Bales of cardboard that have been processed and are waiting to be sold.

Recycle. Reuse. Reduce. Reclaim.

Cheryl Oliver is a true believer.

Her husband, Jack, is not quite so sure.

For Cheryl, there is no choice because she regards recycling as crucial for the survival of the planet.

Jack said he gets it, but doesn’t think a few people can make any real difference.

The house divided is a microcosm of communities when it comes to recycling.

Cheryl believes everyone should do their part, while Jack believes that since not everyone is doing their part, why should he?

“The problem with recycling is that most people don’t do it or won’t do it,” Jack said. “I think it’s mostly due to people being plain lazy.”

Jack has a point – recycling takes more effort than just throwing everything into the same trash can. There are people who might recycle but don’t because they simply don’t know how. With paper, plastic, aluminum, metal and a myriad of other color-coded options for recyclable material, deciding where each thing should go can be troublesome.

Not knowing what recycling programs, if any, are available in a particular city or county can result in people simply throwing things away in the nearest trash can.

Recycling takes some effort.

The SunLight Project team looked into city and county recycling programs and spoke to people across the SunLight Project coverage area – Dalton, Milledgeville, Thomasville, Tifton and Valdosta, Ga., and Live Oak, Fla., along with surrounding counties and cities.

Overall, the SunLight team found recycling programs can be a money pit for governments. It costs more money to recycle than to just throw everything in a landfill, but cities and counties still put forth an effort to offer options for the good of the environment.

There is a marketplace for recyclables, but like all markets, it fluctuates and sometimes it does so sporadically and unexpectedly.

Cheryl Oliver, the executive director of the Annette Howell Turner Center for the Arts in Valdosta, said it’s not enough for people to just recycle. They have to buy recycled products to drive the recycling market up.

“If people make it a point to look for products made from recycled material, then it suddenly becomes more profitable to use recycled material,” Cheryl said.

She strongly disagrees with her husband, Jack, on the subject. She said it is a long game. So what if not everyone is recycling, she said. To her, it is about changing American culture.

“I will continue to make the effort, and if my grandchildren see me making that effort, then it is going to make an impression on them on how they can save the environment,” Cheryl said. “And that creates a culture that says ‘let’s do something about this and not worry if everyone is doing their part.’”

Recycling Programs

Cities and counties vary in recycling programs, some with an aggressive, all-out effort and others offering the bare minimum.

Valdosta and Lowndes County

For the City of Valdosta, the recycling route is the same as the regular household garbage route. That means if people in the city want to recycle, all they have to do is put recyclable material in the proper bin on the same day as trash pick-up, said Richard Hardy, Valdosta public works director. All they have to do is ask.

“Everyone in the city has an opportunity to recycle,” Hardy said. “We provide 19-quart recycling containers. We give customers a list of items we do recycle and we pick them up.”

For residents living in apartment complexes, Hardy said recycling is done through the complex. Most apartment buildings are provided with a recycling dumpster, he said. If the complex is a public-works customer, the city provides the complex with the means to recycle.

When recycled material is picked up, it is taken to the public works department to be processed. Hardy said about 30 percent of properties in the city recycle.

The public works department can process about 22 to 23 percent of the 30 percent. The city then pays a company to process the rest of the material.

Hardy said he would love for everyone to recycle. The city averages about 45 to 50 tons of plastic, glass and paper products a week, he said. Every ton of recyclable material is one less ton of material that goes to the landfill.

“That’s the biggest goal for us – to make sure this stuff doesn’t go to the landfill,” Hardy said.

He said although processing recycling material is not profitable, it is preferable than the landfill. After the material is processed, it becomes a commodity the city can sell.

However, as Paige Dukes, Lowndes County clerk, pointed out, recycling is not as profitable as in the past.

“While recycling is certainly a responsible action to take, it is not the profit returning venture it used to be,” Dukes wrote in an email. “In some case, those collecting recyclables end up losing money, instead of making it.”

Lowndes County does not have a lot of statistical information with regard to recycling in the unincorporated area, she wrote. Reason being, Lowndes County addresses the collection of solid waste, yard waste and recyclables through a franchise agreement with qualified haulers.

The county has two franchise partners: Advanced Disposal and Deep South Sanitation. Residents can choose a company. Advanced Disposal operates two centers to accept recyclables and Deep South Sanitation operates one.

