Concerns with a recycling transfer station planned for the North Judson area have led to a response from the company, as well as local economic development officials. Metro Recycling is currently moving ahead with a permitting process with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. The company plans to add a recycling transfer station on Oakwood Street in the North Judson Industrial Park.
Metro Recycling CEO Neil Samahon says the transfer station will handle municipal solid waste. Meanwhile, asbestos, PCBs, hazardous waste, lead-acid batteries, tires, infectious waste, and bio-medical waste will all be prohibited from the facility, according to its IDEM application.
Starke County Economic Development Foundation Executive Director Charlie Weaver says the transfer station will actually be cleaner than other recycling centers around the county and more controlled than the Richard’s Disposal facility already in North Judson. “They’ve got things that they transfer between gondolas,” Weaver says. “They’ve got stuff that they dump on the open ground. And the people of North Judson are perfectly happy with that because they don’t think it bothers them. [Metro Recycling is] putting it on concrete with drains, where the drainage is going to be controlled, filtered, it’s going to go through oil separators and everything else and monitored.”
Weaver and Samahon note that the majority of the operations will take place indoors. Samahon adds that the waste received at the facility will generally come from within a 25-mile radius. Once it arrives, it will only be allowed to stay at the transfer station for a maximum of 24 hours. “That garbage has to turn around and go,” he says. “This isn’t a landfill. This isn’t somewhere where we can sit on garbage. It literally is a transfer station. The garbage comes in, and then it gets loaded into a transfer trailer, then goes out, and it heads to the landfill.”
Weaver says that before planning on the North Judson transfer station got underway, he arranged for several local officials to tour Metro Recycling’s existing facilities. “I then approached Ted Bombagetti, who was the director of emergency management in Starke County; Terry Stephenson, director of the county planning commission; and Dennis Estok, who was county surveyor at the time,” Weaver says. “They toured the facilities, and came back and reported to me that they were very clean. They were extremely impressed with the facilities. They were very neat and orderly, very clean. There was no junk laying around.” Weaver also notes that while steps are being taken to protect the local environment, the site of the proposed North Judson transfer station has been an industrial area for well over a century.
Samahon adds that a big goal of Metro Recycling is to help protect the environment by reducing the amount of garbage that ends up in landfills. “I’m not sure when it was bad to try to recycle,” he says. “And that’s the part that I don’t want to say frustrates me but I just kind of question. We’re trying to offer a benefit to the community by taking items because if it isn’t for facilities that are recycling, then we need to set aside more land for landfills, and I don’t think anybody’s going to be too happy about that.”
Samahon estimates that the new transfer station would create about five jobs initially. That could eventually increase to up to 15, depending on the success of the facility.
Metro Recycling plans to discuss the proposed facility with residents during Monday’s North Judson Town Council meeting at 6:30 p.m. Town officials have announced that Monday’s meeting has been moved to the North Judson–San Pierre Junior/Senior High School Auditorium. The presentation will be for informational purposes only, since the proposed site actually sits outside of the North Judson town limits and out of the town council’s jurisdiction. However, Weaver says council members have been involved in the project for at least the past year.
If the process continues to move along as scheduled, the new transfer station could open in the summer of 2017.
