By Drew Hatzenbihler
Solid Waste Administrator
The Fillmore County Resource Recovery Center just received a total of six dumpsters from Revolution Plastics for recycling agricultural and silage plastics! Before you jump in your car and head down to start recycling, take a minute to read this article and read the dumpsters when you arrive to make sure the materials you are throwing in the dumpsters belong there.
The new dumpsters are located at the Fillmore County Resource Recovery Center. The address for those of you that haven’t been there before is 727 Highway 52 in Preston. The dumpsters are located along the highway department building. To find them, keep right as you pull in. The dumpsters are across from the small building in the lot. Your view of the dumpsters may be obscured by a large semitrailer as you pull in.
These materials can ONLY be deposited at the dumpsters at the Fillmore County Resource Recovery Center. These materials CANNOT be deposited at the recycling dumpsters located throughout the county. Depositing these materials in the remote dumpsters or anywhere other than the designated dumpsters is considered illegal dumping and carries a fine of $500 or more.
These dumpsters are meant for bale wrap, plastic agricultural/grain bags, bunker covers, greenhouse film, drip tape, and irrigation tubing ONLY. Any materials put into the dumpsters should be relatively clean. Generally, shaking the plastic out as you are loading it into your vehicle is sufficient. All other materials need to be thrown out with your normal trash or need to be disposed of as landfill material at the transfer station. Net wrap, feed bags and other materials CANNOT be disposed of in these dumpsters. If the county fails to utilize the dumpsters correctly we may lose the privilege of using them altogether.
As a general rule, if your material isn’t clearly one of the items I just listed and you aren’t sure if it belongs in the recycling dumpsters or not, it is best to be on the safe side and throw it away rather than put it in the dumpsters for recycling. When in doubt, throw it out.
These dumpsters will be available for use by county residents during normal business hours, which are Monday-Friday 7:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m. as well as the first Saturday of the month from 8 a.m. until noon (unless the first Saturday falls within a holiday weekend, in which case we are open the second Saturday). Depositing material outside of this time frame is unsafe and illegal.
If you are looking to recycle your agricultural/silage plastic please be sure to put these materials neatly into the proper dumpster and to make sure that the material has been shaken out (prior to loading it into your vehicle) to remove any excess dirt or debris. If you are using a skid-steer or other equipment to load the materials onto your vehicle, ensure that you don’t get a large quantity of dirt/manure etc. trapped in the plastic in the process.
The plastics collected by Revolution Plastics have a wide variety of uses after they are recycled. Revolution Plastics is part of a larger family of products and companies that use the plastics to create things like vine cover, silage and bunker film, irrigation poly tubing, lawn edging, trash bags, as well as a number of other materials.
As always, if you have any questions about this new program, please give us a call at (507) 765-4704. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have. In addition, if you are a large producer of agricultural/silage plastic you can give Revolution Plastics a call to get setup with bags or dumpsters of your own.
Leave a Reply