Last spring, about 60 volunteers gave up a Saturday morning to collect trash from alongside Sweetwater Trail.
A year later, “you can’t even tell,” said Phil Stephens, director of the Brown County Solid Waste Management District.
For the Great American Cleanup on April 13, the plan was for volunteers to go out again and redo that feeder road into and out of Brown County as well as Spearsville Road.
Only seven people showed up to help, and four of them were board members of Keep Brown County Beautiful or employees of the solid waste district.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Instead, the group went to the side of Spearsville Road that branches off State Road 135 North in Bean Blossom. In less than 2 miles, they collected 26 more bags of trash — mostly empty drink containers that could have been recycled — plus a girl’s bicycle, a hairpiece, and a syringe, which a sheriff’s deputy handled.
“It’s incredible,” Stephens said. “And what we’re getting Saturday is just the tip of the iceberg.”
Recycle center employees also get called out to pick up trash alongside roads that won’t fit in bags. So far this year, that’s been six TVs, three mattresses and a dishwasher. “There will be more,” Stephens said.
Since the county’s landfill on Dunaway Road closed in 1994, legal options for disposing of large trash items are fewer and further away.
Since March 2017, out-of-county residents have been prohibited from taking “bulky items” like old couches, mattresses and appliances to Monroe County’s recycling centers. Bartholomew County’s landfill doesn’t accept them from outside the county either.
Knight’s Trash Removal no longer picks up large items with their trucks, but they will accept them at their office in Belmont for a fee depending on how big they are.
Brown County residents can haul large items to the Rumpke landfill in Jackson County, but only if they have 2,000 pounds of them, as there’s a 1-ton minimum. The cost is $60 per ton.
For regular trash, several local haulers will come pick it up every week for a monthly fee, starting around $25, or residents can take bags to the Brown County Recycle Center in Nashville to be disposed of for $2 each.
Sometimes, trash, furniture and appliances collect in people’s yards instead.
By the end of 2018, the Brown County Health Department was dealing with 83 open complaints; 44 of them were because of “junked/trashed properties.”
Health department environmental health Supervisor John Kennard told the health board last month that he’s so frustrated with the lack of compliance that he’s thinking of posting the names of people who repeatedly ignore orders to clean up on the health department’s website.
Health board members were not in favor of that idea, which board President Thomi Elmore called “public shaming.” They suggested getting together a coalition to help focus on the issue.
The Brown County Solid Waste Management District already has been trying to work closer with the Brown County Health Department to rewrite and clear up the county’s dumping laws, Stephens said.
He doesn’t know that poverty is the reason people decide to throw their trash in a ravine or on a roadside. “I just can’t help but think they’ve got the money; they just don’t want to pay it,” he said.
It’s frustrating, because adults should already know better. “How do you tell a 20-year-old to behave at the dinner table?” Stephens said. “Grow up. It’s a no-brainer. Don’t do that.”
“When you move here, all you think of is the woods and fresh air and clean living and people that are environmentally minded, and then you find out we’re the biggest failures as far as we have illegal burns every day,” Kennard said. “And here you are in this pristine area and … either screwing the groundwater up or screwing the air up, because ‘we can do what we want on our property.’”
Is it illegal?
Yes, in Brown County, it is illegal to “abandon, bury, chuck, deposit, desert, discharge, dispose, drop, dump, eliminate, emit, fling, heave, hurl, jettison, launch, leave, loft, pitch, place, put, scrap, spill, throw or toss” any item or “any inherently waste-like material” in a way that causes it to remain “upon the land as solid waste.”
The county’s current anti-dumping ordinance, which spans 13 pages, has been in effect since December 2008, but it is in need of rewriting to make it clearer and more enforceable, Stephens said.
The law makes it a misdemeanor to discard any infectious or hazardous waste anywhere in Brown County, to allow someone to dump any kind of waste on your property, or to litter along roads.
Rarely, though, can any trash be traced back to its owner, Stephens said.
It’s also illegal in Brown County to dump anything except “inert solid waste” on your own property. The only things you can dispose of on your own land are “uncontaminated earth, rock, rigid concrete, bricks, tiles or aged asphalt” as well as “uncontaminated natural wood, brush, leaves, wood chips, sawdust and similar materials.”
