Before volunteers arrived first thing Friday to help direct the crowds expected at Dumpster Days, the one Dumpster set up at the highway garage was already overflowing.
By 2 p.m., they were on their seventh Dumpster.
The original plan had been to offer free Dumpster Days Friday and Saturday, but on Friday morning, it was looking like Knight’s Trash Service might run out of empty containers, said Phil Stephens, director of the Brown County Solid Waste Management District.
Keep Brown County Beautiful and the BCSWMD organized their first Dumpster Days to help local people get rid of trash they’d been unable to dispose of themselves.
Multiple couches, TVs, vacuums, broken bikes, toilets — everything including the kitchen sink was collected, and that was just at the Dumpster in Nashville. Another container also had been placed at the west entrance to the Cordry-Sweetwater lakes community.
Stephens couldn’t say exactly how much trash was collected by the time this paper went to print, but he called the demand “astronomical.” He planned to follow up with some statistics later this week.
Dumpster Days was to be paid for with a grant by Cummins, but because the demand went far beyond what was expected, all the costs aren’t going to be covered, said Cathy Paradise of Keep Brown County Beautiful.
Donations would be appreciated to help defray those expenses, she said: P.O. Box 115, Nashville, IN 47448. Write “Dumpster Days” in the memo.
