as originally published in the Pickens County Progress
The Pickens County Progress recently contacted Keep Pickens Beautiful to see if we would be interested in rolls of unprinted newsprint to use as a weed-block in future Edible Jasper gardens. Of course we said ‘Yes!’ When picking up the rolls, we learned more about their recent renovation and what the staff of the Progresswas able to accomplish with a little effort and the support of our community.
During the past few months, the Pickens County Progress has cleaned out most of the first floor of the Edge Building at the north end of Main Street and consolidated their offices into less than half of the space they had previously occupied. Since the newspaper is now produced digitally, they no longer need the rooms where the paper had been assembled. The Progress team made every effort to reduce the waste produced from the clean-out and renovation by recycling, repurposing, selling, donating, or giving away all they could.
The Edge building was built in the 1910s and burned twice, once in the 1920s and more seriously in the 1940s. The last major renovation was done in the 1980s when their current office was a cloth shop and their offices were located on the other side (the future location of the Sharptop Distilling Company). Now that the production of the Progress requires much less space, after 40 years, they undertook a significant renovation.
The Progress had two large undertakings – cleaning out the layout room and newsroom, and renovating their office space. Both of these projects could potentially produce a tremendous amount of waste. In their current office, they gutted the room down to the floor, added new vinyl floors, new sheetrock, new walls, and new cubicles. In the news and layout rooms, they removed all the furnishings and cabinetry to make space for their new tenant. They realized their clean-out and renovation “would generate tons of either waste or treasures,” so they looked for alternatives. They were motivated by both financial and ecological reasons; each load to the dump was an additional expense, and they didn’t want to take items to the landfill that could be repurposed.
According to the most recent statistics of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an estimated 600 million tons of Construction and Demolition (C&D) Debris was generated in 2018 in the United States; this is more than twice the amount generated by municipal solid waste. Demolition represents more than 90% and construction represents less than 10% of the C&D waste generated. Transparency Market Research reported that globally, in 2012, 1.3 billion tons of solid waste was generate annually, and “this volume is expected to increase up to 2.2 billion tons every year by 2025. Building materials account for half of the solid waste generated every year worldwide.”
This is an unfathomable amount of trash! Keep Pickens Beautiful would like to recognize the efforts made by the Pickens County Progress to minimize their dumpster loads and trips to the landfill.
Many years ago, the Progress had gotten rid of their printing press by giving their warehouse-sized Goss Color King to a metal scrapper in exchange for its removal. The items remaining in their space that were sold or given away during this recent clean-out included an mid-1900s lighted Coke wall clock, large wood cabinets, drafting tables, old desks, lead bars from when they printed pre-1980s, and rolls of unused newsprint. They repurposed the wood removed from their lobby to make their current cubicles, and the industrial shelves from their warehouse now hold their old editions. The last of the items that were usable were taken to the Community Thrift Store.
During the renovation and clean-out, the Progress Team reduced their waste as much as possible. They took numerous loads of scrap metal to Priest Recycling where they were able to sell it rather than pay per load to dump it at the landfill – they made a few dollars and the metal will be recycled. They recycled all they could, which ended up being mostly cardboard. The scrap wood, which were mostly old boards, were taken by community members for projects or for kindling.
The waste sent to the landfill was minimized by the efforts made by the staff at the Pickens County Progress. They estimate that they filled two small dumpsters, and that they took three or four loads of unusable old desks and chairs to the recycling center. The cost for each of these loads was an incentive to look for alternatives, and as a result, they were able to divert hundreds of pounds from the landfill.
Dan Pool, the Editor of the Progress, commented “I feel really good about not only the amount of waste we kept out of the landfill, but the money saved and the number of new friends or at least grateful people who got something for free that they were excited about.”
Keep Pickens Beautiful thanks the Pickens County Progress Team for their efforts at reducing their waste through reuse and recycling. For other local businesses needing to perform similar tasks, they found they were most successful in finding new homes for reusable items either through the Free section in their Want Ads or through online avenues.
Contact Keep Pickens Beautiful if you need help finding options for items you’d like to repurpose, recycle, or pass on to a new home for reuse during your clean-out, renovation, or other waste-producing project. You can stop by our office at 56 Main Street Monday – Friday between 11-3:00, or visit KeepPickensBeautiful.org for more information.