The penalties are a series of fines starting at $100, which are supposed to be deposited into a Brown County Solid Waste Management Clean-Up Fund.
Enforcing the ordinance, though, takes money.
The Brown County prosecutor’s office rarely prosecutes ordinance violations that do not carry jail time, so, about two years ago, the health department hired its own attorney. Late last year it won its first case against a landowner — one that it had been pursuing for more than 10 years, Kennard said.
The solid waste department doesn’t have its own lawyer, but it does has a small budget for legal fees, Kennard told the health board. So, the two departments have been talking about how to collaborate.
The health department’s primary concern about illegal dumping is the environmental issues it can cause, such as rodents and “vectors” like mosquitoes which can carry diseases.
It’s also concerned about open burning and its effect on air quality, especially on people with respiratory problems.
County ordinance and state law about open burning are in conflict in some places, and in the past, fire departments have not all agreed on what the rules should be, Kennard said last week. This spring, the health department and health board are giving the rules another look, including the burning of leaves.
“In reality, you can burn virgin wood and virgin paper. That’s it,” he said.
“Ceremonial fires” like bonfires and cookouts are OK, but burning trash such as plastic and metal is not, and that’s an ongoing problem, Kennard said.
“We just went out yesterday on a complaint. People don’t think anything about burning couches and tires and cars. Or if they need to get rid of a mobile home, they think, ‘Oh, I’ll just burn it,’ and they do,” he said.
“There’s a lot of complications in something that should be relatively simple.”
Where does our trash go?
In 2018, Brown County sent 10,054.51 tons of trash to 14 different facilities in other counties, according to a database on the Indiana Department of Environmental Management’s website. That includes 9,012.24 tons of municipal solid waste, 67.81 tons of construction/demolition debris and 974.46 tons of “other/non-municipal” waste that did not fit in the categories IDEM identified.
The most Brown County municipal waste going to one facility last year was 5,974 tons, and that was to Hoosier Disposal & Recycling, a transfer station in Monroe County, the data said.
Another 2,422.35 tons of municipal and “other” waste was hauled directly to the Medora landfill in Jackson County. Other landfills that accepted Brown County waste were Decatur Hills in Greensburg (519.89 total tons) and Sycamore Ridge in Vigo County (1 ton). Brown County waste also went to incinerators, medical waste processors and liquid waste disposal centers in several counties.
No recyclable items that are taken to the Brown County Recycle Center end up in landfills, Stephens said.
However, 16 tons of non-recyclable materials — such as dirty diapers, old lumber and drywall, and rotten food — was dumped in the recycling bins last year, and that all had to be hauled out as trash, he said.
How can we help each other?
The recycle center, the health department, volunteer group Keep Brown County Beautiful and the Brown County Redevelopment Commission have been talking about how they could help people who truly can’t afford or don’t have the physical strength to clean up their own properties.
The recycle center has planned its first Dumpster Days for June 14 and 15. Dumpsters will be placed in “key areas of the county” — specific locations not known yet — and anybody will be able to “clean out their garages and throw mattresses in, old, moldy furniture, whatever, at no charge,” Stephens said.
Last year, the redevelopment commission started working on a process by which it could help a private property owner clean up his yard, house, etc. Eliminating blight is one of the responsibilities of the redevelopment commission. However, that program has not panned out yet.
In the meantime, Keep Brown County Beautiful has been looking for another major cleanup project. For several years it has employed people to do road cleanup. Last summer, the group worked with 70 volunteer employees of Cummins to clean up an illegal dump on Green Road where they hauled 435 tires and 15 TVs out of a ravine, as well as enough trash to fill a 30-yard dumpster.
Late last week, someone dumped another truckload of trash, tires and a TV at that Green Road site.
The solid waste department and Keep Brown County Beautiful also organize an Adopt a Road program whereby anyone can commit to cleaning up a road or section and get supplies to do it.
Didn’t we used to have a landfill?
Yes, from 1972 to 1994, Brown County had a legal landfill on Dunaway Road northeast of Helmsburg. Before that, there was also an “open dump” on Grandma Barnes Road, according to newspaper archives. The county commissioners ordered the Grandma Barnes dump closed in 1972.
