The Putnam County Solid Waste Department will restructure its recycling services next month.
Department Director Keith Street said the changes will have little impact on customers who use the service.
“The main change we were making… We have about 240 businesses and county buildings that we pick up as a free service every week,” Street said. “The route just kind of needed to be cleaned up and needed changes to make it a little more efficient for us and more economical.”
Street said the biggest change to the recycling route will involve plastics as the county will no longer accept them along their route.
“We’ll no longer at these pickups be able to take the plastics due to the limited market now. It’s no longer cost-effective for the department,” Street said. “We will still collect the plastic if anyone in these businesses still want to get rid of their plastic. We’ll accept it either at the recycling center on South Jefferson or any of the city (or county) recycling containers.”
Street said the department will look to create central pick-up locations for recyclables after some trips to businesses with recyclables didn’t warrant a stop.
“We’re trying to restructure this. Some of our accounts we pick up, we went by every week and not necessarily have anything to pick up,” Street said. “Our route drivers are going to work real close with all the folks and figure out whether we need to do it once a week, once every two weeks, once a month, whatever their volume dictates.”
Street said the department also asks customers to help keep shredded paper together by bagging it before recycling.
“We’ve run into a couple accounts where it’s just kind of scattered everywhere and made a mess,” Street said. “If folks would kind of help us out and bag those things up, it’d be cleaner not only for us but for those individuals, so we’d appreciate that too.”
Paper recycling pickup will run Monday through Thursday with cardboard and aluminum cans being picked up on Friday. The changes will go into effect beginning the week of Feb. 11.
Street encourages customers to contact the Solid Waste Department for any questions or concerns regarding the changes.
