WESTBROOK – The large bins put out by the city’s public services department are intended for public use, but according to one city official, the wrong things are being dumped there, and that’s costing the city money.

The drop-off bins are located at the armory across the street from Westbrook High School on Stroudwater Street, and at the Route 302 end of Pride Street, according to Lynn Leavitt, recycling program administrator at Westbrook Public Services.

The problem, she said, is that those bins are supposed to be used by the general public for recyclable materials that won’t fit in the normal, residential bins.

Lately, however, there has been a growing amount of drywall, wood and other waste construction materials found there, she said, and the materials are half-buried in legitimate recyclable material, so it hasn’t always been noticed.

“It’s an easy way to get rid of waste that people don’t want to pay to get rid of,” she said.

But the outside contractors who are supposed to take the materials away for recycling have been rejecting some of the loads due to the trash, forcing the city to pay a tipping fee of $70 per ton, the same fee the city pays to dispose of regular trash, Leavitt said.

Normally, the city produces about 100 tons of waste per week, and about 28-29 tons of that is recyclable, Leavitt said. The recyclable material, she said, is taken away and processed for free, saving the city an estimated $100,000 a year in trash processing fees.

Since the recycling program began about a year ago, no loads were ever rejected, until now. In the past two weeks, Leavitt said, the city has had to pay tipping fees on 6 tons of trash that was supposed to be processed for free as recyclable.

That adds up to about $425 the city has to pay. Hardly a large sum, but Leavitt fears that the problem might get worse before it gets better.

“It’s not a huge, huge part of the budget, but it’s certainly adding up,” she said.

Part of the reason for the rejections, she said, is stronger scrutiny of the materials by the contractors. Pine Tree Waste of Scarborough actually picks up the materials in the bins, and takes it to ecomaine of Portland for processing. That company, Leavitt said, has been getting stricter about processing waste after finding too much trash mixed in with what’s supposed to be recycled.

“Their numbers are creeping up,” she said.

Kevin Roche, general manager of ecomaine, said there are problems with people dumping trash into bins that are supposed to be for recycling. Roche said the problem is “a very small percentage,” but it’s noticeable enough for the company to pay attention.

Stu Axelrod, division general manager at Pine Tree Waste, said he covers 43 communities in southern Maine, and in the past three years has had one or two loads rejected. In the past month alone, he said, four to five loads have been rejected due to too much trash mixed in.

“It’s not just Westbrook. It’s everywhere,” he said.

The problem, he said, is that the troubled economy is forcing people to cut corners, dumping trash in recycle bins instead of paying for a trash bag from their local community.

When it comes to construction waste, Axelrod said, many construction firms are small businesses, which are feeling the pinch more than larger ones, leading to the dumping of materials where they won’t have to pay for disposal.

“We didn’t have to police it before, as people weren’t as strained,” he said.

Leavitt said she wasn’t sure what the department was going to do to prevent the problem, but she expected there might be more vigilance in the future to keep an eye out for the trash dumpers.