Keep Pickens Beautiful’s new Simply Recycle program, funded primarily through a grant from Keep America Beautiful and Coca-Cola, strives to make recycling an easy household habit.
This program is a response to the main complaints we hear about recycling in Pickens County: the Recycling Center staff is “picky”; people are confused about what they can recycle; having to sort recyclables is a real pain. To make home recycling simpler and more convenient, Keep Pickens Beautiful has obtained attractive, small footprint, stackable bins that will fit in even the smallest of homes. Says committed recycler who was an early pilot user of the Simply Recycle bins, “I have a tiny kitchen and a small house, so it was hard to manage my recycling easily. The Simply Recycle bins totally solved my problem. Now I just toss things into the bins as I go, carry them to the car, and drop them off at the Center on my way to and from Jasper. Easy and elegant!”
The Simply Recycle bins are designed to make using our county recycling facility easy. Each household can get up to four bins at a nominal price of $2 each. Along with the bins, Simply Recyclers receive labels that are an exact match to Pickens Recycling Center signage. Households label the bins to match the items that they are most prone to use on a daily basis. On the sides of each bin are QR codes to allow users to easily report their recycling numbers so KPB can track the success of the program.
Any Pickens County resident is invited to participate. To make it as easy as possible, Simply Recyclers can sign up online at https://keeppickensbeautiful.org/programs/simply-recycling/. The next step is picking up bins, labels, and instructions. They are available at the KPB office at 56 Main Street from 11am-3pm Monday through Friday. Once bins are acquired, recyclers can set them up in a convenient place in their home and start collecting recyclables. When they drop the recycling at the Center on Cove Road or at Appalachian Court, recyclers simply fill in a quick form online to let us know how much they recycled. They can watch the amount of recycling they do over time with built-in reports on their Simply Recycling webpage.
Most importantly, recyclers can rest assured that all of the items they bring in for recycling are actually recycled responsibly and that they are contributing to the circular economy where instead of consuming natural resources we are returning these items to be repurposed, reused, and renewed. And that is Simply Recycling at its best.
