Oakland County contains many separate municipal waste and recycling programs, while communities in parts of the county already collaborate through RRRASOC and SOCRRA, examples of an intermunicipal authority model. The county's Materials Management Plan work program calls for a collaboration action plan, and Michigan's materials-management framework recognizes that recyclable material, organics, and solid waste frequently move across local boundaries. The planning choice is therefore not simply local versus county control; communities can share purchasing, facilities, education, data, or authorities to different degrees while retaining different kinds of local responsibility. Garbage trucks and recycling markets don't stop at city limits. We should figure out which parts of the system benefit from scale without assuming every service has to be run by the same organization.