MORGANTOWN — It was never meant to be permanent.
In 2014, after a confluence of events rapidly crippled the county-wide recycling program operated by the Monongalia County Solid Waste Authority, the county commission set up a spartan, stop-gap effort to keep recycling available for county residents.
The county partnered with the city of Westover to locate a single weekday drop-off site in the parking area next to Westover City Hall. A few months later, Saturday drive-through recycling began multiple Saturdays each month in the parking lot of the Walmart on Retail Circle.
But the drive-up and drop off efforts died with COVID in February 2020, and the Westover site has never been without problems.
The site collected more than 1 million pounds of recycling in 2024, with a monthly average of 86,648 pounds, or just over 43.3 tons. The county pays $67.02 per ton to drop the material at the transfer station.
It’s Jack Eldred’s full-time job.
In a perfect scenario, he’d spend most of his day at the drop site making sure proper recyclables were going into the seven 16-yard commingled single-stream bins and two larger cardboard bins.
But due to the volume of material being dropped off, his day is spent running one bin after another to the Mountaineer Transfer Station in the Morgantown Industrial Park – eight to 13 trips between 7 a.m.- 3:30 p.m. each day.
“The biggest problem is not having someone on site when I’m running. Our biggest contaminants are normally plastic bags and Styrofoam and everything like that. A lot of people don’t dump the bags out. They just throw the whole bag in,” Eldred said. “I try to inform people if I see them doing it incorrectly. When I dump at the transfer station, if it’s something I can get to, I grab it and throw it in the trash.”
Unfortunately, the contaminants go well beyond the occasional, accidental plastic bag.
Monongalia County Litter Control Officer Alex Hall said Eldred arrived one morning to find five-gallon buckets of used motor oil had been thrown into the bins. Earlier this week, someone tossed a crossbow in with their “recycling.”
“Sometimes people just use it as a free alternative to get rid of their trash. In reality, they’re contaminating everything,” Hall said, explaining he’s never received any real guidance on exactly how much contamination will get the entire bin trashed.
Monongalia County Commissioner Tom Bloom raised the issue earlier this week.
“We do have a problem that some folks don’t understand how important recycling is, and they’re taking trash and dumping it at Westover. We have a serious problem with contamination. That’s the biggest problem,” he said.
When asked how much of the material he believed was actually getting recycled due to the contamination issue, Bloom responded, “That’s a legitimate question that we don’t know.”
These issues, and others, recently prompted Bloom and Hall to sit down with a representative of the Monongalia County Solid Waste Authority to discuss the present and future of recycling in Monongalia County. Bloom subsequently sat down with Interim Morgantown City Manager Damien Davis to continue the conversation.
“We came up with some suggestions that are very, very preliminary. I want that very clear,” Bloom said.
According to Hall, those suggestions included a collaborative effort with the city of Morgantown, or potentially partnering with the SWA to put the recycling program back in its hands, or following the example of Cabell County, which utilizes key fobs to allow residents to access secured recycling drop sites in various locations across the county.
“That would help because, one, if something happens at a certain time, we can see who was in there. And two, the county commission has always had an unwritten policy that this is for Monongalia County residents and students who are leasing here. That’s impossible to police,” Hall said. “By needing that fob, we could say, ‘Let me see your lease. Let me see your driver’s license,’ before we give out that access.”
Bloom said the idea of a county-wide, levy-funded program was even tossed around.
“Again, that’s so far out there, but it’s just one of the ideas,” Bloom said. “We just have to start looking at what we’re doing.”
