How does recycling work in Macon-Bibb County?

Every other week, streets in Macon are lined with blue bins.

While some may be more full than others, none of them contain garbage. The blue bins are part of Macon’s recycling program.

Slowly, a large truck will come by and lift them up one by one and dump their contents into the back.

Kevin Barkley, executive director of Macon-Bibb County’s Solid Waste Department, is tasked with overseeing the county's daily recycling operations and played a large role in the program’s changes.

“The former city only had about 2,000 homes doing every other week type of recycling in the blue containers,” Barkley said, referring to the city of Macon before it consolidated its government with Bibb County in 2012. “There was a very limited number considering we had about 27,000 residents, (and) only about 2,000 were actually participating.”

After moving to a streamlined service and biweekly pickup in 2015, Barkley said there are now 14,000 residents participating in recycling.

“We’re diverting about 10 percent of our weight from the garbage into the recycling program which is very good for us,” Barkley said.

For many Macon residents, the back of a recycling truck is as far as they see their recyclables travel. But those materials have a much longer journey before anyone will see them repurposed and back on local shelves.

After being left at a drop site, Macon’s recyclables are split and driven to different locations around the state. Most of Macon’s recyclables end up nearly an hour away at Attaway Recycling in Milledgeville.

From there, all of the materials — aluminum cans, cardboard, paper and plastic — will be separated by a combination of machinery and on-site workers.

The divided materials are then run through a machine that compresses them into large square bales.

Once they’re in bales, the recyclables can be treated like any other industrial raw material and shipped out to be remade into new items.

“They’ll send those to different markets probably right here in the state of Georgia where they can be reused and back on the shelves or back in the grocery stores for consumers to pick up and recycle again,” Barkley said.

While most people see recycling as a quality of life issue, Barkley said, it’s important that people acknowledge its economical purpose.

“We have manufacturers right here making in Bibb County that could use these materials,” he said.

Apart from Macon not having its own recycling center, there are other difficulties with maintaining a program like this.

“Transportation costs are the biggest hindrance to recycling,” Barkley said.

To have affordable transportation, there must be enough recyclable goods to process and eventually sell.

Most of the time, those blue bins do a good job of adding to the total recyclable goods. Sometimes, they don’t.

Barkley said one of the program’s biggest challenges has been participants wanting to recycle everything.

“If you contaminate the recyclables with garbage then we have to throw the whole container away,” he said.

Regular household garbage will certainly ruin a blue bin, but other products can be more deceiving.

Cardboard pizza boxes, plastic bags and glass are common items tossed in with recyclables. While they may seem to fit the criteria, none of those items can be properly recycled in Macon.

Pizza boxes are ruined by cheese and grease, plastic bags get caught in the machinery, and glass is often too fragile and too messy to properly recycle.

However, just because these items can’t be recycled, it doesn’t mean they are thrown away.

“We do throw away, but that’s on a cart by cart basis,” Barkley said.

He said the biggest myth he hears about the recycling program is that most of it ends up thrown into a landfill anyway.

Pam Carswell, president and CEO of the Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful Commission, takes an educational approach to make sure Macon residents know what and what cannot be recycled.

Through a program called “Waste in Place” volunteers go to about 38 schools a year to teach children across the city about how and why to recycle.

Carswell said the program has reached roughly 8,000 families in the six years she has overseen it.

The lesson shows children where the symbol is that indicates something is recyclable, how to separate their goods and what a single stream service means.

“My love of this position is to do the education piece,” Carswell said.

Along with the school programs, Keep Macon-Bibb Beautiful is also responsible for a $45,000 grant that put new garbage bins and recycling containers in downtown Macon.

Carswell said recycling is also a topic of conversation for those visiting Macon.

“During the Cherry Blossom Festival people are coming from all over, and they’re used to recycling on their streets, and we were kind of behind,” she said.

With the program’s redesign in 2015, there have been major educational and practical changes to how Macon recycles compared to the past.

Both Carswell and Barkley said this was only the beginning.

“There is a possibility that a recycling center could be built in Macon,” Barkley said. “If so, this would drastically change the way the city’s program looks. It would create jobs and cut costs because the recycling would not have to be transported to other cities.”

If Macon were able to process recyclable materials locally, it could open the doors to a wider variety of goods. Electronics recycling and paper shredding are all possibilities, Barkley said.

But that's still a ways away.

“I think we need to do this,” Carswell said. “It’s not going to go away.”

This story was originally published December 14, 2017 at 4:39 PM with the headline "How does recycling work in Macon-Bibb County?."