MURRAY - The efforts of a work group formed in the summer to pursue additional ways Murray residents could dispose of their recyclable materials other than the Andrus Drive drop-off facility reached an important point last week.
The Murray City Council unanimously approved a plan that includes incorporating the city’s trash collection contractor for curbside recycling for residents. The council’s approval now gives City Attorney Warren Hopkins permission to begin drafting an ordinance on the subject.
The main piece of the plan includes a $15 charge for residents who want to be included into the program, which will be on top of the current $15 charge residents pay for trash collection. An additional recycling container will cost $10, which is the same cost for an additional trash container. The city turned over its trash collection five years ago to Republic Inc,, and that is with whom the city is currently negotiating a new contract.
“We asked Mayor (Bob) Rogers to explore a price for (curbside recycling) since Republic is our current waste management contractor, so we started with them,” said the work group’s co-chair Pat Sieber. “Republic gave us a proposal and they need 500 to 550 subscribers to start out. Once they get that number, they will start with bi-weeky service for residential customers only, and they will need approximately a month of lead time once this number of subscribers is reached.
“Several members of the work group expressed their desire to begin single-stream curbside recycling and I had to learn myself what single-stream recycling is. Basically, what that means is you put all of your recyclables, whether plastic or metal, what have you, into one container.”
Since the work group formed in June, a familiar theme with its meetings has been the Andrus location and how its has become a drain on the city’s finances, City Sanitation/Street Manager Ron Allbritten has said on numerous occasions the Andrus Drive facility is costing the city just short of $70,000 a year to run. Therefore, it became rather easy to see in the early stages of the work group’s pursuits that maintaining the Andrus facility was not it’s members’ plans.
However, the door does not appear to be completely closed on Andrus Drive just yet. Work group member Valerie Frederick presented the group’s minority report, which listed several ideas that did not make the final cut.
“There was sentiment to reopen Andrus Drive with the hours of Thursday through Friday 2-6 p.m. and Saturdays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.,” Frederick said, listing the other main items of the minority report as having curbside recycling being available to businesses, as well as residents, the construction of an incinerator for disposing of non-recyclable materials and combustibles, as well as allowing residents who wish to volunteer to be part of any recycling operations to do that, even while on city properties (it is believed that there are issues with the city’s insurance that present a roadblock to the last suggestion).”
In addition, the Republic proposal calls for the city to pay a $45-per-ton penalty should a quarter of the materials collected be contaminated. That describes recyclables that have not been cleaned of their contents and have been mixed with regular waste that is considered “trash.”
This has been a big problem with the Andrus Drive facility, Allbritten has said.
“That is still a concern with (the curbside proposal),” Seiber said, adding that the local chapter of the environmental activist group, the Sierra Club, has pledged to lead the charge on education efforts and helping residents who wish to subscribe to the Republic plan to learn how to correctly recycle.
All recyclables will go to a facility in nearby Hopkinsville, where they will be sorted. Seiber added that, depending on the market and composition of the loads, they could be forwarded to facilities in Tennessee, Alabama and Missouri. Seiber said this can give contributors peace of mind in knowing that their recyclables will be going to places that will indeed recycle the materials, not a landfill where they will languish.
“For single stream, you can have clean plastics 1 and 2 (namely bottles with necks), mixed metals, including aluminum cans, as well as paper and cardboard, all in one 96-gallon cart,” Seiber said. “They will not accept glass or e-scrap (consisting of computer parts or old TV sets).
“Presently, we have around 5,000 residential customers (for trash pickup in the city), so roughly 10% is what we need and we’d have to have that number because they are going to need a new truck, as well as an employee to do this,” said work group co-chair Burton Young. “We’ve got to have the people’s support on this and we’re going to work with the Sierra Club to publicize it, and I think education is going to be a key in all of this.”
The first step in the education process will come soon when residents receive their upcoming trash bills. Social media campaigns, as well as announcements on the city’s website are also planned.
The city’s contract with Republic expires in October of next year. The recycling agreement is contingent on that contract being renewed.