Lyon County Environmental has started a new pilot project with the Rock County Opportunities (RCO) organization. We now have bins located within the Household Hazardous Waste facility for residents to drop off paper that they need shredded. There is a fee for this service. The papers are kept in a locked container and will be picked up by RCO and shredded in Luverne at their facilities. The shredded paper that they create from your documents will be sent to Millenium Recycling in Sioux Falls where it will eventually be made into things like toilet paper, paper towels or facial tissue. This is a good way to support those with disabilities in our area. If anyone has questions, please feel free to call our office. This is for residents only. If businesses are interested in working with RCO, please call their office at (507) 283-4582.

We have been seeing a recent uptick of mattresses and box springs being tossed out into the ditches around the landfill area. Please remember it is against the law to dump items in the ditches or other people’s trash cans. Mattresses and box springs can be brought to the Household Hazardous Waste facility in Marshall for $16 disposal fee. Box springs are free to bring to the facility. Mattresses and box springs must be fairly clean, dry and free of bedbugs.

If your mattress or box spring has bed bugs, it should go to the landfill. The program that Lyon County uses to recycle mattresses and box springs includes taking each piece apart by hand. We do not want to send bed bugs home with those who have to work with the items. It does cost more to send a mattress to the landfill and box springs can go there as regular trash.

If you are purchasing a new mattress and box spring, talk to your salesperson. We work with most furniture stores and they do bring used mattresses and box spring to us for recycling. Another option is to donate your clean, gently used mattresses or box springs to friends, relatives or to others who may need one. Lyon County recycled over 2,600 mattresses and box springs last year.

It can be difficult to know what to throw or what to recycle. This, in part, is often due to something called “greenwashing” where the label on a container makes it seem like you can recycle something when in fact, you cannot. The tiny triangle that is on most plastic items that has a number in the center is one of the more confusing symbols. This is actually the plastic resin code which tells the manufacturer what kind of plastic a package is made out of. It is not a guide for whether or not a package is recyclable.

The “yes” list is important and can be found online at www.lyonco.org or if you call or email the Environmental office, we would love to get that out to you for your reference. Please note that we have this “yes” list printed in 4 different languages.

The reason why we have a “yes” list is because the business that takes our recycling will only be able to take items that they have a market to sell these items to. If there isn’t a market for certain items, they are trash. Eventually, due to some hard work with various groups in Minnesota and within the United States, this “yes” list will continue to evolve as new markets open up over the next 5-10 years. Residents may see that some items may be able to be recycled outside of the drop sites or the recycling cart. Lyon County residents are quite familiar with these outside of the bin options as many of you have used these services for car seats, mattresses and box springs, shredded paper and much more.

So what happens to items that are placed into curbside recycling or drop sites that are not recyclable? First, please note that Lyon County does a pretty good job at recycling and our contamination rate (the items that are not recyclable) is around 10-12% whereas in many other places with the United States that rate is much higher, usually around 25% or more.

However, if items are picked up in curbside carts or the drop site, they are transported to Redwood Falls to the recycling transfer station, pulled out and thrown away. At this point, because Redwood County brings their trash to the Lyon County landfill, this trash makes a round trip back to Lyon County. It is a cost to the program services for this to happen. We appreciate resident’s attention to detail in our county and we hope that we can continue to keep our contamination low.

For more information on disposal or recycling, please feel free to call our office at (507) 532-8210 and please remember as you are spring cleaning to know your options for disposal and dispose of things in the right place.