There is a battle brewing in Medina County over the green-and-yellow recycling bins for newspapers.The fight pits the Medina County Solid Waste Management District against AbitibiBowater Inc., the company that recycles newspapers from the bins.Caught in the middle are up to 35 churches and private schools, including St. Francis Xavier in Medina and St. Ambrose in Brunswick, plus such nonprofit groups as the Salvation Army and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.The garbage district, which says it is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue because of the bins, mailed letters this week to the schools and nonprofit groups.The letters, signed by the three Medina County commissioners who oversee the district, ask them to voluntarily cease using AbitibiBowater bins to recycle newspapers.If the schools and nonprofits continue to use the bins, Medina County says it would consider legal action against AbitibiBowater.The county is hoping for compliance to avoid costly litigation, said Bill Strazinsky, who heads the Medina County agency that oversees trash and recycling.The county is offering to meet with and explain its situation to groups that use the so-called Paper Retriever bins.The Rev. Anthony Sejba of St. Francis Xavier, one of the county’s biggest users of the bins, declined comment. He said he first wants to see the letter and look into the matter.A few of the 35 bins might have been removed already, officials said.The long-simmering battle has become “very important” to the district and county leaders, Strazinsky said.The drop-off bins “are not part of our [state-mandated] plan and never have been, and they are, in our opinion, illegally in our county,” he said. “And they are hurting our county. ... This company is not welcome in Medina County.”AbitibiBowater “says it is recycling papers, but we were already doing that. In effect, it is taking newspapers away from us that we had been recycling,” Strazinsky said. “That doesn’t help us.”In August 2010, Medina County met with AbitibiBowater officials to express its unhappiness with what was happening. Nothing changed, Strazinsky said.AbitibiBowater feels it is being singled out unfairly and that Medina County is not taking similar action against other recycling efforts, said Sylvain Longval, vice president of AbiBow Recycling LLC.He asked why the county is not concerned about CVS drug stores or Walmart stores that do their own recycling.Longval said the county’s new initiative would unfairly and improperly interfere with private business operations between the company and its recycling partners.Lost incomeThe county’s biggest concern is that AbitibiBowater’s bins cost the garbage district about $342,000 in lost income in 2010.Strazinsky said the county takes a double financial hit on the estimated 1,900 tons of its newspapers that go to AbitibiBowater, which has 18 pulp and paper mills and 24 wood-production facilities in the United States, Canada and South Korea.First, the county gets less income on trash shipped to its Central Processing Facility, off Lake Road in Westfield Township. That money is used to operate the plant.And that loss of income has resulted in Medina County twice raising the tipping fee that haulers and their customers paid at the county facility. The fee rose from $51.25 per ton in mid-2005 to $58 in mid-2009, then to $60 a ton last March.Medina County estimates it lost about $114,000 in tipping fees in 2010 from the missing newspapers, Strazinsky said.The lost income from the newspapers going elsewhere to be recycled contributed in a major way in the need to boost the tipping fees that Medina County residents pay to their haulers, Strazinsky said.“To be honest, it wasn’t the only factor, but it was a big one,” he said.In addition, the loss of 1,900 tons of newspapers to AbitibiBowater resulted in Medina County being unable to recycle those papers.Newspapers are selling for $120 a ton, meaning Medina County lost $228,000 in revenue on recycling.The county’s volume of newspaper has dropped from about 5,000 tons a year to about 3,100 tons a year, Strazinsky said.Welcome elsewhereWhat’s happening in Medina County is different from the situation elsewhere in Northeast Ohio, where AbitibiBowater’s green-and-yellow bins generally are welcome.The bins boost recycling and provide a modest source of income for schools and church groups.AbitibiBowater helps some counties boost recycling totals, but Medina County was already recycling newspapers when the first bins came there in 2005-06.The county was aware of the arrival of the green-and-yellow bins, but took no action at that time, Strazinsky said. “We were not too alarmed,” he said. “We felt it would probably not catch on or spread much in Medina County. ... We were mistaken.”When the processing facility was built, Medina commissioners ordered that all waste produced in the county must go to the plant. That is called “flow control” and provided a needed assurance that the county-run plant would get enough trash to operate effectively.In 1994, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that flow control was an illegal restraint on interstate commerce. But later court rulings made flow control acceptable, and Medina County’s use of flow control has strong local support.Several other Ohio counties rely on flow control on garbage shipped to county-owned landfills.School districtsMedina County has found allies in its fight against AbitibiBowater: the county’s seven public school districts.Strazinsky and other county officials met in late 2010 with the superintendents of the Medina, Brunswick, Wadsworth, Highland, Cloverleaf, Buckeye and Black River school districts. The county explained its situation and asked the superintendents to cease recycling with AbitibiBowater.The seven districts together had green-and-yellow bins at up to 24 schools.The school leaders agreed, and AbitibiBowater removed those bins.The garbage district provided a one-year grant of $1 per student to the seven school districts to make up for the money they lost by dropping AbitibiBowater. That $28,000 was paid in the spring.Exactly how much money schools, churches and nonprofits get from AbitibiBowater is hard for outsiders to determine.It is generally less than 10 percent of what the company gets for recycling the binned papers, Strazinky said.Participating groups get paid more if they recycle more. Bins with low volumes get paid less, and certain thresholds must be met before a payment is made.In some cases, no payment is made if the bins are contaminated with trash or undesirable materials.Based on data AbitibiBowater provided, the private schools, churches and nonprofit groups with bins in Medina County were paid about $22,000 in 2010, Strazinsky said.According to county records, the Akron Beacon Journal was paid $37.68 in 2010 for a bin at a distribution center on Medina Road in Medina.The newspaper will consider Medina County’s request for removal, said circulation spokesman Shaun Schweitzer.Strazinsky said he is in favor of AbitibiBowater recycling old newspapers in Ohio — just not in Medina County.“We’re not opposed to what the company is doing. That’s great and helps many counties. Just not us,” he said. “It’s hurting us.”Bob Downing can be reached at 330-996-3745 or bdowning@thebeaconjournal.com.