Carter County Recycling Center open to the public since May
Published 2:46 pm Thursday, August 6, 2020
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File Photo/Brittnee Nave Benny Lyons at the new Carter County recycling center which opened in May.
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BY BRITTNEE NAVE
STAR CORRESPONDENT
The Carter County Recycling Center is open to the public.
Amidst confusion over the past several days regarding whether the center is open to the public, Benny Lyons, Director of Solid Waste, wanted to share updates.
The recycling center previously opened earlier this year before it was closed in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The facility reopened in May and has been open ever since.
“We shut down to the public during the pandemic, but we have never shut down as far as doing our recycle routes that we do on the businesses,” he said.
Lyons said that they are taking the same items they did before with the exception of plastic due to guidelines indicating that the virus can live on plastic for up to five days.
In addition to the plastic rule, satellite locations for recycling are also still closed to the public and will remain so until the pandemic dies down.
“We can’t be there to see what people put in them, so we are going to leave them closed until the virus settles down,” Lyons explained. “They will be open at a later date.”
In addition to the recycling facility reopening, inmates have also begun returning to aid in work in the last couple of weeks. There is one inmate for the landfill and one inmate at the recycling center. Lyons does not believe this will impact the budget.
To the public, Lyons wanted to remind people to separate items set in recycling, for example, styrofoam from boxes as well as not including trash.
“Just try to help us keep the contaminations out,” he said.
Since the pandemic and people opting for more time in the home, Lyons noted that there has been increases in both the flow of trash to the landfill and the recycling center.
The Carter County Recycling Center can be found at 410 Cherokee Park Drive, Elizabethton, and the landfill can be found at 169 Landfill Road, Elizabethton.
For the latest updates on the landfill and the Carter County Recycling Center, one can go to the Carter County Solid Waste Facebook page, or go to https://www.cartercountytn.gov/government/departments-services/landfill/.
