Stephens County Preparing to Start Back Recycling Program

The Stephens County Board of Commissioners approved a motion to implement a single stream recycling program at all of the county’s convenience sites at their meeting on Tuesday morning. The plan is to hopefully begin by the end of this month collecting recyclables and then transferring all to Athens Recycling. Stephens County Commissioner Dean Scarborough says this new set-up should make it easier for everyone in the county to recycle. “The whole thing started because we were not doing such a good job of recycling” says Scarborough; “It was dropped in the hands of someone else. Here we will have (as Commissioner Stanley London said) an easier way to recycle an object, you can put in a cardboard box or plastic container and dump the whole thing in.”
Scarborough says though there have been problems in the past with recycling in Stephens County, this new program will hopefully lead to more and more recycling here. “The encouragement is to get the education out so we can do more recycling. The more (recycling) we do, the less go in the landfill. It has been a lot of interruption and problems, we were not receiving many recyclables, but now it has been made easier and hopefully we’ll get more.”
Last April, Stephens County and Keep Toccoa-Stephens County Beautiful hosted a Stephens County Amnesty Day where citizens were able to bring in junk and trash from around their home and business. Commissioners announced Tuesday that the next Amnesty Day for Stephens County has been scheduled for Saturday, September 26th from 8:00 A.M.-4:00 P.M. at the Stephens County Road Department.