NATCHEZ — One of the cities that initially joined in the regional effort to get recycling off the ground is no longer part of the program.

While the City of Brookhaven will continue a recycling program, it won’t be in conjunction with Concordia Metals, the company that has served as Brookhaven’s recycling intermediary and which serves the Natchez, Adams County and Vidalia recycling programs.

The change will not impact local recycling programs or any regional grants tied to the recycling effort, Concordia Metals Recycling Coordinator Jim Smith said.

Brookhaven Alderman David Phillips was reported in The Brookhaven Daily Leader as saying this week Concordia Metals had suspended recycling activities in the area until recycling commodity prices recover.

Phillips could not be reached for comment Friday, and did not return a telephone message.

Smith said the suspension of recycling pickup in Brookhaven was because of contamination and storage issues.

“The commodity markets have fallen, and they drop every month because everything is tied to the price of oil, but that didn’t even factor into it,” he said.

“Plastic is petroleum, and it has fallen over 60 percent in the last few months, so that has really taken a tumble, but mixed paper stays right at $55 dollars a ton, and it has for two years now, and that is 60 percent of what we get.”

The Brookhaven program needed to make changes in how it stored recyclables, Smith said, because the storage facility currently in use allows rain to get onto the material.

“They have known about this for six months now, so we finally stopped,” Smith said. “The last two loads had to go to the landfill because it was unusable. It was sopping wet, and you can’t do anything with that.”

The program also had significant issues with contamination with other household waste, with residents dumping non-recyclable trash at unmanned recycling stations, Smith said.

The Brookhaven aldermen reportedly voted this week to close the unmanned stations because of the contamination issues.