Ask five people how much longer the Middle Point Landfill will remain operational, and you’ll likely get five different answers. Most estimations place the timetable somewhere between three and 10 years, which allows for a somewhat comfortable complacency to the current status quo. However, times are changing, and inevitable growing pains are accompanying them.
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Mac Nolan, the solid waste and landfill director for the Rutherford County Solid Waste Department. As a concerned citizen who has witnessed the population explosion of the county over the past two decades, I wanted to know what steps were being taken to curtail the increasing mound of trash near Walter Hill Dam. The answers I received were eye-opening.
The initial and obvious area I focused on was incentive-based recycling. Much to my surprise, I learned that long gone are the days when recycling was meaningfully profitable. While there are nominal amounts to be collected from corrugated cardboard and aluminum, depending on the weight of the load and the current premium, it often doesn’t compensate for the gas money and time to bring them to the recycling centers. In order for true profit to be attained, the average household would have to hold on to their recycling commodities for six months at a time, and even then, it would only amount to hot dog and Coke money at the local ball park.
The city and county fare no better. When an uncontaminated recycling load is accepted into the recycling centers, the small profit derived from the load doesn’t fully compensate the cost to operate the trucks that haul them.
Nonetheless, up until the past year Murfreesboro city residents have enjoyed a seemingly free waste disposal service. That was at least the perception, because it wasn’t a direct out-of-pocket expense. The past revenue stream has been generated through property taxes and recycling. While recycling hasn’t been profitable per se, it is still cheaper than waste disposal because there is still a return, albeit incommensurate, so some of the burden for waste disposal costs was being alleviated through the city and county recycling efforts. However, cross-contamination has nullified a staggering amount of those efforts.
Cross-contamination occurs when something other than the specific recycling commodity is present within the container of recyclables. Often times the culprit is something as simple as a plastic bag. While it seemed reasonable to me to collect recyclables in plastic bags before placing them in recycling bins, it is actually counterproductive. Machines sort the recyclables, and machines cannot open up the bags and separate the recyclable commodity from the bag itself. So, under the current confines of technology, either the manpower to do that work must be present, or else the problem must be eliminated. At this point, it’s a numbers game. The cost of manpower to separate the recyclables exceeds the current cost to send those cross-contaminated recyclables to the landfill, so any cross-contaminated recyclables are hauled off to Middle Point Landfill.
Middle Point is a privately-owned business, which means as long as they meet state requirements, they can haul trash in from any area they choose. That means Mount Trashmore—as it has become known by many locals—isn’t just a culmination of Rutherford County trash, but it also includes trash that has been trucked in from various (sometimes far-outlying) areas outside of our county. Local residents have not seen much waste disposal expense in the past because, as people who live in the host location of the landfill, we not only enjoy the use of the landfill for free, but we also make a small profit on trash coming in from outside the county. Therefore, the only expenses the city and county have had to recover have been collection and hauling costs. Our system has worked in the past because we were a smaller community. Due to an exponential explosion in population and the landfill beginning to approach its capacity, we have outgrown that system.
Since the beginning of this year, Murfreesboro city residents may have noticed a $5 fee tacked on to their water bill. Nolan commented that in July, that fee is set to increase to $7.50.
“It needs to go somewhere around $15 to make it self-sufficient, per month,” he added.
Eventually, the city is heading in the direction of receiving waste services as a utility, much the way water and electricity are already established. In other words, you pay for what you use.
So, what’s the bottom line? If the city intends to eventually implement a utility-structured system, then I propose that recycling has become incentive-based in a different way. While it may no longer be meaningfully profitable for lining your pocket, recycling is leaning toward becoming profitable for guarding the money that’s already there. If we get ahead of the game and get in the habit of recycling, the growing pains that are coming will have less of an impact on our individual bottom lines. Recycling is good for the environment, and people who have a reverential respect for the environment have been participating in its practice for decades. Now is the time for everyone else to get on board.
To learn more about recycling in Murfreesboro and Rutherford County, including the locations and hours of the 16 centers where county residents can drop off recycling (any day except Mondays and Thursdays), visit murfreesborotn.gov/1546.
