DANVILLE – In less than two months, Thelma Thormann and Paula Dees will have nowhere to take the glass, plastic, paperboard and cardboard they both have been recycling every other week for several years at a Vermilion County drop-off site a few miles from their homes.

"It's just a shame," said Dees, who was dropping off a couple bags of recycling last week at the Vermilion County Recycling bin in Kickapoo State Park.

It's one of seven sites around the county that will be eliminated Oct. 31 because the Vermilion County Health Department no longer has the funds to run the 10-year-old program.

The city of Danville continues to investigate the feasibility of creating three recycling drop-off sites, similar to the county sites, within the city.

And tonight, city officials and Danville aldermen will discuss various options for doing that, but city sites won't help recyclers like Thormann and Dees, who live in the county.

It's upsetting to Thormann who, like Dees, was dropping off recycling last week at the Kickapoo site, a bin that both of them have used every other week for several years.

"I'll be shedding a tear," said Thormann, who knows of no other options for continuing to recycle materials from her household in rural Danville. "It has to go to the garbage man and to the dump. I'm going to really miss it."

Dees lives in the rural Newtown area, but works in Champaign, so she will look into taking her recycling somewhere in the Champaign-Urbana area, but already knows how inconvenient that would be.

"I can't imagine throwing all this stuff in the garbage," she said.

The county hopes that if Danville can get its own sites operating, then it might be more feasible for the county to restart its program outside Danville in the future. The Danville recycling site on East Main Street is the most expensive for the county to maintain because it's the busiest.

Doug Ahrens, public works director for the city, said he will present to the council's public works committee tonight some background on the county's situation, what the city has been studying this summer and what options the city may have.

Ahrens said it appears that the city would have startup costs of $86,000 for three drop-off recycling sites in Danville with annual operating costs of about $200,000.

Such costs are not programmed into the city's $18-per-month solid-waste fee.

Ahrens said he will also share with the committee the option of curbside recycling.

Ahrens said it would likely be most feasible for the city to provide that service on a subscription basis to focus on those who will use it rather than providing the service citywide.

"From an overall efficiency and cost standpoint, it would be better to have those who want to recycle participating, rather than resources spent on those who choose not to," he said.

Committee meeting

The Danville City Council's public works committee will discuss recycling options during its meeting at 6 p.m. today at the city's municipal building, 17 W. Main St., Danville.