MARTINSBURG, W.Va. — Berkeley County’s drop-off recycling program quietly began its 25th year in operation Saturday.
From humble beginnings in the parking lot of the Food Lion grocery store in Inwood, W.Va., on May 9, 1995, the program now has three drop-off sites where more than 5,700 tons of material are accepted annually, according to the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority, which facilitates the service.
In its first year, the voluntary drop-off program recorded a total of 3,763 participants and recycled 62.3 tons, but accepted only glass bottles, steel and aluminum cans, cardboard and mixed paper at that time, according to the solid waste authority.
Now, 24 categories of recyclable items are accepted.
In the program’s first week in 1995, the program recorded 74 participants, but now typically sees more than 2,400 on a weekly basis.
More than 1.67 million vehicles have entered a drop-off site since the program’s inception and more than 72,000 tons of material have been collected in the past 24 years and recycled.
“This represents the equivalent of keeping over 7,000 standard garbage trucks from entering a landfill,” the solid waste authority noted in a news release on Saturday’s anniversary.
In an interview Friday, Clint Hogbin, the solid waste authority’s longtime chairman, credited the many volunteers, elected officials, businesses and staff over the years for the program’s success.
But for the next 25 years to be successful, Hogbin said the program will need more public funding or changes in the commodity marketplace, where little, other than metal, currently generates revenue.
In fact, without lease revenue from Entsorga West Virginia’s resource recovery facility, the recycling program’s current $340,000 budget would have to be cut by nearly one-third, Hogbin said.
Built near the solid waste authority’s Grapevine Road recycling center, the Entsorga facility uses conveyors, sorters and cranes to sort through household garbage and then oxidation and composing biological processes to produce a fluffy, dry insulation-like material that is burned at the Argos cement plant near Martinsburg.
Metals removed during the sorting process are recycled.
And unlike other materials, metals are the only items generating revenue in the commodity market. The recycling program also has been financially impacted by the decline of companies in the Tri-State area like Ox Industries, that have a use for recyclable items.
The company operates a paperboard mill in the community of Halltown in Jefferson County, W.Va.
Glass now is shipped to Pittsburgh, plastics go to Harrisburg, Pa., and electronic items are shipped to Indianapolis, Hogbin said.
“Back in the ‘90s, nearly every recyclable item we collected could be marketed to an end user locally,” Hogbin said.
The growing program costs, combined with a longstanding need to establish a fourth drop-off recycling site in the fast-growing northern end of Berkeley County, have prompted the solid waste authority to lobby state lawmakers to divert some of the fee revenue that the state already collects to close landfills to county solid waste authorities across the state.
Hogbin said residents in Falling Waters-Spring Mills area deserve to have a recycling center, but estimated that it would cost about $500,000 to develop, and would add another $50,000 annually in staffing costs to the recycling program budget, Hogbin said.
A fourth drop-off recycling site would join comprehensive recycling centers at 111 Landfill Drive off Grapevine Road east of Martinsburg and 637 Pilgrim St. in Inwood. The county program’s Hedgesville drop-off site at Eagle Plaza, which is currently closed due to the coronavirus outbreak, operates only on Saturdays.
The drop-off sites are staffed with four full-time attendants and one part-time attendant. Lynne Lashley serves as the recycling and litter control program coordinator, fields complaints and phone calls and also handles financial matters for the solid waste authority.
Until Lashley’s hiring about five years ago, Hogbin said he and the late Edgar Mason co-managed the recycling program.
While the recycling program has been able to grow, Hogbin noted that the solid waste authority’s dependence on county taxpayer money has been lowered to about $62,000 due to the Entsorga lease revenue.
Over the years, Hogbin said the Berkeley County Council (formerly the Berkeley County Commission), has been a “vital partner” in support of the recycling program.
Ahead of Saturday’s milestone, the solid waste authority thanked residents, “most of all,” for their decades of public support in a news release.
“Without your participation, these programs would have simply not enjoyed overwhelming success and we want to take a moment to express our appreciation.”