Establishing a landfill in Brown County was not a decision that locals just accepted. More than 100 people packed a 1971 zoning meeting at the courthouse, most to speak against it. Neighbors filed a lawsuit, but a judge eventually dismissed it.
The landfill was owned and operated by a private company. By the mid-’80s, the county was paying $60,000 of property tax money per year to help run it. Locals who dumped trash there also had to pay a user fee, according to newspaper archives.
For years, the landfill operator “suffered financially,” stories said. The county commissioners, instead of directing more money to the landfill or raising user fees, decreased the county’s subsidy to $48,000 per year in 1986 and began allowing out-of-county trash to be dumped there. “They acknowledged that would reduce the life of the landfill but said they believed that was the only workable solution to the problem,” an archive story said.
In 1992, the operators offered to sell the landfill to the county for $300,000, but the solid waste district board refused it. By that time, Brown and all other counties had been state-mandated to come up with a 20-year plan to reduce and dispose of their waste, and the landfill was projected to fill up within 15 to 20 years anyway, according to newspaper archives. They also were concerned about future legal liability.
In 1993, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management slapped the landfill with 15 violations — joining others that had been alleged since 1988 — ranging from improper soil coverage to leached fluid flowing into a drain that led to a creek. The owners had been making plans to close the landfill because of stricter federal regulations that were going into effect, but the IDEM action hastened that end, archive stories said.
By the spring of 1994, it was leveled off and closed.
In the early ‘90s, besides buying the landfill, county officials had considered building a recycling center, setting up satellite trash drop locations around the county, and establishing a transfer station.
The Brown County Recycle Center opened in November 1991 at Old State Road 46 and Greasy Creek Road. The current building, which is shared with the county highway department, went up in 1999.
Plans for a large transfer station — where trash is collected and then transferred to a major landfill — were dropped in 1993, partly because of public protest and because there wasn’t enough space to put one at the recycle center property.
Local trash haulers did offer satellite pickups for a while, where they’d park at Brownie’s in Bean Blossom and at the Brown County IGA and take trash for $1 per bag, but they couldn’t make it work financially with the interest residents showed, according to newspaper archives.
“After two years, the drop-off program clearly demonstrated that there is not sufficient demand from county residents to justify the construction of a transfer station, or even a smaller trash ‘convenience’ station,” Mark Davis, then-director of the solid waste district, told the newspaper in 1996.
Jim Crane, a county commissioner in 1998, told the newspaper, when Monroe County was clamping down on taking Brown County garbage that year, that he worried it would end up “in ditches, roadsides, or somebody’s back yard. About the best you could hope for under those circumstances would be that more people would take advantage of pickup services that are available.”
What about a transfer station now?
Stephens thinks this would be “the ideal thing.”
“It’s where you could bring trash here and it’s transferred to a major landfill, like the big one (Rumpke) in Jackson County,” he explained. “Some of the larger counties have them.”
It’s been a few years since the solid waste board has really discussed a transfer station, Stephens said. It was brought up during a solid waste budget discussion in 2015, and at the time, the county council was not in favor of building a transfer station or another landfill.
The idea is that a transfer station “would prevent that sofa from being dumped, and bags of trash (along the sides of roads),” he said. It would be supported by tax dollars “and we would charge fees to haulers like Knight’s and Spicer’s and maybe Rumpke to use that transfer station. And it would probably double or triple our (solid waste district) budget. But I doubt if that will ever happen,” he said.
“I’ve learned a lot in this position about this county’s public sentiment for things.”
For one, “it’s a lot of startup money, and plus, we don’t have the land for it (at the current recycle center). … So, we muddle along with the budget we’ve got.”
Is the recycle center doing OK?
Yes. Unlike some recycling programs in larger cities, Brown County’s hasn’t had trouble finding a market for its recyclables, Stephens said. WestRock Recycling out of Indianapolis buys the items and recently raised that amount.
However, the recycle center is nearing capacity of how much material it can handle, and it is needing to replace equipment, Stephens said.
“We did well over 800 tons of recycled goods last year and even then, we’ve about maxed out,” he said. “We can take a little more, but we’re working on 20-year-old balers. … We don’t have the capacity to process much over 900 tons a year.”
