Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Solid Waste Recycling topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Regional solid-waste board unveils RecycleRightTN clearinghouse, plans county roundups and data collection
Summary
Donna Barrett, chair of the Central Tennessee Regional Solid Waste Planning Board, presented RecycleRightTN, a county-level recycling clearinghouse and education pilot. The board plans hard-to-recycle roundups in Warren County and requested traffic counts at convenience centers to guide next steps.
Donna Barrett, chair of the Central Tennessee Regional Solid Waste Planning Board, presented RecycleRightTN to the McMinnville Board on Sept. 15, describing a web-based clearinghouse of local recycling options, plans for hard-to-recycle collection roundups and requests for local data to guide the program’s next phase.
Barrett said the regional board covers Rutherford, Coffee, Cannon and Warren counties and that the pilot’s first phase is an online clearinghouse, recyclerighttn.com, which lists local recycling locations and end users for specific items. Barrett said the board vetted partners to ensure materials go to end users rather than to landfill disposal. She said the region already meets the state’s 25% diversion goal but noted a federal target that could rise to 50% by 2030.
Barrett described regional resources: 13 convenience centers in Warren County; about 120 private-sector recycling partners across the four-county region, roughly 34 of which are in Coffee and Warren counties; and a recent round-up event in Murfreesboro that collected about 54,000 pounds of hard-to-recycle items. She said those single-day events are typically funded through federal grants or board contributions and that the board funded Rutherford County’s event this year. Barrett asked city staff to promote future roundups via city channels and requested a one-week traffic count at each convenience center to help the board assess service use and plan business-facing recycling services.
Barrett said phase two will be a business-focused clearinghouse to help match commercial recyclables with end users. She encouraged the board to promote the clearinghouse and to provide the requested traffic-count data; she said the program will be free for local governments to use.
A board member asked about curbside recycling pilot programs; Barrett said those are possible but require streamlined clean-stream collection, local processing capacity such as a materials recovery facility (MRF), and reliable buyers for recyclable streams. She said Warren County’s sanitation department is pursuing an RFP for a MRF and that such infrastructure steps are part of the work required before curbside recycling can be scaled.
Barrett left contact information through the site and asked staff to coordinate dates for a Warren County recycle roundup.
