After multiple weeks of closure, Juneau’s recycling center is back up and running at limited capacity.
The partial reopening comes after the center has been closed on and off since late December, after Juneau was hit with back-to-back record-breaking snowstorms, which inundated it with a backlog of materials to process.
Denise Koch, the city’s director of Engineering and Public Works, says the center will begin by accepting only cardboard and mixed paper, and only for this Friday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 pm. Other recyclables like plastic and glass are still on hold.
“We know that recycling is an important service for people, and we know it’s been really inconvenient for people to hang on to their recycling,” she said.
The city contracts with Waste Management to operate its recycling program in Lemon Creek. Waste Management is the private company that runs Juneau’s only landfill, which is estimated to run out of space in the next decade.
Since late January, the city has been asking residents to hold onto their recyclable material while it fixed multiple issues with the recycling baler, which is the most critical piece of equipment for the center to operate. The baler is the machine that compresses the recyclables into blocks, which are then shipped by barge to recycling facilities in Seattle that repurpose the materials.
Koch said while the baler has since been fixed, the city is opening the center up at a limited capacity so that the machine does not get overloaded. She said the center’s staff will then decide further openings depending on how the baler performs this weekend.
“We are, of course, hoping to be able to do that as soon as possible,” she said. “We are planning to make another announcement on Monday, after we see how things go on Friday and Saturday, and how quickly we’re able to move through material.”
More information and updates can be found on the city’s RecycleWorks webpage.
