Otter Tail County’s Solid Waste Department had a distribution event for recycling ag and silage plastic waste dumpsters on Friday. Over 500 of the new dumpsters were distributed to farmers who had signed up ahead of time.
“Solving the problem of this waste is something as a department and a county we’ve been trying to figure out for years,” Zach Fjestad, assistant director of the Solid Waste Department, said.
There are two main ways farmers currently rid themselves of this plastic: illegally burning it or paying to have it disposed of with the transfer station, where it usually ends up in the landfill.
This is where Revolution Plastics came in and proposed a possible third solution. Since the 1990s, Revolution Plastics has been providing farms and dairies with free, on-farm ag and silage plastic collection. They started in their company’s home state of Arkansas, and they made it to Wisconsin, and now in 2017, they’ve made it all the way to Otter Tail County. Adding Minnesota to the list means Revolution Plastics is now offering services in 12 states.
“We realized part of the problem was people just aren’t going to pay to recycle”, Price Murphy, Revolution Plastics’ director of operations said. “So we put our money where our mouth is and we made it free to entice people into doing it”.
And entice people, they did. At no cost for the dumpster and no cost for waste pickup, people have embraced the idea with open arms.
Credits of source are given too: http://www.fergusfallsjournal.com/2017/04/farmers-get-new-solution-to-silage-plastic-waste/
