Trash, Recycling and Litter

In 2018 the Pickens County Council voted to close all recycle centers on Wednesdays and went from 4 to 11 days on the centers' holiday schedule. When the new council was elected in in 2016, I argued total spending was $60.4 million. In 2019 total spending was $77.9 million. A healthy increase, but yet they couldn’t maintain the existing level of essential services? During my campaign, I pledged to work to reopen all recycle centers on Wednesdays.

Feeling the election year heat, the council reopened one center (the Easley center) on Wednesdays. Then they reopened all the centers on Wednesday, but cut hours to 8 am to 6 pm. Then they restored the old hours from 7:30 am to 7:20 pm. Horray!

This is the way government should work. Elected officials (and sometimes the public or would-be candidates) identify which issues are important. They then put forth their viewpoints, solutions and plans on those issues. Council members, candidates, others then debate the issue and plans in public meetings, on the campaign trail and in the press. This educates the public and John Q. Public begins to weigh in on the issue via contacting their councilmen via email or phone, speaking at council meetings or writing letters to the editor. At that point, when all that is taken in, the council debates it all, narrows the solution to one plan and votes to approve it. The result is a solution with the input of elected leaders and the public. This democratic process is first and dependent on those leaders identifying problems and educating the public on the issue.

I started on the council 10 weeks ago and to me the recycle centers and litter seems to be one of the biggest problems. Everything with me starts with asking questions and making an assessment. As I see it this issue breaks down into four problem areas.

The landfill is full. The 2012 council had a plan for a new landfill -- a public-private agreement with MRR to own and run a 225 acre landfill off Cartee Road in Liberty. However, MRR then decided to put coal ash in it, a lawsuit followed and threw a monkey wrench in that plan.

No doubt the county needs a new landfill. In the meantime the county decided to truck all household trash and C&D waste to Greenville. We are getting a good price on that and need to lock in a longer-term agreement. Naturally, there are logistic issues with compacting and loading the trash and waste into trucks, and trucking it daily. Additionally, we were told last week the transfer station built last year was too small. We moved up a year spending of $358,400 for capital needs to smooth out that process.

In the past all brush going to the landfill was burned. The 2016 council ended that, bought a grinder and has been grinding the brush into mulch and giving the mulch away. The grinder went down and that section of the landfill is now full of brush. I asked about that at the March 1 meeting and the grinder is back up, grinding away and the landfill will soon be accepting new brush and giving mulch away again. If you want free mulch, call the landfill for their hours for pick-up -- 850-7092.

You sometimes notice the blue bins at the recycle centers are full. During the day there are four roll-off trucks and drivers picking them up and taking them to the landfill for transport. Buying two extra roll-off trucks and adding two drivers is needed to address this problem.

Litter on our county roads is pitiful. That is due to people throwing too trash out of their moving vehicles. According to Keep America Beautiful, 80% of the litter is intentionly thrown out of vehicles and 20% is blowing out of unsecure loads. Sure we can better educate people. We also need to tighten up the holes in our litter laws. However, I think the focus needs to be on enforcement of litter laws and getting the prison litter crews on the roads to pick up trash.

By law, only sentenced inmates are allowed to do work detail. As of March 1 the county jail had 231 inmates and only 18 had been sentenced and available for work. The number of sentenced prisoners is down because of the courts/ family courts having been closed for the most part. Typically there are about 70 sentenced prisoners available for work in our jail.

Those 18 sentenced inmates are being used within the jail, mostly to cook the meals each day and to keep the facility clean. I asked where are the female litter crews? Way back when a couple of female detention officers took out a crews of 6 to 8 women to pick up litter two or three times a month. I was not given an answer why the prison no longer does that. We were assured by the sheriff as the courts crank back up, and inmates are sentenced, and we'll see the litter crews back on the roads (hopefully by mid-April).

A councilman has no budget, no employees work him and he can not order direct anyone to do anything. I can propose solutions to problems, try to get those plans passed or join the majority or opposition on this or that proposal.

