From Councilman Tim Powers: Many years ago, the Town of Cairo led the way on offering local recycling for our residents in conjunction with the Greene county solid waste program. It was offered as a local convenience for those who are concerned with recycling. Now, over the course of time , as most of the local waste management companies offer up recycling cans at no charge as part of local domestic trash pick up, it has become obsolete, as well as abused by a few in our town. Several times in this past year, items other than recycling have been placed in the dumpsters in which the Town of Cairo is now responsible to get rid of at a cost to our tax payers. According to the Greene county solid waste department, the last four months of Cairo resident recycling dumpsters have had to be dumped into the normal domestic garbage stream due to the contamination from other than recyclable materials. The last incident of this appears to have been from a house clean-out in which to have the dumpster emptied by Greene county solid waste, will most likely result in a charge back to the Cairo taxpayer. This issue is compounded by the fact that in order to keep this from happening, the town must keep a member of the parks department on site during the normal hours of the recycling operation. Our park workers have often been harassed by some for attempting to enforce the restrictions of recycling. So therefore, as the result of this recent incident, the Cairo town board did an emergency resolution on 10/21/20, and unanimously decided to close the Cairo recycling center once and for all. Said closure to be effective on 11/1/20. Information on alternative Greene county solid waste and recycling locations will be posted at a later date. While the town of Cairo fully supports recycling, we as a town board can not, and will not tolerate the misuse of the system, harassment of our employees, or un-necessary costs to our taxpayers. Thank you
