http://ozarkspub.vo.llnwd.net/o37/KSMU/audio/mp3/sense-community-small-town-curbside-recycling-program-boasts-success-22-years-and-counting_46001.mp3
Reporter standup: “Good morning, and welcome to our Sense of Community series on ‘Doing Your Civic Duty.’ Right now, I’m standing in a gravel parking lot of the West Plains Recycling Center…and I’m next to a large, white, noisy sanitation truck that I’m about to hop aboard and go for a ride in. In today’s segment on Science and the Environment, we’re profiling the successful recycling program in this town that was started decades ago by just a handful of people who saw it as their civic duty to take care of this earth.”
[Sound: recycling staff chatting]
It’s dawn here, and the recycling staff members are trickling in for their shifts. Each has a nickname: there’s Shrek, Fast Freddie, Lazy Seven, and Roberto. I’m riding with Peacock today…that’s Brent Pitcock.
[Sound: truck brakes]
“Some days, we get a lot of paper. Most days, it’s more cardboard and plastic,” Pitcock said.
Pitcock only stops at the homes with bright red, rectangular recycling bins out front; those bins are provided by the city.
Every day, five days a week, these men drive the routes for the free, curbside recycling pickup program here. It was the second town in the state, after Columbia, to offer free, curbside recycling for everyone within the city limits, and folks are pretty proud of that around here.
Today, Pitcock and the other recycling truck drivers are picking up glass, plastic, paper, cardboard, and aluminum.
[Sound: glass crashing]
“It takes about two to three hours to pick up the route, then the rest of the day we work in the recycling building bailing it up and sorting it all out,” Pitcock said.
[Sound: glass shredder]
Back at the recycling center, glass pickle jars and empty wine and beer bottles are fed into a large glass shredder. This crushed glass will end up in the asphalt used to fix potholes and roads. The cardboard is bailed and sold to brokers; much of it ends up exported to China.
James Mayfield is a supervisor here.
Mayfield: “We recycle about 800 tons of cardboard a year.”
Davidson: “Just in West Plains?”
Mayfield: “Just in West Plains, yeah. And we’re small compared to a lot of places.”
In West Plains, the city oversees trash pickup services. So, a small percentage of the weekly trash pickup fee goes toward the recycling program. It also gets money from the fees it charges people to drop off large loads of trash at its transfer station.
The recycling program also gets money from the recycled products it sells, and it relied heavily on grants for its startup costs. Its two trucks and massive machinery were almost all purchased through grants.
One of the founders of the program in 1990 was Dennis Sloan. He said Senate Bill 530 required Missouri to significantly reduce the amount of waste cities were sending to landfills. Sloan said the West Plains team thought they could take that one step further by offering a curbside recycling program.
“It wasn’t really mandatory, but we thought it was the right thing to do,” Sloan said.
Although it wasn’t within his job responsibilities, Sloan personally spent a lot of time on grant-writing. This became his project, and even though he’s retired now, he still stops by the recycling center weekly.
He says it’s a person’s civic duty to conserve precious resources, and to look critically at what products they buy.
In this case, Sloan felt it was his civic duty to see this recycling program through, and he feels it’s the civic duty of others to use the program. Today, about 30 percent of residents here recycle.
Through this recycling program and other efforts, West Plains has reduced the amount of waste it sends to the landfill by over 40 percent over the past 22 years.
Join us this afternoon at 4:30 as our Sense of Community series continues. We’ll be diving into the issue of water conservation, particularly in light of this year’s drought. I’m Jennifer Davidson.