STARKVILLE — After one year of Starkville’s revamped recycling program, the city sees approximately 75 to 100 drop-offs per day, Ward 5 Alderman Hamp Beatty said.
The city launched its “Think Green” program in spring 2021, giving residents a central drop-off location at the Starkville Sanitation and Environmental Services Department on Dr. Douglas L. Conner Drive. The initiative’s goal was to invest in a cleaner, healthier environment, said Beatty, who was one of the prominent influences on creating the program.
Starkville eliminated its curbside recycling program in spring 2020 due to high costs and low participation and pivoted to Think Green instead. The amount of drop-offs at the recycling central location sees more participation than the minimal 10 percent of curbside participation in previous years, a press release issued Monday said.
Residents can dispose of cardboard, office and mixed paper and scrap metal, such as tin and aluminum cans. Plastic and glass currently cannot be recycled due to costs and safety concerns, but Beatty said he hopes to see Starkville expand to plastic recycling in the future because of the excess amount of plastics individuals use daily.
“If somebody said, ‘What’s the big goal right now?’” Beatty said, “Well first is to get more participation, and second would be to offer people plastic recycling because that’s something I feel everybody uses.”
The city contracted with Waste Pro USA’s Columbus location to oversee the recycling process in fall 2020.
Starkville received a $25,000 grant from the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in the fall to hire two interns to gather tangible data on the success of the program and ways to expand it, Beatty said.
“This grant will be used to pay for two part-time Mississippi State students to help us collect data on where our people stand on issues and help us be able to offer recycling in other places, such as the (Starkville Community Market), and continue to raise the profile of recycling in the city of Starkville,” Beatty said.
The city is also partnering with master of business administration students from Mississippi State University to analyze the best practices of Starkville’s recycling and trash collection through an online survey. Ward 3 Alderman Jeffrey Rupp, who serves as the director of outreach for MSU’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach, said he feels the survey would give the city insight on how residents feel about the city’s sanitation resources.
“I don’t know if we’ve ever asked the residents how they feel,” Rupp said. “People talk about it all the time, but they’re all over the map. I just wanted to get some quantitative data to help us make smart decisions.”
Rupp worked with Beatty and sanitation director Chris Smiley to generate questions for the survey. He said recycling is a difficult action for small cities like Starkville, and he wants to find the best methods to carry out the process. After a few weeks, once results from the survey come in, he said he plans to share the data with the rest of the board of aldermen and Mayor Lynn Spruill.
Residents can take their recyclables to the dropoff location Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and on the first Saturday of each month. Overall, Beatty said he is pleased with the success of the program’s first year and is hopeful for its future.
“I think it is our responsibility as human beings to recycle,” Beatty said. “Maybe we do it on a city-to-city, town-to-town basis, but I think that’s just a small way we can contribute, making our world a more habitable and cleaner place to live and giving our children a good place to inherit.”
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