describes the intervention's fate rather than the absence of measurement, which is instead carried by the E4 evidence grade. (h) The SWANA [8] and Brooks [10] figures describe the national and global shock, not Deltona, and are cited only for the mechanism. (i) Whether the commission ever considered the fortnightly-collection or glass-to-drop-off resets before voting is not established by any fetched document; the arithmetic comparison in what_operators_would_change uses only the record's own sourced figures. No figures were estimated or interpolated by the registry; all nulls reflect absence in sources.

CITE THIS RECORD

change4planet.org. C4P-CIR-0004: Municipal curbside recycling collection (City of Deltona), Florida: suspended after the 2018 China National Sword price collapse and not restored. Grades T2/E4 (rubric v1.0). Last verified 2026-08-16. https://change4planet.org/records/c4p-cir-0004-deltona-recycling-suspension-usa