Advanced Disposal had a curbside recycling program for county residents during its first year in Lowndes but contractual changes ended curbside recycling pick-up.

Dukes said recycling is important to the county. The less material deposited in landfills, extends the life of the landfill site, she said. Once a landfill is at capacity, it must be monitored for decades and even after, the site can have limited future uses.

Lowndes isn’t the only county concerned with limiting the amount of waste going to the landfill.

Tifton and Tift County

In Tifton and Tift County, Golden Environmental is contracted with both city and county for garbage collection.

Richard Golden, owner of Golden Environmental, said single stream recycling, which is what comes from residential curbside pick up, totals about 30 tons a month. The material is then collected and taken to Tallahassee, Fla., to be separated, sorted and processed.

Businesses benefit from pick-up of cardboard and office paper, which Golden said totals approximately 100 tons per month. Paper products are delivered to a recycling plant in Tifton’s industrial park, where it is processed and then sold to a paper mill.

Golden said the Tift area has a 60 percent participation rate in recycling.

“Some sections have 100 percent, some have zero,” Golden said, adding overall the Tift area has a good recycling program.

In addition to glass, paper and plastics, other materials are recycled, which keeps them out of the landfill.

“We don’t take grass, it’s not a commodity, but it’s ground up and turned into mulch,” Golden said.

Lawn waste and trees are included. Tift area residents can go to the landfill and take the mulch for free, so long as they have a way to transport it. Golden said the process keeps more than 300 tons of yard waste are kept out of the landfill.

He said the recycling programs make for a 25 percent reduction in the volume going into the landfill.

Golden said the Tift area doesn’t collect nearly enough recyclable materials to warrant a processing plant in Tifton.

“We’d have to do 100 times more to justify that,” he said.

He said even though some avenues are profitable, the recycling program generally costs more than it brings in.

“It costs to recycle,” he said. “We don’t get paid for it, we have to pay to have it processed.”

Even though his company doesn’t break even, the environmental concerns and keeping material from filling the landfill are important factors.

Golden said his numbers do not include individual companies that have recycling programs. Many large companies, such as Walmart, recycle cardboard, Golden said.

It’s more cost effective for large companies to have recycling programs because they can afford the start-up cost of purchasing the equipment.

“Lots of industries try to get as low a footprint as they can,” he said.

Dalton and Baldwin County

The Dalton Public Works department collects recyclables from the curb outside single-family homes and duplexes once a week and delivers them to the recycling center at the Dalton-Whitfield Solid Waste Authority landfill. There, the items are sorted, processed and sold by the solid waste authority.

In 2016, the program collected 1,251 tons of glass, metals, paper, cardboard and plastic.

Liz Swafford, recycling and education program coordinator for the solid waste authority, said Dalton’s recycling program saved approximately 2,131 cubic yards of landfill space in 2016.

She also said the city brought in $38,360 from revenue sharing for recyclables collected by the city and sold by the solid waste authority and saved $35,028 in disposal fees.

Dalton Public Works Director Benny Dunn said the program costs about $295,000 a year to run, which includes salaries and benefits for three full-time and one part-time workers and three trucks.

“We did a count during the month of June 2017 and found that just over 4,100 households participate in our curbside program,” Dunn said. “On a weekly basis this means that we pick up around 6,500-plus individual recycling bins.”

Baldwin County offers six trash/recycling pickup centers for residents throughout the county.

Although the county does not make money from recycling and trash pickup, a $13.50 monthly charge is collected from each household that goes to pay Advanced Disposal, the county’s designated trash pickup provider.

After the recycling is collected from the six sites, it is transported to the headquarters of Attaway Recycling, where workers separate the recycling by type and ship it to one of several companies in Atlanta to be reconstituted.

“All of the recycling that gets collected in town is brought to our facility, where we process the paper, plastic, and stuff like that,” said Matt Attaway, son of Brantley Attaway, the business’ owner.

Attaway said the company get about two or three tons of recycled material a week from Baldwin County.

From there, items are run up a conveyor belt where about 16 people on the line sort through everything and throw each recyclable into bins underneath the line.

“From there, we bale it up in a baler and ship it off to be processed,” Attaway said.

