News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Putnam County will consider new solid waste technology to help reduce the amount of garbage going to the landfill.
County Mayor Randy Porter said he plans to seek proposals for a materials recovery facility, or dirty MRF.
“The goal of this MRF is to pull out the recyclables that are in the household garbage without the person in the home having to do it,” Porter said. “This system would go in and pull out those recyclables and allow us to sell those, and take that much out of the solid waste stream.”
The county currently spends about $1.8 million disposing garbage at the Rhea County landfill. Porter said the facility could reduce the solid waste stream by up to 40-percent and increase sales in recyclables by as much as 7 to 10 fold.
“If we can reduce it 30-percent, that would be about $540,000 a year that we would save of not sending to the Rhea County landfill,” Porter said. “If we’re selling $250,000 now, that could be somewhere between $1.5 and $2 million in recyclables that we would be selling. When you put all that together, my guesstimate is that we could save about $2 million a year on our solid waste.”
The county commission voted Monday to request RFPs for the technology. Porter said regardless of what happens, the transfer station will need to be addressed within the next few years.
“We’ve got to do something in the next two or three years with our transfer station,” Porter said. “We’ve either got to find some land and build a bigger one, or we can look at doing something like this.”
Porter first mentioned the Dirty MRF technology during a February meeting with county commissioners.
