Boonslick Industries not equipped for Columbia’s extra recycling
BOONVILLE — A local nonprofit that operates a recycling center said it is not equipped to accept the extra recyclables generated by people from Columbia.
Boonslick Industries Inc., located in Boonville, confirmed that it is not able to take on recycling from outside areas. The organization said it simply doesn’t have the capacity. Items are sorted by hand, and an increase in product is negatively affecting its workers.
Boonslick Industries provides job opportunities for adults with disabilities by operating the recycling center. Boonslick said its mission and staffing can’t support a large increase in volume.
“We just don’t have people we can hire,” Boonslick Industries Director Geoff Shackelford said. “We hire certified individuals, which are individuals with developmental disabilities or mental illness, and so there is not a whole lot of people that we can go out and find, so we’ve exhausted all the applicants we have,” Shackelford said.
Columbia temporarily halted recycling pickup after a tornado destroyed the city’s recycling sorting facility. Since then, the city has resumed pickup of recyclables, but the city is taking the material to the landfill.
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Some Columbia residents have been using nearby recycling facilities since the closure of the recycling center.
Some residents, who want to keep recycling, assumed that smaller, regional centers like Boonslick could take their recyclables. However, Boonslick’s leadership said that’s not realistic.
“If we get anything that is not recyclable, obviously we have to landfill it, and it incurs a cost to us,” Shackelford said. “On a daily basis, we deal with some level of contamination. We get about two to four 2-yard dumpsters a day, when this started happening, that influx made it about 8-to-10-yard dumpsters of trash a day, which is a significant expense for us.”
For now, Boonslick Industries will continue its current operations but said it cannot support Columbia’s overflow.
Columbia officials have not announced a new plan for handling future and excess recyclables. Columbia’s recyclables are still going straight to the landfill.