Although residents have the option to recycle as many usable items as they wish, many of the recycling centers are open during inconvenient hours, residents have said.

Milledgeville and Baldwin County

Milledgeville offers six centers throughout the county where recyclables can be dropped off, but by comparison the city lags considerably behind Dublin in Laurens County in recycling pickup

Dublin Sanitation customers receive an individual recycling cart for their homes that is picked up every other Friday. Only one Baldwin pickup center is open more than four days a week, and only one is open during the same hours daily. Three of the six are only open three days a week or less.

Thomasville and Thomas County

By contrast, Thomasville does not offer curbside recycling services, and recycling is not mandatory.

In addition to city locations where recyclable goods may be left, the city provides bins at several Thomas County trash collection sites. Items left in the bins are processed at the city baling center at no cost to the county.

Each ton of materials recycled is 2,000 pounds of waste that does not have to comply with strict environmental requirements for the landfill, said Nate Tyler, city solid waste director.

Recyclable items handled by the city are cardboard, plastics, newspapers and magazines that are recycled into new products.

In 2016, the city processed 3,056 tons of recyclables in all materials, including electronics. A total is not available for the year to date.

In addition to the city’s recycling bins at county trash sites, county government provides receptacles for scrap metal at the locations.

Moultrie and Colquitt County

Colquitt County has worked out a compromise of sorts – a central collection site where residents can drop off a number of recyclable commodities. Customers must pay $5 per month — either $30 for half a year or $60 for 12 months — for the service to be self-sustaining.

The county cranked up its recycling effort in December on fenced land it owns on 23rd Street. The center accepts plastics, paper, cardboard, aluminum and metal goods such as washers and dryers. The program is funded by selling the recyclable commodities and the monthly fees, Colquitt County Administrator Chas Cannon said.

“The key for us was making it voluntary and not burdening taxpayers,” he said.

The City of Moultrie at one time operated a recycling collection site at the Farmers Market grounds on First Avenue Southeast, but it was closed in early 2016. The private company that picked up the recyclables at the site was losing money by servicing it, city officials said at the time; prices of the recyclable material were too low.

Live Oak and Suwannee County, Fla.

Since Suwannee County currently offers limited options for recycling. People interested in recycling have to get creative.

Danny Garrett, crew leader at the Suwannee County Solid Waste Facility, said the county recycles used motor oil, aluminum, cardboard, newspapers, magazines and tires. Every collection site has been bins designated for items, except for tires and oil.

To recycle tires and oil, they must be dropped off at the Suwannee County Solid Waste Facility. Garrett said residents must pay $100 per ton to recycle tires and oil.

“That is the exact amount it costs us to recycle,” Garrett said. “This is not a money-making thing.”

Garrett said there is always something everybody can do at home.

Garrett shreds and soaks paper in water at his house and turns it into bricks using a press.

Once the paper bricks dry, he uses the bricks as fuel for his fireplace instead of wood.

The City of Live Oak does not offer a recycling option to residents.

Community Redevelopment Agency board member Cindy Robinson recently approached the subject of adding a recycling option, but it appeared the cost would be too much.

“I know it can be expensive and I know we don’t have a lot of money in our community but I think we should do our part,” Robinson said.

She said as much as possible should be recycled because the world is going to run out of resources.

“It’s a shame that everything goes into the landfill,” Robinson said.

Robinson said she separates cardboard, glass, tin cans and aluminum cans but it is not always convenient for city residents to go to the county’s solid waste collection sites to drop off.

“I grew up reusing everything that you could possibly reuse and I’m always looking for ways to reuse something,” Robinson said. “Not everything can be reused but I try my best to reduce my footprint.”

Robinson said she understands some people don’t have time to separate but she would like the City of Live Oak to have a recycling facility that separates the recyclable items.

People throughout the SunLight coverage area had different opinions on recycling. In the second part of this series, the SunLight Project will look at what people have to say about recycling in their neck of the woods.

Keeping it out of the landfill

The life of a water bottle begins deep down in the earth, from the building blocks of hydrocarbon feed stock — natural gas that likely was procured by injecting large volumes of high-pressure water into rock, or perhaps crude oil from a well in Venezuela.

The gas or oil is then processed into pellets – the DNA, as it were, of the budding bottle. The pellets are shaped into the ubiquitous containers and labeled with brand names such as Perrier or Evian or the local supermarket’s own brand.

