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With the snip of a ribbon displaying examples of the many things that can now be recycled, last Friday representatives of Tompkins County and its private partners ReCommunity and Casella Waste Services celebrated the grand reopening of Tompkins County’s new and improved Recycling and Solid Waste Center.

All parties agreed that the $2.5 million capital project, and the innovative public-private partnership that brought it to fruition, are truly “groundbreaking,”will enable the County to meet its ambitious goal of 75% waste diversion by 2015, and will make it easy for everyone to recycle.

County Solid Waste Manager Barbara Eckstrom called the ten-year partnership with Casella and ReCommunity that began last February “the best marriage of partners,” and said the new Center is an important product of that partnership.  ReCommunity president Sean Duffy noted the partners have designed the new Center in a thoughtful way to make use of it safe, simple, and user-friendly for all.

Visitors to the Center will find a “Recycling Market,” where they can drop off many different types of items for recycling, under separate covered bays.  A one-way traffic flow keeps traffic moving safely, with residential and commercial traffic separated.

Manager Eckstrom noted the arrangement with ReCommunity and Casella, in which materials collected through single stream recycling are transported to Casella’s state-of-the-art facility in Ontario County for processing, has given her program “room to grow.”  That arrangement has freed up space in the Center to support specialized programs that are diverting more materials from the waste stream.

Commercial loads that contain a high percentage of fiber and sorted loads of cardboard or high grade paper are now baled at the Center and shipped to market, maximizing revenue.  Through a new waste diversion line, recyclable and reusable material from certain recycling-rich loads of garbage are now separated and diverted from the waste.

Eckstrom reported the County still expects a grant from the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation to cover half of the Center’s construction cost.

Through this public-private partnership, Eckstrom said, her program is “doing good and doing well.”  Casella Waste chief executive John Casella observed that, by working together, “the best of the private and public sectors can really do amazing things.”

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