Pulaski County area gets recycling

197 houses to receive curbside service in year- long trial

Nearly 200 households in southwest Pulaski County will get curbside recycling in the coming months, but only for a year.

An area including 197 houses just northwest of Otter Creek, mostly in between Belle Meadow Lane and Crystal Valley Road, will be part of a pilot program to take curbside recycling to the county’s unincorporated area for the first time and measure its success.

The area’s northern edge will be Hammond Road and its southern edge will be Raines Road.

Residents in the unincorporated area used to have six state- funded drop- off centers to take recyclable materials. Those drop- off centers closed last July in favor of an already planned recycling incentives program for the county.

Maumelle and Jacksonville, along with a couple of private companies in east Little Rock, still take varying types of recyclable materials but haven’t been as convenient to use as the drop- off centers for many people living closer to the edges of Pulaski County.

The pilot program will be operated by the Regional Recycling and Waste Reduction District — a state agency also known as the Pulaski County Regional Solid Waste Management District — and will be used to measure interest in recycling in the area and whether offering curbside recycling to more of the unincorporated area is feasible.

The area in southwest Pulaski County is one of the denser parts of the unincorporated area, District Deputy Director Carol Bevis said. That makes it more attractive and convenient for a contractor and more effective for a pilot program, she said.

“It should be real easy for them to handle 197 homes once every other week in this area,” she said.

A contractor will be picked sometime after next Tuesday, when the district’s request for proposal period ends.

Bevis said she has no idea what the cost may be for the project but said the district may be able to fund it through the hefty carryover in its administration budget.

The district is projecting a $ 1.6 million budget for fiscal 2016, $ 105,726.25 of which would be administrative carryover.

The program would be part of the district’s fiscal 2016 budget, which begins July 1, should the district’s board approve it.

The district board is made up of the county judge and the mayors of the county’s five biggest cities: Little Rock, North Little Rock, Sherwood, Jacksonville and Maumelle.

Better access to recycling for the unincorporated area is something County Judge Barry Hyde has been pushing for since taking office in January.

“People like to recycle,” Hyde said. “It’s one of those things that makes people feel good.

“I don’t think anybody wants to spend any more money building landfills,” he added.

Hyde hopes to eventually expand curbside recycling to the rest of the unincorporated area, with the exception of some of the most remote properties. The pilot program will give him an idea of whether that’s possible.

“I hope and I expect that there’ll really be some great interest,” Hyde said.

The unincorporated area has a much lower population density than a city does, adding time and money to a contractor’s expenses.

Pulaski County officials looked into curbside recycling before Hyde took office but determined it wasn’t something enough residents would likely be willing to pay for at the price it could be offered.

But Hyde said he’s optimistic that curbside recycling can be offered to areas where homes are more closely clustered on a few streets.

“Typically with some exceptions, it looks to me like 80 percent of households in unincorporated area are in pretty dense concentrations,” Hyde said. “If you follow the main roads, you’ll find that plenty of the households are within a block.”

Other state solid waste districts in Arkansas provide recycling opportunities for residents who live in unincorporated areas, such as Benton County and Boston Mountain in Washington and Madison counties. Those districts offer drop- off centers but not curbside recycling.

The goal in Pulaski County is to give almost everyone the opportunity to participate in curbside recycling, Bevis said. But they’ll see whether that could work soon.

“Those people may not want to even mess with it. You never know, and that’s what we’re trying to find out,” Bevis said.