EATON — Preble County Engineer Kyle Cross provided PC Commissioners his monthly landfill update during their Monday, Aug. 9, meeting.
“Monthly tonnage was up again last month. It was just a little bit over last July by about 18 tons,” Cross said. “But we’re still about 5,000 over last year to date, and we sit right now for 2023 at over 32,300 tons. Within the next month we will probably have surpassed everything for the annual totals from 2018 prior. So that’s good for the revenue, but it does take a little bit of a bite out of the air space though,” Cross said.
Some 5 percent of the tonnage is out-of-county waste, with 90 percent of the out-of-county waste coming in from Butler County, according to Cross.
“We were hoping to have the composting facility well under way for construction but we’re still waiting on the manhole to come in for the leachate system on it,” Cross also reported. “So we’ve got a call in to the manufacturer and find out where it is and once it arrives, we will begin construction immediately.”
He also reported on receiving a grant from the EPA for litter prevention for the purchase of a skid loader.
Providing a dumpster and recycling at the Preble County Fair and Pork Festival were also discussed.
“We had kind of talked at the beginning of the year to eliminate the dumpsters and the presence at fair because it just wasn’t paying off for us and then I think we had talked to about a dumpster for the Pork Festival and it kind of made me want to revisit that,” Commissioner Adam Craft noted.
In the past Preble County Solid Waste picked up the recyclable materials put out by each booth, etc. at the fair and Pork Festival, and provided a dumpster.
“I think that goes back to partially the way it was handled in the past, that there were basically curbside pickups from the vendors down there. Which added a significant amount of labor,” Cross said.
“But it is a real hard sell from the standpoint of the amount of recycling that we take in from it versus the cost of it,” Cross said. “I think last year between the fair and the Pork Festival combined there was like maybe six tons of recycling in total. And you know the cost of the dumpsters, the cost of the rental on the equipment to actually go around and do pick up to service this, and then also all of the labor that went into it. I think the fair was close to 60 to 70 hours and then another $1,200 for the equipment rental and then the cost of the dumpster. So, for the fair alone, there was at least $3,000 involved with the recycling operations. I wouldn’t be opposed to providing a dumpster for them. But with that said, I think they need to figure out a way to get the materials.”
“To that point, what I what I proposed back to them was that we would provide a dumpster. However, it is your responsibility to provide volunteers. You’re going to be responsible for the collection and you will be responsible for a fees for people that aren’t putting recyclables into that dumpster — any fees that we ended up with,” Craft said. “I said that would be really the only way we would even consider putting a dumpster back over there. That being said, I left it open ended. I said it’s a board decision. It’s a sanitary engineer decision. I said it’s not really an Adam Craft decision to be made.”
“But they are willing to provide volunteers to service the collection, at their cost,” Craft said. “Basically they were just wanting help with the placement of the dumpster itself.”
“I think that’s completely reasonable,” Cross said.
The need to restrict public access to the dumpster to minimize the exposure to additional fees caused by people throwing away regular trash in the dumpster will need to be addressed as well, according to officials, but Cross agreed a dumpster could be placed at the fairgrounds for the recyclables.
Reach Eddie Mowen Jr. at 937-683-4061 and follow on Twitter @emowenjr.