Estimates are all of the water bottles used in the United States each year require the equivalent of some 17 million gallons of oil, according to the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank. That’s not counting the energy required to transport the pellets to the plant or the bottle of water – often water purified from a municipal well – to the store shelf.

From there, the consumer takes the water home to put in the fridge or places it in a cooler to drink at the beach.

After that, the bottle’s lifespan is usually quite compressed; the water is poured into a glass or drunk straight from the container, with the bottle’s life often ending in a curbside cart or tossed on the side of the road.

“Unless,” as Dr. Seuss would say, “someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Throughout the SunLight Project coverage area – Dalton, Milledgeville, Thomasville, Tifton, and Valdosta, Ga., and Live Oak, Fla. – people are trying to make a difference and others struggle to make recycling a viable solution.

In Moultrie, at the 23rd Street recycling facility, the grounds are kept clean by attendant Eddie McIntyre, who also assists with unloading.

McIntyre, whose salary as a temporary services worker is paid through the program’s revenues, said some days are slow, and other days are busy. During the past three weeks, his count adds up to an average of 25 cars per week during the 16 hours the center is open each week.

However, on a recent Wednesday morning, some half-dozen residents showed up to drop off cardboard, plastic and paper items within 30 minutes. Most of them said they have been coming since the recycling service began.

“It keeps trash out of the landfill,” said Bama Norman, a farmer’s wife who lives on Adel Highway. “I’m trying to do my part.”

Norman said she usually drops off items every two to three weeks.

“It’s fairly easy,” she said. “If you’re going to town, you put your trash in the car, you just drop everything here.”

Several parents brought their children along to help, including Robin Redding.

“The kids are learning to recycle and it’s a good experience for them,” she said.

The hours of 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday are convenient, she said.

“(We) are just trying to cut down on the amount of trash in the landfill,” she said. “We’re glad they brought it back.”

Chas Cannon, the county administrator, said that the goal is to make the recycling center break even and expand.

“We want to make it a long-term service,” Cannon said. “We’ve gotten a lot of requests for the service.”

Since the recycling center is paid for with fees of participants and sales of scrap material, it is an independent program that does not require taxpayers’ funds, Cannon said.

The prices paid for recyclable commodities can swing wildly, said Stacy Griffin, the county’s solid waste manager. Cardboard, for example, has been at anywhere from $21 to $200 per ton. The price of metal can range from $40 to $200 per ton; plastic up to $20 per ton; and paper between $20 to $70 per ton.

The recycling center also accepts metal goods such as washers and dryers. Residents who do not have a recycling card can drop the items off at no charge at the county landfill. Glass is not accepted because there is no market within a distance that would make it economically feasible, Griffin said.

So far, about 100 residents have paid for the service.

The county, using its staff and prison inmate labor, picks up cardboard at Moultrie businesses at least twice per week. It also works with Colquitt Regional Medical Center to collect any of its recyclable items.

“We have the capability of opening earlier or adding more days,” Griffin said. “One hundred (households) is good at this time. The more that people hear about this and want to participate, the more it will grow, I think.”

One of people who showed up during the Wednesday morning rush at the facility was Beth Cannon, the county administrator’s wife, with daughters Allie, 6, and Catherine, 7, helping put cardboard and plastic in their respective bins.

“I used to take it to the Farmers Market,” Beth Cannon said. “When that went away there was nothing to do with it except take it out of town or just trash it. It’s nice to have a (local) place to put it.”

She said “taking care of our earth and planet” is what motivates her.

Globally, single bottles that don’t end up in a landfill or recycled are creating a bit of a mess.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for example, is a Texas-sized toxic amalgamation of trash, which got sucked into currents that moved it to the west. Swirling ocean currents collect it into a mass.

Mostly plastic, it doesn’t break down except into ever smaller pieces of plastic. These particles are not healthy for ocean creatures who ingest it, and neither is it for the top of the food chain – whether hammerhead sharks or humans.

Floating chunks of plastic can choke marine and avian life. Sea turtles are among the most impacted, and rings that hold six-packs of cans are especially deadly to birds.

Beth Cannon thinks the recycling center has a lesson for future generations.

“We teach it to our children, and the schools teach it,” she said. “If we as adults don’t do it, we’re not setting an example.”

