Benzie County
When there are only 17,000 residents in a County, you have to constantly be working to try and keep people involved in recycling. Last year 1,009 tons of single stream recyclables were collected from this rural area. Benzie County has been extremely successful with this and along the way, they have come up with some creative projects that will continue to increase their diversion rates.
In this County there are many ways to recycle. They have seven drop off sites that are all accessible 24/7, and all are single stream, taking plastics 1-7. These drop off sites have been known to see up to 300 people a day. If you are a commercial business, they also offer a program where semi trailers are placed for cardboard to be recycled at no charge. When one of these trailers are placed at a local school, a portion of the proceeds from this will even be given back to the schools.
Collection events also help Benzie County offer clean up days two to three times a year, including grant funded scrap tire collections. Clean up doesn’t stop with collection, though. Benzie County also works with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a clean forest initiative where you can adopt a forest and go clean up any illegal dump site. This is just one of the creative programs out there that Benzie County has found. Another one is a fishing line collection program that they started. This consists of a few different cities where local scout troops will volunteer to clean up the rivers and lake shores where collection of fishing line is then taken and sent in to be turned into artificial, underwater structures for fish. One final program that they are involved in is for paper shredding. At the County level all shredded paper is sent to a local, organic worm farm where the worm castings are used to amend soil.
All of these different programs would not be successful in such a rural area, if it was not for the education and outreach that Benzie County tries to offer. Whether it is at a township hall meeting, through social media, through the website, or constantly going into the schools to reach out to kids, Benzie County is spreading the word.
"There are people who seek the opportunity to recycle, but mostly you have to bring opportunities to them, and make them aware that it exists”
Benzie County is looking to change this in the future, and they hope to do so with the help of the DEQ education grants. They have plans to work on a social media campaign, wrap a local bus with recycling program information, put Recycle, MI signs at all drop off sites and state parks, and add kiosks at drop off sites so each site can become an information center, as well.
This year alone, Benzie County hopes to get the land to build a recycling/education center for the County. Even though they are small, they are still doing their best to grow and provide countless recycling opportunities to all of their residents.