Workers load bags of unsorted, weather-damaged recyclables into a Charleston garbage truck at the Slack Street recycling center Monday to be trucked to the landfill. Solid waste officials hope to have Slack Street cleaned up by the weekend.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Kanawha County Solid Waste Authority Executive Director James Young said he hopes to have most of the piles of soggy, moldering junk choking the Slack Street recycling center cleared out by the end of the week.
Work crews spent most of the day Friday and most of the day Monday loading a mountain of plastic garbage bags onto garbage trucks and tractor-trailers to be hauled to Charleston’s landfill.
Most of the material came from curbside recycling programs around Kanawha County that recycling center operator George Hunyadi failed to ship out to recycling centers. Young said water and weather conditions left the materials too dirty to be recycled, so the Solid Waste Authority was forced to bury the materials in the landfill.
“I feel awful about it,” said Young, who watched a box of material he had personally set out on the street to be recycled put into a garbage truck on Monday along with bag upon bag of materials county residents had set out in good faith to be recycled.
“All this stuff that we’ve been promoting all this time — we weren’t practicing what we were preaching,” he said.
Last year, Hunyadi took over running the Slack Street recycling center under a lease agreement with the Solid Waste Authority. Hunyadi was supposed to sort the county’s recyclables and ship them off for sale.
That’s not the way it worked out…