Winneshiek County Recycling marks its first anniversary

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It was one year ago on April 1st that Winneshiek County took over the operation of the area's recycling program from The Spectrum Network.

Winneshiek County Recycling Coordinator Terry Buenzow says the past 12 months have been "excellent." The program has been able to handle all of the recycling with just three county employees and a few "Experience Works" employees.

Buenzow says the biggest change between last April and this April has been the volume of cardboard being recycled at the facility. Winneshiek County stopped its pickups of commercially-generated cardboard, requiring the businesses to deliver the cardboard to the recycling center by themselves. Despite that, cardboard collections have zoomed. Buenzow says the recycling center takes in three times as much cardboard at its Freeport dropoff spot than it did one year ago--and might have to build a bigger collection shed.

The only recyclable material that has dropped off in the last 12 months has been paper. Buenzow says there are a number of reasons for that, including the impact of websites as a news source; a decline in magazine readership; and the shrinking physical sizes of newspapers. He says any recycling binds he orders in the future will be configured to have more space for plastic and aluminum cans and less space for paper.

The Winneshiek County Recycling Program recycled 143.25 tons of material in February, which drew $12,824 in revenue. However, quite a bit of material was held in stock in February, in anticipation of rising prices in March. Figures for March tonnage and revenues have not yet been calculated.

The plastic sorting line