By Mitchell Kaminski
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COLUMBIA, Missouri (KMIZ) — City crews have been working the past two days to get electricity and fiber up and running at the city landfill, after the recycling facility was destroyed in a storm on Sunday.
The City of Columbia declared a disaster on Monday after the National Weather Service confirmed an EF-1 tornado touched down Sunday in northeast Columbia, issuing its second emergency declaration in the past 15 years.
City facilities and infrastructure were damaged, causing power outages and service disruptions. The city’s recycling program is indefinitely suspended. City utilities spokesman Matt Nestor said that once crews get power restored at the facility, it will help with operations.
However, with recycling collection temporarily suspended and the city’s eight recycling drop-off centers temporarily closed, there are some concerns that residents who ignore the closures could cause overflow, creating potential health and sanitation risks.
The city is planning on removing the drop-off bins, and some have already been removed.
“Some of those drop-off centers are right next to parks, right next to too wooded areas. So, yeah, there’s always an environmental concern when people are dumping trash and recycling illegally,” Nestor told ABC 17 News.
Nestor said the same issue arose two years ago when a winter storm threatened to ice over the recycling facility, making conditions dangerous for trucks. Because of this, the city asked residents to hold onto their recycling while pickup was temporarily halted. However, when collection resumed, city drivers found collection facilities overflowing with materials, which “created a mess” for drivers.
“We’re asking people to please cooperate with us,” Nestor said. “Please give us some patience.”
Rebuilding the facility could take more than a year, so the city could try to hire an outside service to handle recycling. City manager De’Carlon Seewood told ABC 17 News on Monday that the city has to do an analysis and take some time to come up with a plan to move forward.
An evaluation done in 2023 found that the city’s recycling plant was becoming outdated, and left the city missing out on money due to inefficiency. From 2019 to 2023, the city collected an average of one million 44 thousand dollars in revenue from the sales of recyclable material.
Columbia’s Material Recovery Facility was built in 2002, which is one of the things that prompted the city to launch the study.
The city was planning on building a new facility by 2027 or 2028, but Seewood said the storm could expedite the process. In the meantime, city officials are urging patience from residents.
“Recycling is important to us as well. You know, this is a thing we want to do. We don’t want these recyclables. We want to keep as much of them out of the landfill as we can. So we are looking for a good solution,” Nestor said. “That’s going to take some time. It’s going to take a lot of studying. Please have patience. Please work with us. We are going to come up with an answer.”
Columbia has made waste reduction a big part of its climate action plan, which was passed back in 2020. That plan also created the Climate and Environment Commission, a group tasked with helping guide those efforts.
“Obviously, with this weekend’s storms, the recycling did take a literal hit. So there is going to have to be an adjustment on the plan just because if we don’t have a recycling center, there is not a plan to recycle,” Climate and Environment Commission Chair Abra Spisso-Podoliak said. “I think overall, the city has always set ambitious goals, and I think they’ve done a really good job in trying to meet those.”
Spisso-Podoliak is serving in her first year as the chair after serving on the commission for the past six years. With recycling now temporarily off the table, the commission is asking residents to help out in small ways, such as reducing what they throw away and being more mindful of everyday waste.
“Water bottles, if you have a steel water bottle or a glass water bottle or reusable coffee cups that you can use, that’s a great way for you as a consumer to just not use single-use plastic,” Spisso-Podoliak said. “Every time you go, if you order out food, if you don’t get recycled utensils from that restaurant, use your home utensils instead. Those are little things that people can do every single day.”
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