Thousands of green recycling carts sat stacked in a yard off south Arch Street this week as Waste Management prepared to kick off its first week of recycling collection in unincorporated Pulaski County.
The company announced Wednesday that it will begin rolling out the 17,700 recycling carts to residents next week.
Recyclable items
Permitted materials for recycling collection in Pulaski County will include:
Newsprint, junk mail, brown paper, white paper, magazines, soft-cover books, phone books.
Empty aluminum cans, aluminum foil and cleaned pie tins.
High-density polyethylene plastic jugs, including empty milk and bottled-water jugs.
Polyethylene terephthalate plastic bottles numbered 1 - 7.
Emptied steel cans.
Corrugated cardboard, paperboard and chip board products, including cereal boxes and shoe boxes.
Empty aerosol cans.
Aseptic packaging, including milk cartons, juice cartons and juice boxes (without straws).
Rigid plastics, including plastic tubs and buckets, plastic toys, hangers, nursery pots and laundry baskets.
Household metals, including old metal pots, pans and cookware.
Items that are not permitted include:
Glass
Any recyclable materials that have been in contact with food debris, including pizza boxes.
Stretchable plastics, including bags from grocery stores or dry cleaners.
In March, the Pulaski County Quorum Court approved a monthly charge for recycling services to be added to residents' garbage-collection bills. The bi-weekly recycling collection service will be fully operational by June 5, county officials said.
Waste Management will send out mailers next week to inform customers of their pickup dates and what materials can be placed in the bins.
On Wednesday, county and company officials stood before two brand new, forest-green recycling collection trucks -- two of three purchased by Waste Management at $325,000 each for the county's new service contract. The trucks will run on compressed natural gas instead of diesel fuel, a company spokesman said.
"One common theme I discovered shortly after taking office was that access to recycling in the unincorporated areas of the county was woefully limited and burdensome," Barry Hyde, county judge for Pulaski County, said Wednesday. "Many of the people I talked with said they would love to recycle, but having to locate and haul their recyclables to a receiving station miles away was just too difficult."
The company's first hurdle in implementing the service will be educating the new customers on what materials they can collect. On each stop, drivers will check each bin to ensure that only acceptable materials are inside.
If a cart is "contaminated," or has items better suited for garbage collection, drivers will not collect its contents and will instead mark it with a flier or sticker indicating its contamination.
"Our biggest barrier is customer adherence to what's recyclable," Waste Management's Residential Rate Manager Terrell Clark said. "People tend to recycle what they think rather than actually reading the materials that they are sent.
"That causes missed pickups -- it causes the customer to be angry that we left the can."
Collection trucks also will be equipped with on-board computer units that allow drivers to note whether a customer's cart was placed out, whether it contained contaminating materials and the exact time the truck stopped at each home. If a customer calls to inquire about their collection, the company will be able to look up the data for each individual, Clark said.
County residents will see a $4.22 increase to their monthly garbage collection rate, raising it to $26.58 starting next month. Residents will receive bills of $79.74 every three months for all sanitation services, including weekly garbage collection, bulk item pickup, limb and brush pickup, and old tire collection.
The recyclable materials will be taken to Waste Management's single stream sorting facility near the Little Rock Port Authority along the Arkansas River, where aluminum, plastic, tin and fiber products are processed at a rate of 100 tons per day. The processed materials are then shipped via rail and truck and sold as raw commodities.
Company officials estimate the recycling service will collect about 660 tons of material per month, thereby diverting those materials from Waste Management's landfill and expanding its lifespan.
Recycling collection will occur every other week, while trash collection will remain weekly.
Metro on 05/11/2017