Elkhart County will be closing the recycling site located in the Goshen College Church-Chapel parking lot on Jan. 20. It has become increasingly difficult for the county to manage public recycling sites due to the amount of trash that is being intermixed with the recycling.
“For the last 20 years GC has offered the site as a goodwill gesture to the community,” said Cynthia Good Kaufmann, GC’s director of planning and events.In an effort to make recycling on campus more efficient, Elkhart County and GC are implementing new recycling strategies. GC is adding single-stream recycling bins at the Church- Chapel and Recreation-Fitness Center, in addition to the existing single-stream dumpsters located at Kratz, Yoder and Westlawn dining hall.
To find out more information about the recycling process, the GC custodial team took a field trip to RecycleWorks in Elkhart in early January. There, they observed the process as a whole to better equip GC to aid in the collection process. They also learned that recycling is a lengthy process that still includes a lot of human labor — even pulling out the trash during the sorting process is done by hand. Plastic bags cause the majority of this extra sorting.
In addition, the city of Goshen has also supported a new recycling plan. The city has recently implemented free curbside recycling for all city residents and has added a new recycling site across the train tracks from the Old Bag Factory. There is also still a public recycling site located at the Martin’s on Bashor Road.
“We’re very pleased with the efforts of the City of Goshen to make more opportunities for recycling available to area residents,” Good Kauffman said.
