BUCKHANNON – When the Buckhannon Crossroads Recycling Center reopens Saturday, June 20, the setup will look a little different.
The center will no longer be open 24 hours a day and will only be open on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to noon, and the drop-off site will be manned. City of Buckhannon information coordinator and grant writer Callie Cronin Sams said this change was made because the center will now have an employee standing by to answer any questions and ensure everything going into the bins can actually be recycled.
“They were simply getting too many people either just dumping trash or folks were not paying close attention to the materials that are recyclable and were inadvertently or mistakenly putting in materials that are not actually recyclable,” Sams said.
The only materials that may be recycled at the Crossroads center are newspaper; corrugated cardboard; No. 1 plastic soda/pop bottles; No. 2 milk jugs; and aluminum and steel cans without liners.
“Our waste department supervisor Jeff Wamsley takes quite a bit of pride in the fact that the haulers and the recycle markets that we deal with often comment on how clean of a product they get from Buckhannon, and it doesn’t have a lot of contamination, but that really takes a lot of work on our end,” Sams said. “It helps if people who recycle do that work of sorting and just pay close attention to what types of plastics they are recycling.”
Sams said the Mud Lick Recycling Center has remained open during the COVID-19 pandemic and is still available to recycle goods. On top of the items recyclable at the Crossroads center, the Mud Lick Facility is also capable of recycling office paper and electronics.
“One of the reasons the Mud Lick facility was able to stay open was because there is usually staff there,” Sams said. “They might not be outside where the drop-off bins are, they might be inside working and sorting, but generally there’s folks on-site who can help people if they need assistance or if they need clarification on what can be recycled at those sites. It was decided they needed to do the same thing at Crossroads because they were finding up to 70 percent of what was in the bins was not recyclable material.”
The Mud Lick Center is open Monday through Friday from 7:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. and 7:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m. on Saturday.
“They do have the blue recycling bins at the Mud Lick Recycling Center so if anyone needs a recycling bin and hasn’t recycled before, or they just need a new bin, you can go to the Mud Lick Recycling Center during those hours to pick up a blue recycling bin that can be used for curbside recycling,” Sams said.
