What started as a free service has turned into a liability for the Jefferson R-7 School District, and officials say it may be time to cut the program entirely.
For almost 15 years, the school district has maintained a contract with Abitibi Recycling Services, which provides 2-ton capacity paper recycling dumpsters for all four of the district’s buildings as part of the company’s free Paper Retriever program.
Pickup has become so infrequent, however, that recycled materials have been piling up and causing problems and extra expense for the district, R-7 Superintendent Clint Johnston said.
“The program was originally designed to promote recycling in schools,’ he said. “There was a small – and I’m talking minuscule, here – financial return for the district for the materials turned in. It was just pennies per pound, and that stopped a while back. But it wasn’t supposed to be a big money-maker; the idea was to give people in our community a good option to recycle.”
The district encompasses about 53 square miles in southern Jefferson County. There are no recycling pickup options for residents in the area, and the closest drop-off recycling centers are in Hillsboro, Barnhart and High Ridge.
“That’s why we have kept the dumpsters available, given that we were a remote, unincorporated area and we don’t have a lot of recycling opportunities,” Johnston said.
Residents have embraced the service over the years – perhaps too enthusiastically.
“We are receiving recyclables and trash from many families, hundreds of people’s worth of products. That’s the problem,” Johnston said. “The price (Abitibi) gets for recycled materials has gone down, so they don’t make any money on it. They have had staffing problems, and what was supposed to be weekly pickup has become very intermittent.”
Johnston said the last pickup was Jan. 18, and before that it hadn’t been picked up since mid-October.
“We went all through the holiday season, and it got to the point where every receptacle was stuffed full and people started just putting stuff around the dumpsters,” he said. “That has meant an exorbitant amount of blowing paper, cardboard and even trash on our campuses.”
The district’s maintenance and custodial staff has struggled to keep the dumpster areas clean, an effort that has run into considerable expense, Johnston said.
“It’s taking our custodial staff six to eight hours a week to keep on top of it,” he said. “It is just everywhere – against the buildings, along the tree line, on the playground and the football field. It’s everywhere. It’s a big mess. And that’s just an unacceptable situation.”
After the October pickup, Johnston said he and maintenance director Steve Walters began making calls on a daily basis to Abitibi.
“We finally reached a company rep who said it’d be another week before they could get somebody out here to pick up,” Johnston said. “They finally came on Jan. 18.
“We made the board aware of the situation, and said if the company is not going to provide service, we’re going to have to remove the receptacles altogether. We want to offer the service, because we know it’s utilized, but we just can’t commit tax dollars to this any longer.”
Johnston said the district normally pays about $1,000 monthly for trash service, and the ongoing recycling mess has added significantly to that cost.
“Doubling or tripling trash costs for stuff that isn’t ours is something the district just cannot continue to do,” he said. “We are trying to work out a service agreement, but people need to know there will likely come a time when the receptacles will be removed and the service won’t be available anymore.”
The district is always looking for ways to recycle, conserve energy and teach children about those efforts in the process, Johnston said.
“We have this recycling, we have solar arrays on the roofs of our building,” he said. “There’s no better way to demonstrate science in action. But we have to be good stewards of our resources.”
The Jefferson County Recycling Center, 355 Elm St., in Hillsboro, is one of the three recycling drop-offs in the county. It is staffed.
The others are at the Windsor Branch of the JC Library, 7479 Metropolitan Blvd., in Barnhart and at the High Ridge Civic Center, 2700 Community Lane, in High Ridge. Neither is staffed.