Allen County Recycling is hitting the pause button.
Group members agreed Monday with Allen County Recycling Board President Dan Davis’s decision over the weekend to close up the group’s collections depot.
“It’s just become harder and harder for a few people to handle all of this,” Davis told the Register.
That means unless either Allen County or Iola take over the operation — the group’s preference — or they receive an influx of dedicated, consistent volunteers, the recycling effort that began nearly 30 years ago by Iola Rotary will be no more.
“It’s really frustrating,” Davis said. “It’s been proven a good number of people will support recycling here, but it’s just gotten no traction with the city or the county.”
Davis closed up the depot with a sign over the weekend after he arrived to see little work had been done to clean up strewn cardboard, “and it had been a while since anybody had baled anything,” he said.
Davis requested a meeting with other board members for Monday, at which point those in attendance agreed it was time to take a breather.
SINCE THE mid 1990s, Iola Rotarians spearheaded recycling efforts through paper drives, an effort that eventually expanded to include collecting cardboard, plastic, glass and metal.
But the effort eventually became a victim of its own success, said Davis, a fellow Rotarian, as the responsibilities for the operation steadily grew beyond the group’s capabilities.
Then, when Peerless Products notified the Rotary club that it would need to reclaim its loading dock — the site used by Rotarians to drop off recyclables — Rotary ceased its recycling program at the end of 2021.
Allen County Recycling launched a few months later.
The group set up shop in the old Thompson Poultry building just north of Pump N Pete’s on East Street.
Over the ensuing 18 months, the all-volunteer effort has been a struggle, as fewer and fewer helpers have stepped forward to collect totes filled with cardboard boxes or sort through the various types of plastic, glass and other materials left at the site.
“FRUSTRATED is probably the right word,” board member Steve Strickler agreed.
Strickler has been one of the group’s driving forces, often driving around by himself or with his dairy employees to ferry cardboard from local businesses to the recycling center.