The Brown County Recycle Center is supported 86 percent by property tax and excise tax, with the rest coming from the sale of recyclables and service fees like bagged trash collection. It ended 2018 well within budget.
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Trash disposal dos and don’ts” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Household garbage disposal
- DO call a local garbage hauler. You can find a list on the Brown County Solid Waste Management District’s website, browncountyrecycles.org.
- DO buy a book of trash stickers from the Brown County Recycle Center, stick them on your full trash bags, and take them to the Brown County Recycle Center drive-through in Nashville. They will accept bags as big as 55 gallons (the large outdoor garbage can size) for $2 per bag. Several kitchen-sized trash bags will fit in one 55-gallon bag.
- DO NOT toss your trash alongside a road or into a ravine.
- DO NOT put your trash in a recycling bin at the Brown County Recycle Center or at one of the elementary schools’ satellite collection stations. Recycling bins are for recyclables only.
- DO NOT use the town-owned trash cans along the streets of downtown Nashville as a place to dispose of your household trash.
- DO NOT toss your household trash in any old dumpster you see at someone’s home or business without their permission. They pay for that service and that space.
- DO NOT burn your trash. That is illegal, and it affects the air quality of your neighbors and other people living miles away.
Furniture and other large items
- If the furniture is in good condition and you just don’t want it anymore, contact St. Vincent de Paul 812-988-8821 to see if they would like to take it as a donation. The donation center is open Mondays and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to noon on Long Lake Road, off Clay Lick.
- If the item is not usable, contact a local trash hauler for pickup and fee information.
- Get a dumpster from a local trash hauler.
- If you can get together 2,000 pounds of large trash items, you can haul them to the Rumpke landfill in Medora for $60 per ton. There’s a one-ton minimum.
What is recyclable?
The Brown County Recycle Center has a drive-through (open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays) and 24-hour collection bins outside the center at Old 46 and Greasy Creek Road. It also has satellite collection stations at Van Buren, Sprunica and Helmsburg elementary schools; at the Cordry-Sweetwater Conservancy District office; and at Knight’s Corner on State Road 46 West in Belmont.
ACCEPTED:
- Cardboard and paperboard, such as corrugated cardboard, brown paper bags and cereal boxes
- Brown, green and clear glass bottles (without lids), rinsed clean
- Magazines and catalogs
- Newspapers, including glossy inserts and ad fliers
- Aluminum, steel and tin food and drink cans, rinsed clean
- Aluminum foil (drive-through only)
- Colored and white office paper, sticky notes, and envelopes with or without plastic windows
- No. 1 plastics, such as clear bottles (without lids) and clamshell containers
- No. 2 plastics, such as bottles used for milk or soaps, and yogurt/cottage cheese/sour cream containers
- Plastic bags labeled recyclable with No. 2 or No. 4. Plastic grocery bags are not accepted.
NOT ACCEPTED:
- Juice boxes and cartons, milk cartons, waxed boxes, soiled or wet cardboard, cardboard with food residue
- Cereal box liners
- Most types of plastic bags, including grocery bags
- Styrofoam
- Used tissues
- Glass medical vials, cookware, drinking glasses, mirrors, light bulbs, blue glass, window glass or empty candle jars
- Ceramic dishes and cookie sheets
- Aerosol cans
- Scrap metal and rusty cans
- Paint cans
- Sheet metal and wire
Special collections
- Computers and electronics: Saturday, May 18, 8 a.m. to noon at the recycle center, free except for tube TVs and CRT monitors which will be taken for $20 each. Visit browncountyrecycles.org/special-events for a list of accepted items.
- Document shredding: Saturday, May 18, 9 a.m. to noon at the recycle center, free.
- Large item disposal: Friday, June 14 and Saturday, June 15 during Dumpster Days, details to be announced.
- Tires: Friday, June 28 (scheduled pick-ups) and Saturday, June 29 from 8 a.m. to noon (bring to recycle center), free for car, bus and light truck tires without rims, fees ranging from $1 to $15 for included rims and larger tires.
- Appliances and scrap metal: Accepted every day the recycle center is open during normal business hours, $15 for appliances that contain freon (refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, dehumidifiers), free otherwise.
- Batteries and household hazardous waste: See browncountyrecycles.org/household-hazardous-waste for guidance.
