By Eric Stock
NORMAL – One of the region’s largest recyclers is busier than ever before.
Midwest Fiber Recycling reports a record year for recycling last year. The communities is serves in Central Illinois produced 339 million pounds of material that’s been diverted from the landfill.
Vice President of Sales and Procurement Todd Shumaker said many probably don’t realize how many different things they can recycle.
“We still see in these communities, even though the changes have taken place, there’s some slow adopters,” Shumaker said. “Some people only put the traditional maybe newspapers, aluminum cans, tin cans, and it’s continuing education to make people aware of all the different varieties of things that can go in the container.”
About four million pounds of material is brought in each week from Springfield, Decatur, Champaign, Peoria and elsewhere to Midwest Fiber’s plant at 422 S. White Oak Road.
Shumaker said the material recycling had an astounding environmental impact, creating enough energy savings to power an electric heater rated at 1000 watts for 2.4 billion and spare 2.4 million trees from being cut down to make new paper.
Bloomington-Normal is among the Central Illinois communities have offer single-stream recycling.
Eric Stock can be reached at eric.stock@cumulus.com.
