By Rose Hooper
"I've got a truckload piled high with big
bags of mixed recyclables ‚ does the county expect me to stand
here all day and put them one-by-one into this recycling container?
Not!" said local hauler Bobby Gunter. Gunter and other haulers
are upset with the county's move this week to prevent them from
placing bulk recycling at Webster Enterprises facility in Dillsboro.
‚ Herald photo by Rose Hooper
While commercial recyclers say they are "loaded
with no place to unload," Jackson County Manager Ken Westmoreland
hopes to have a solution to the situation within 10 days.
Haulers like Bobby Gunter, Jeff Mills and Bill Buscemi are taking
issue with new county procedures for handling recycles.
As of Monday, July 7, private haulers can no longer take recyclables
to the Wesbster Enterprises site in Dillsboro.
"Before, we could take cardboard and glass in bulk quantities
there and unload them for recycling," said Mills, owner
of Mills Recycling. "Now we are being told to stack cardboard
in a container at Mineral Springs or try and fit those big pieces
in little slots at the SRC containers."
"We've also been told that we could put the recyclables
in the trash compactor, but that's not an option for me,"
said Gunter, who, along with his wife, Sandy, own Gunter Enterprises.
"It defeats the whole purpose of recycling."
Westmoreland said the county does have a separate container
for cardboard provided by Asheville Wastepaper that is located
at the C&D landfill at Mineral Springs.
"It's just a matter of haulers emptying the cardboard from
their trucks into the container," Westmoreland said.
Buscemi, owner of Helping Hands, said, "Having to walk
up a set of stairs into the back of a semi-truck while you're
carrying a big stack of cardboard is just not feasible –
and, on top of that, it's not safe. I'm not doing it."
Haulers contend the set up is also too time consuming. As is
manually inserting individual glass bottles in a tiny slot,
they say.
Glass, which previously could be dumped in large quantities
into color-separated bins at Webster Enterprises, now must be
placed individually in SRC containers.
"Who has the time for this?" Gunter said Tuesday as
he arrived at the Dillsboro SRC with a truckload piled high
with bags of glass and other mixed recyclables. "I would
be here all day and night inserting one bottle after another
into one tiny slot; this is ridiculous."
While there is an option for cardboard, Westmoreland said "at
present there is no option for recycling glass. But we are working
on getting something at Mineral Springs to take care of the
mixed recyclables."
Meanwhile, Buscemi said he is losing money.
"I'm having to tell my large accounts, like the Great Smoky
Mountains Railroad, that I can't pick up their cardboard. What
does the county expect me to do? This is how I make my living
and they are paralyzing me," Buscemi said.
Mills said that along with the money, he is also losing time.
"I drove around five hours Monday to the different SRCs
just trying to find containers that weren't already filled up;
I don't have time for this," Mills said.
Commercial haulers aren't the only ones upset. Tuesday morning
several visitors to the Dillsboro SRC were disgruntled with
the new set up. Others, unfamiliar with the new recycling guidelines
that went into effect July 1, were upset at the lack of green
boxes to place aluminum cans. These individuals ended up throwing
their boxes and bags of recyclables into the trash compactor.
Under the new guidelines, recyclables should now be sorted into
three categories: mixed, fiber and cardboard. Items that can
go in the mixed container are steel cans, aluminum cans, plastic
bottles, milk jugs and glass.
Newspaper and mixed paper go into the fiber container and cardboard
boxes, which must be broken down and flattened, go into the
cardboard container.
"While it is an imposition now for our commercial haulers,
we hope to have the situation solved in a week to 10 days,"
Westmoreland said.