First there is problem identification, investigation, a proposal or two, debate, more talking and then a vote. Finally, there is implementation of the plan. The legislative process is long and slow, often times too slow.

Executives like the county administrator, sheriff or the superintendent for schools for that matter, have budgets at their disposal, employees that work for them and they can give them immediate direction and allocate funds for here-and-now solutions. As a result, quite often I ask questions of and make suggestions to the county administrator or sheriff in this case. As I mentioned above, on March 1 I asked the sheriff’s department, where are the prison litter crews? Could they bring back the female litter crews while the number of sentenced prisoners is this low?

One of the downsides of our longer recycle center hours is residents from Anderson, Greenville and Oconee often come over the county line and dump in our recycle centers when their centers are closed. Why should Pickens County collect and process their trash, when they pay zero taxes in this county? We shouldn’t, they shouldn't and what they are doing is illegal. This is what the sticker program is about — identifying county residents from these interlopers. If you are a county resident, you can get a sticker by going to the county administration building (till 5 pm) or the landfill (till 4:20 pm).

You look at any road leading to a recycle center and it is lined with trash. Why? Too many trucks filled with trash are driving to the centers without a tarp and trash flies out, littering the road. This is illegal too.

If those out of county-ers are turned away, some will throw their trash out on the road outside the recycle center. That's illegal. We would pick up those bags of trash, identify whose it was from the contents and report that to the police.

Additionally, commercial vehicles should be going to the landfill, instead of dumping in the recycle centers. One of our biggest costs is when the “brown goods” bin fills up at a recycle centers. A county truck has to drive to that center, pick up that bin and bring it to the landfill. The more commercial vehicles dump C&D waste at the satellite centers (rather than the landfill) the more back and forth trips the county trucks need to make. That costs money --- $$$$.

I think a full-time litter office out of the sheriff’s department is needed, and litter laws enforced to curtain all these things. At the March 1 meeting I asked about that. The sheriff’s department doesn’t have one, though they did in the past and Oconee County has two. This past four years the council built a $30 million state of the art jail as the sheriff requested. The council funded 45 more employees and raise the operations budget from $9.6 million to $14.6 million. Granted the request to give the sheriff’s department Animal Enforcement and the stockade. I don’t think it is a lot for the council to ask for help with litter crews and enforcement. A second alternative is the county hiring its own litter control officer(s).

The way a county gets the most money for its recycled materials is to sort it, put it all in one place and condense it. So it makes sense to have residents sort their plastics or have the attendant sort out the more valuable #1 or #2 plastics. (This way the vendor who buys it, saves sorting costs and will pay us more.)

The county then condenses and bales the plastics, so it has more weight in less space. (This way instead of their truck being full of air and some plastic, it is all plastic and they pay us more again.)

This is a chain link process and it is only as efficient as its weakest link. Lately this process has broken down. For example, because Covid lingers on bottles and cans, our attendants no longer sort at the recycle centers. The county’s trucking fleet is old, so if a couple of trucks break down, recycle-ables will and at times have piled up at the recycle centers.

By the way, the recycle-ables we typically can sell are cardboard, plastics (mainly #1 and #2), newspapers, metals cans (mainly aluminum), batteries and glass. Sorted glass we can sell. Comingled glass we have to pay to have hauled off. Electronic waste and tires we have to pay to have hauled off. C&D waste is costly to haul off, mainly because it is so bulky and not dense. Brush, we are converting into mulch and giving away.

Myself, I put solid waste and litter in the top tier of problems that we face at the county level. Tonnage of waste in 2011 was 36,784. Today it is about 46,000 tons. That puts trash in top tier are the things that population growth is stressing along with roads, EMS, sewer and planning/ codes. Those things need to be the focus in my opinion. We are going to have to make a capital investment here — beit on trucks, maybe a shedder and likely another landfill, if we are going to stay ahead of this growing problem.