Building community partnerships across Orange County to improve our local environment and reduce litter is what the 25th Annual Trash-Off is all about. On Saturday, February 22, Keep Orange County Beautiful collaborated with Shangri la Gardens to add recycling to the 2020 Trash-Off. Superior Tire and Service of Orange and D&D Scrap of Bridge City collected abandoned tires and scrap metal, at no charge to county residents. New this year was a chance for Trash-Off teams to collect plastic bottles and aluminum drink cans in blue Recyclops bags for recycling.
Over 280 tires were collected during the 5-hour event at the Orange Boat Ramp. “Big Picture” Mike Hughes from Superior Tire and Service said, “Working together we filled the Superior box- truck twice and a full load in the pick-up truck!” Tire recycling is paid for through a partnership with SE Texas Resource Conservation and Development using enforcement funds from the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality (TCEQ).
D&D Scrap from Bridge City also collected scrap metal during this event. “As loads of tires with rims came in, we separated them onto a separate trailer so we could remove the metal before sending the tires on to Superior”, said Chris Dollins co-owner of D&D. When a load came in, the crew pulled off the tires and metal first, then sent the vehicles on down to the dumpster to drop trash bags from the Trash-Off. “This year we added new volunteer partners from Dow Chemical”, said KOCB Chair Deborah Bednar, “We could not have done this without them”. The event was a huge success!
The final stop for the clean up was to turn in the Recyclops bags. Each Trash-Off team was given 2-3 of the blue bags and asked to fill them with plastic bottles and aluminum drink cans. “By separating those items out of the trash mix, we were able to send them with Recyclops to Houston on their next recycling run, rather than to the landfill”, said Katie Krantz, the Education Director of Shangri La Gardens.
This is the first tire recycling KOCB has sponsored in 2020. One-thousand tires and over 10,000 lbs. of scrap metal were collected and recycled in Orange County in 2019. KOCB will sponsor additional recycling events during the year.
