AUBURN – There may be money in a more efficient recycling system for local communities – as long as they do it together.

“There’s a lot of pressure, individual communities thinking they can get a better deal by striking out on their own,” said Fergus Lea, a planner for the Androscoggin Valley Council of Governments. “But I think that’s rare. Communities that work together on solid waste issues, they tend to make out a bit better.”

AVCOG hosted a forum for representatives from Auburn, Greene, Leeds, Lewiston, Lisbon, Livermore Falls, New Gloucester, Raymond and Sabattus as well as Oxford County and the State Planning Office on Monday afternoon to discuss single-stream recycling.

Each community has a different programs. Some collect recyclables door-to-door while others expect people to bring their recycling to a transfer station. But most of them have their recyclables hauled to Lewiston, where it is sorted, bundled and then sold by FCR Recycling, a Scarborough-based broker and a subsidiary of Casella Solid Waste. The city pays those communities a share of the profits from the sale.

Lewiston and Auburn have been discussing changing to the more efficient single-stream system. People dump all of their recyclables into one bin, then it’s dumped into a truck and shipped to a sorting center.

Portland-based EcoMaine has the only single-stream recycling facility in Maine. That company works with 31 Maine communities in southern and central Maine. General Manager Kevin Roche said the recycling building cost $3.7 million to build and opened in May.

His company would be interested in bringing its service to more of Maine, he said.

Representatives of FCR Recycling said they plan to build a central Maine sorting facility next year, although they have not decided where.

“It could be Lewiston-Auburn,” said regional sales manager Susan Millett. “That would make a lot of sense to us. This is a commodity business, and we need to be able to show that we’d be able to bring tons of recycling in. We have tons from this area now.”

FCR does not have a sorting facility in Maine, they ship Maine recyclables to their plant in Auburn, Mass.

Whatever happens, do it together, urged Sid Hazelton, Auburn’s assistant public works director.

“We’re all different communities, but we can do something regionally,” he said. “I don’t think we want to find ourselves in a situation where each community does something completely different. If we move forward together, we’ll get a better deal.”