LEWISTON — With the city steering toward single-stream recycling, officials are looking for a company to haul away the collections.

City councilors voted Tuesday night to switch from curb-sorted recycling to single-sort collections.

That lets Lewiston residents toss all of their recyclables into a single bin, makes for faster collections and will save the city $18,000 in the first year of the contract. The city’s Finance Committee is scheduled to vote Monday, giving the recycling collection contract to Almighty Waste of Auburn for $198,989 for fiscal year 2012.

The city currently pays $217,000 per year to collect recycling curbside.

Single-stream recycling will be a service boost for Lewiston residents, letting them include every kind of recyclable plastic in their bins, as well as colored glass and aluminum foil, said Rob Stalford, Lewiston’s solid waste superintendent.

“One of the benefits of this co-mingled process is that we are able to accept a much greater variety of materials,” Stalford said. It’s also more efficient to collect, which is why it’s less expensive, he said.

“Look at it now, and you have a guy sorting everything out and tossing it into the hopper,” he said. “That takes time, and time is money. Now, the truck is not idling, the route gets done more quickly and you’re saving wear-and-tear on the truck.”

Lewiston’s recycling truck currently brings the sorted recycling to the city’s landfill, where it is baled, stored and eventually sold as a commodity.

Now, the city will look for bids from single-sort processors to take the unsorted recycling, said Public Works Director David Jones.

“We got prices from a couple of them, just to get a ballpark figure,” Jones said. Portland’s ecomaine and Casella Solid Waste have single-sort processing plants.

And there are a couple of others, Jones said. “Hopefully, in a week or so, we can get that information out on the street and start considering bids from three or four vendors.”

Lewiston also stores, bales and sells recycling for Auburn, Greene, Leeds, New Gloucester and Turner, giving each a share of any profit from recycling sales. Jones said those cities are welcome to keep bringing their recyclables to Lewiston.

“We’re not closing the door on anybody,” he said. “We’ve talked with them to let them know that they can join us if they want to go to single-stream.”

Representatives from those towns said they were still considering their next steps.

“We’re not sure if there would be additional fees for us or what,” Greene Town Manager Charlie Noonan said. “We’ll have to wait and see what proposals Lewiston gets, and what kind of arrangement they’d make for us.”

New Gloucester Town Manager Sumner Field said he was talking with other communities, as well, to consider next steps.

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