MURRAY – The City of Murray began its curbside recycling pick up program in March of last year. As of Thursday, 656 are subscribed to the service.
City of Murray Street and Solid Waste Manager Ron Allbritten said he is pleased with how the program is going, and subscribers seem to be pleased as well.
“It makes you feel good,” service subscriber Randy Johnson said. “We were recycling anyway because we don’t like the waste and it was nice to be able to do it right from home. We still go to the animal shelter for the papers and the WATCH Center with the cans just because.”
“We weren’t recycling tin cans at all, so now we’re recycling cans and more aluminum stuff, just not the pop cans for WATCH Center,” Johnson added. “It feels like we’re doing more than we were, and it’s easier.”
Jean Bennett, another subscriber, said that she and her husband Don are “thrilled to have as much recycling as we have. We are very thankful with what the city is doing.”
The Bennetts are glad that they acquire more #1 and #2 plastics than other types because those kinds of plastics are accepted; however, she said “there is still enough (plastic) that we have to throw away that it would be nice to recycle those – if that’s possible. But it really hurts to have to throw away the glass.”
Allbritten advised that adding other types of plastic or glass to the list of accepted items is not likely to happen any time soon. Glass could be sent to a glass manufacturer to be melted down and reused. Unfortunately, there are no glass manufacturers in the region. Even if there were, the process is very labor intensive as glass must be sorted by color before it can be recycled.
“There are seven different categories of plastic,” he explained. “Different types of plastic have different recycling processes. For some of the plastics, the recycling process is as environmentally nasty as the plastic itself. … The other problem is that the process of recycling plastic is more expensive than creating a brand new (container). It is cheaper to use virgin resin to make that plastic bottle than it is to make it out of recycled bottles.”
Murray’s recycling program is breaking even, but he noted that recycling is not a financially lucrative industry. The industry standard is that it costs $4-5 to make $1.
“Ever since China closed the ‘green curtain,’ it kind of threw the whole recycling industry into a tailspin,” he said. “There has been a lot of reinventing going on. A lot of the prices on recycling changed. In 2018, cardboard brought $150 a ton; last time I checked, it brought $30 a ton. That’s a big difference.”
Allbritten noted that, in our area, recycling centers that collect and sort materials are few and far between. In the past, Murray’s recycling was sent to a facility Hopkinsville where it was combined with material from other municipalities, sorted and sent to a recycling processor in Memphis. In early March, the Hopkinsville facility closed. Fortunately, Allbritten was able to find another recycling center to take the recyclables; unfortunately, it is farther away, in Martin, Tennessee.
“That’s part of the big problem with recycling – there’s no money in it,” Allbritten said. “That is why Hopkinsville closed their recycling facility. They had been operating for 10 years and they had lost over $2 million. They were losing $200,000 a year.”
Allbritten said his goal is to have another building at the transfer station just for recyclables. His vision calls for a facility where recyclables can be collected, loaded on to a tractor trailer and transported directly to a recycling processor, such as the facility in Memphis. Doing that would reduce some of the costs by removing the middleman between the city and recycling processor. In the meantime, Allbritten is focused on getting more subscribers so that the program can continue to grow.
