A small housing development along S.C. 90 has a big say in whether curbside recycling will become a reality in Horry County.
And so far, it's going pretty well, said Esther Murphy, recycling supervisor for Horry County Solid Waste Authority.
In the month since the six-month pilot curbside pickup program started at Heritage Preserve, trucks have picked up 2,500 pounds of recyclables from the 52 homes that are participating.
They could be picking up more, said one homeowner, Craig Hobart, if the recycling containers were bigger.
As happened when Myrtle Beach began its residential curbside program, homeowners in Heritage Preserve have found that they could trade their larger, roll-out trash bins for the smaller, 18-gallon recycling totes.
"We pack things in there pretty carefully, crushing the cans and plastic bottles to save room," Hobart said. "But we could probably double the amount of recyclables every week."
Murphy said the pilot program started at the beginning of October as a fact-finding mission. Six months of data will be gathered on how much people recycle, how much it costs SWA to do curbside pickup, how much it will reduce landfill usage and how much time it takes, among other questions.
SWA staff members will prepare a report next spring for the board to consider, but also for private haulers to use when considering whether to offer the service to their customers.
A few do, now, but others have not yet started. Waste Management, for example, says it will consider curbside recycling based on how many requests it has.
SWA Executive Director Danny Knight said he has no specific threshold at which he will recommend the authority start a larger curbside program - he's just keeping an open mind and watching the results, which so far, he said, are great.
"Twenty-five-hundred pounds in a month seems like a lot, to me," Knight said. "I'm happy with how it's going and how much buy-in we've had from the residents."
The program started with a kickoff event Oct. 2, at which the SWA handed out free bins. Murphy said the agency already had the bins, so there was no extra cost for them. It will continue through the end of March.
The 52 households that agreed to participate make up the bulk of the 78 houses in Heritage Preserve, and 38 of them place their bins out at the curb each week. Others, where the households are smaller, might not fill their bins that quickly, Murphy said, and choose to put them out every other week.
SWA dedicates one of its office-paper recycling trucks and two regular trash-route drivers to the weekly Wednesday recycling pickup, giving the route to the drivers who finish their own routes first so there's no overtime incurred.
The materials collected go to SWA's Materials Recycling Facility where they are sorted, packaged and sold, along with all the materials that come in from the drop-off sites across the county. The money from selling the recyclables goes to SWA.
The more people recycle, the more cost-effective the recycling program becomes. Plus it prolongs the life of the landfill, but Murphy said it's a double-edged sword, because the landfill is the big money generator for SWA. But even with recycling, people in Horry County still produce plenty of trash - 228,000 tons in the 2009 fiscal year.
Hobart said most of his neighbors came from places that had curbside recycling, so they were happy to participate in the pilot program.
"One of the houses puts out the 18-gallon tote and three smaller totes they brought with them - they recycle almost everything," he said.
Murphy said that's one of the goals of recycling education programs - to get people to think about whether something needs to go to the landfill or whether it could be recycled, including electronics, newspapers, glass, plastics, cardboard and more.
Hobart said his family already recycled because his wife's employer has a program, but they had to pre-sort everything. SWA's program doesn't require any division - all recyclables can be comingled.
"We used to have three recycling containers in the kitchen because we had to sort everything out," he said. "This is much easier."
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