In Dalton, the recycling program brings a sense of pride and convenience. Dalton resident Jamie Hyatt said the city’s curbside recycling program makes it easy to be green.

“You don’t even have to sort it,” he said. “Just put it in the bin, and put it on the curb, and they take care of the rest.

City Council member Gary Crews said he thinks the program is one of the things that makes Dalton stand out.

“When I talk to people, they are really proud that we have it. Most local governments in this area don’t provide that service,” he said.

For Thomasville, there is no pot of gold at the end of the recycling rainbow.

Figures show the City of Thomasville’s recycling program is a money-losing service.

In 2014, the city received $114,000 for recyclable goods, with $102,004 spent. The expenditure does not take into account the cost of transportation of recyclable items to various sites.

“So we actually lost money, but it’s a service city council wants to provide,” said Nate Tyler, city solid waste director and Thomasville-Thomas County Landfill manager.

Thomas County resident Shanelle Roberts does not recycle, but some of her relatives do religiously.

Roberts, Thomas County/Thomasville Narcotics/Vice Division administrative assistant, said she leads a hectic, busy schedule and, regrettably, forgets about the importance of recycling.

Tommy Verran, a Thomasville resident, recycles glass, plastic, metal, cardboard, magazines, newspapers and any other recyclable paper.

“We have three bins at our house where we separate,” said Verran, while visiting a Thomasville recycling location.

Verran, a retired Thomas County Central High School band director, and his wife, Kim, visit the Remington Avenue recycling site every two weeks. Verran said they are attempting to reduce their carbon footprint.

“Plastic is one of the worst things. Plastic doesn’t degrade. It stays plastic forever,” Verran said. “People have become a parasite on the earth.”

Among the people fighting for more recycling bins in Baldwin County is Ashley Bacon, the director of Keep Milledgeville Baldwin Beautiful. KMMB is a local chapter of the national organization Keep America Beautiful, which attempts to rid communities of trash by sponsoring cleanup days and promoting recycling wherever their groups have a foothold.

“Recycling is important, period,” Bacon said. “If people calculate the amount of time it takes their consumables to break down and the amount of time it takes a landfill to fill up, I think it could really help curb (unnecessary trash) … there’s no sense in letting a piece of trash spend 100 years in a landfill and having to close the landfill because of toxic fumes, spillage, and that sort of thing. I want to better our community, and it all boils down to the choices people make.”

One of Bacon’s recent successes is an agreement with Baldwin’s Board of Education to purchase one recycling bin for every classroom and field district-wide.

The initiative was launched at the beginning of the 2017-18 school year, and makes Baldwin County one of relatively few “green” school districts around the state.

Bacon said she hopes the agreement can act as a catalyst for other government entities to implement recycling programs, but said a strong push is needed to get the message to local leaders.

“I think it’s a generational thing,” she said of people who are apathetic towards recycling. “It’s just a mindset. I’ve had people in leadership tell me ‘It’s not worth it’, and those few words impact me greatly. These are our decision-makers, and theirs are the mindsets I hope to change.”

“To be honest with you, not enough,” said Ken Everett, of Milledgeville, on how frequently he recycles his household trash. “I used to do more of it when you could go by the recycling centers and know when they were going to be open, but it just gets to a point where you just give up and throw it in the trash can. If the recycling centers were open all the time, I probably would.”

“We pay enough in taxes as it is, and then they want to keep raising the rate to come pick up the trash,” said Curtis Scott referring to Baldwin County’s plans to raise the monthly pickup rate to $15 per household.

“Well, we’re from Sandersville, so we don’t have recycling bins, but my neighbor and I put our [recyclables] in a big bag and take them (to a recycling center),” said Milledgeville resident Shan Hobbs. “I do think recycling is important. First of all, it’s good for the environment, but I don’t want to see this stuff out on the streets, either.”

The SunLight Project team of journalists who contributed to this report includes Thomas Lynn, Patti Dozier, Alan Mauldin, Charles Oliver, Will Woolever, Jessie Box, Eve Guevara, Jordan Barela and team leader John Stephen.

To contact the team, email sunlightproject@gaflnews.com.

Thomas Lynn is a government and education reporter for The Valdosta Daily Times. He can be reached at (229)244-3400 ext. 1256