SOMERSET, Ky. (LEX 18) — For the last three years, the Pulaski County Regional Recycling Center has used a unique model to improve recycling efforts in the surrounding region.
Solid Waste Coordinator and Recycling Manager Danny Masten sees recycling as an opportunity to make a difference in the community.
“You’re turning something old and making it into something new,” he said.
Since 2021, Masten has employed the hub and spoke model to better recycling in central and southern Kentucky.
“It's not a new model, but it’s kind of new to the state of Kentucky,” Masten said. “It’s a regional recycling program where you have a county that’s kind of in the center, and it reaches out and assists counties around.”
Acting as the hub, Pulaski County reaches out to the spokes of Russell, Rockcastle, Lincoln, McCreary, and Metcalfe counties. Masten also shared they take in certain recyclable materials from Glasgow, Danville, Harrodsburg, and Wilmore.
The joint effort started when smaller recycling centers began struggling after the COVID-19 pandemic. Recycled materials from these smaller centers were undervalued, and some centers even faced closure.
“Companies weren’t paying them what the materials were worth because they couldn’t provide a full load,” Masten explained. “A full load of something is worth more than mixing a bunch of materials onto a load, so they couldn’t provide the full loads to get their full value."
The hub and spoke model helped these smaller centers by combining their materials with the large volume of recycling from Somerset and Pulaski County.
“They can join their volume in with ours and get it shipped out at a higher value,” said Masten. “We would buy it from them and give them a percentage of that, which still came out more than what they were getting from the companies that were coming and buying it from them.”
The growing group of spokes to the Pulaski County hub shows signs of growth of the recycling industry in Kentucky.
“We’re in the process of starting a recycling coalition in the state,” Masten said. “This is part of our mission, is to grow recycling. You can’t grow it if places are going out of business and counties are shutting their doors on the recycling centers.”
“The biggest thing for me was, I hated to see these programs die. It’s hard to recycle. It’s hard work. Our employees do a tremendous job, and all those other counties are the same way. And people want to have an outlet for their material, they don’t want to throw it all in the landfill, and if we didn’t reach out and provide this for them, then some of those programs were going to go away.”
“We’re wanting to help them stay sustainable. We want their programs to keep growing. We want their community to have an opportunity to keep recycling.”
