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Dumping tires and refrigerators at the financially strapped Salt Lake Valley Landfill is going to get more expensive.

Up until now, people could discard up to four tires at the Salt Lake County-owned landfill as part of the $10 tipping fee. The same fee applied to loads containing refrigerators.

But to cover some of the costs the county incurs in dealing with those forms of waste, the County Council on Tuesday voted unanimously to increase fees by $2 a tire and $12 a fridge.

"It's not really a new fee. We're passing along a fee the landfill has been absorbing for quite some time," said County Public Works Director Russ Wall.

The landfill at 6030 W. 1300 South, he noted, has "some serious financial problems. We're trying to find ways to turn that around, looking at every revenue [source] and expenditure to make sure we can operate the landfill to break even."

With refrigerators, for instance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires the landfill to remove all of the chilling solution before disposal. The county pays a contractor $12 per unit to do that, Wall said.

"Tires are very difficult to handle," added Ashlee Yoder, the landfill's sustainability manager.

State law requires the county to take up to four tires per load — "if you change the tires on your car, we take them," said Wall — but then the county has to pay a recycler $2 a tire to get rid of them.

The fee increase covers that expense but not the cost of transporting the tires a few miles to the recycling plant, he said, adding the landfill's financial situation is "healthy enough we can absorb that as a cost of doing business."

Wall said he didn't want to add much more to the "substantial hit" felt by some who "are used to paying $10 for a load of grass and a refrigerator, but now it will cost $22."

The landfill takes in a couple of thousand refrigerators a year, he said, expecting the number to increase because Rocky Mountain Power recently stopped collecting old refrigerators.

That means residents will have little choice but to take their spent fridges to the landfill. Without the new $12 fee, Wall said, "that would be a cost we probably couldn't absorb."