Recycling district looks to address issues at overflowing recycling site

Cardboard boxes, stacks of papers and bags of plastic bottles pile up next to large recycling bins that are already full, and too often, the papers and recycling blow into a neighboring apartment complex.

The scene outside a Center Grove area church on Monday mornings where residents in one of the most populated parts of the county bring their recyclables is evidence of the continued growth in the area. The amount of recyclable items being left at the Johnson County Recycling District’s most popular site at has grown year after year, and the site had its biggest month ever in April.

But the site at Emmanuel Church isn’t keeping up with the growing demand to recycle, said Jessie Biggerman, the executive director of the Johnson County Recycling District.

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Now, the county office that manages recycling for residents in unincorporated Johnson County is looking to add more bins to collect recyclables to avoid the weekly overflow issue, Biggerman said.

But they also need residents to be patient and not dump their recycling at a site that is already full.

“It is up to the public to properly dispose of materials and use the site properly,” Biggerman said.

The problem is a good one to have, with more residents interested in recycling their paper, plastic and cardboard instead of sending them to the landfill, she said.

But the Center Grove area doesn’t have a government-run service that will collect recycling from residents’ homes. So that duty falls to the county recycling district, which is run by a board of directors made up of town, county and city officials. With an annual budget of about $550,000 and a staff of three, handling a recycling service for the 40,000 residents in the Center Grove area, plus the rest of the unincorporated county, is challenging because of how the population is growing, Biggerman said.

The recycling site at Emmanuel Church is by far the county’s busiest, with about 750 tons of recycling collected last year. The next nearest site, the recycling district’s Franklin offices, collected about 320 tons of recycling last year.

The county office wants to continue offering the service because of the demand for recycling. But officials are concerned about not having the ability to manage a site that has been overwhelmed with more recycling than it can handle.

The recycling site currently has 10 bins. The plan is to move the bins from the east to the north side of the parking lot, which has more room, and potentially add as many as five new bins. Currently, when a recycling truck comes to empty the containers on Monday morning, workers will often fill four to five more containers with recyclable materials that were left scattered around the containers, Biggerman said.

None of the bins are emptied on Sundays, and residents coming over the weekend will still leave their recycling, even if there isn’t room for it, she said.

“People will go out there and put the material on the ground, rather than holding on to it,” she said.

If adding bins doesn’t solve the problem, the worst case scenario would be closing the site if the recycling district doesn’t have the resources to manage it, Biggerman said.

The district isn’t able to constantly monitor the site, and keeping it clean takes away time from employees’ other tasks, she said.

Closing a site is a step the recycling district took years ago when a site in Trafalgar was shuttered after having persistent problems with people dumping trash, she said. In the past, the recycling site at Emmanuel Church has had problems with people leaving items they shouldn’t, such as electronics or styrofoam. But recently, people have mostly been leaving only the items that are allowed to be recycled, such as paper, cardboard, aluminum cans and certain types of plastics, Biggerman said.

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Here are the locations where Johnson County residents can drop off recyclables:

Johnson County Recycling District office, 900 Arvin Road, Suite A, Franklin

Bargersville Senior Center, paper and cardboard only, 14 W. Old South St., Bargersville

Emmanuel Church of Greenwood, 1640 W. Stones Crossing Road, Greenwood

Edinburgh transfer station, River Road, Edinburgh

Mount Pleasant Christian Fellowship, 2424 S. Emerson Ave., Greenwood

Prince’s Lakes Town Hall, 14 E. Lakeview Drive, Nineveh

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Here is a look at what you can recycle at the drop-off sites in the county:

Large bins

Steel and tin food cans

Aluminum beverage cans

Paper and cardboard

Glass (green, brown and clear)

Plastics 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, which includes milk jugs, soda bottles, laundry detergent bottles. They do not accept No. 6 plastics, including styrofoam

Cartons, such as for milk and juice

Small bins

Paper and cardboard

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