About 8 tons of trash from all over the county was collected and properly disposed of on Dumpster Day, preventing it from possibly being tossed into a holler instead.

Volunteers from Keep Brown County Beautiful and staff from the Brown County Recycle Center pitched in to put on Dumpster Day from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on June 4, the second such event in the past three years.

At the first Dumpster Day in 2019, staff and volunteers saw just how valuable this service could be, when people hauled in so many old mattresses, rugs, pieces furniture and general junk over two-and-a-half days that it filled eight 30-square-yard Dumpsters. That amounted to 19.2 tons of trash and 8,327 pounds of unwanted electronics.

This year’s haul wasn’t as big, but was still enough to fill three large Dumpsters. All recyclable material was extracted from the trash and put into the appropriate recycle stream, said Brown County Solid Waste Management District Director Phil Stephens.

Stephens and his staff, pretty regularly, have to go out and pick up couches, TVs, hot tubs and other large pieces of trash that people decide to dump along roadsides and on private property instead of finding a legal way to dispose of them.

Events like Dumpster Day give residents an outlet for these items if they cannot afford to haul them to a site like Knight’s Trash Service on State Road 46 East, which takes large furniture for a fee, or rent a Dumpster themselves.

Brown County has no legal landfill.

Dumpster Day was put on with a grant from the Brown County Community Foundation.

Stephens said they do plan to do more Dumpster Days as funding permits, and might also do an event just to collect TVs.