Murphy – Nobody wants to talk about it, but Rob Ward, solid waste director in Cherokee County, has made a career out of it.
Trash, rubbish, refuse, scrap, garbage – “that which we call a rose by any other name, would smell as sweet.” In part, that’s a good portion of Ward’s mission – to keep the county smelling sweet. With 13 solid waste convenience centers and a landfill in the county, Ward has a daunting job.
“Cherokee County has a small recycling department compared to larger urban areas that collect the volumes of recycling materials required to support a municipal recycling facility,” he said.
Ward said a municipal recycling facility houses useful but expensive machinery to ease the detailed work involved in recycling.
“They have conveyor belts, electro magnets, shaker screens are used,” he added, “and employees sort out and separate a mixed stream of all recyclables at a central industrial facility.”
Ward said the county doesn’t have a sorting facility, which is why residents are asked to sort their own.
“In order to reduce the cost to taxpayers, Cherokee County asks residents to sort their recyclables and place the contaminant-free and un-bagged recyclables in the appropriately labeled and color-coded recycling roll-off containers at the convenience centers located throughout the county,” he said.
Aluminum is gold in recycling currency. Ward said clean and contamination-free aluminum beverage cans return $40 per 100 pounds.
“This is our best dollar per-pound price, but they are also low in volume,” he said. “So please recycle all of your aluminum beverage cans; do not place them in garbage bags.”
Each county convenience center offers receptacles for aluminum, cardboard, glass, mixed scrap metal and plastics. Ward said the cardboard return is only $7.70 per 100 pounds, but the pulp is used to create new boxes, thereby using fewer trees, making the return much higher in the abstract.
“We (the centers) do not turn a profit, but we do offset some of the expenses incurred by collection and packaging of recyclable materials for reintroduction to the market through our recycling vendors,” he said. “Recycling of many of these items is required by the State of North Carolina, some is also required by the Cherokee County Solid Waste Ordinance.”
Use of the centers is limited to county residents at the cost of $75 a year. According to the county’s Solid Waste Ordinance, “Anything placed in a green box Dumpster will be compacted in a trash truck and dumped at the tipping face of the landfill into the landfill cell.”
This is why the centers are so particular about what they call prohibited wastes, which are not allowed inside the green boxes. The green boxes must be free of prohibited wastes in order to comply with state law.
Residents wishing to dispose of prohibited wastes – including items containing Freon, mixed metals, wood palates and tires – must bring them to the Cherokee County Landfill, 10160 U.S. 19 in Marble, to be weighed by the scale house weigh master. There is a tipping fee attached to the weight of the waste.
Residents may not be aware that the ordinance allows any law enforcement officer or any employee of the Solid Waste Division to search any vehicle or container brought onto the property for purposes of investigating compliance with the solid waste ordinance plus any state or federal law concerning the disposal of waste products.
Trash disposal is a serious business that winds across county, state and federal jurisdictions. But it’s not just the law that motivates Ward to serve the county. He is playing the long game.
“Most importantly,” he said, “it’s the right thing to do for the environment.”