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| Thelma McCullough stands next to a wood chipper at the Anniston Army Depot's recycling center. Photo: Bill Wilson/The Anniston Star |
Thelma McCullough had racked her mind, but a solution to the carbon paper that was piling up at the Anniston Army Depot recycling center would not come. She needed a better way to recycle the stuff.
An Auburn University expert put her on the path to a solution.
McCullough, the division chief of the recycling center, built a wooden box and partially filled it with soil. She added wilted vegetables — and four inches of shredded carbon paper. Then she tucked in a pint of earthworms.
The carbon paper disappeared, the soil multiplied, and so did the worms. “There were so many, you couldn’t even reach down in there.”
The worms are tiny recycling engines. They’re just one of the ways McCullough, who wears a knit cap to work, has found to harness nature to deal with the depot’s river of waste.
Her goal: Total recycling, zero waste to go into a landfill.
“Will we reach that? I don’t know,” she said. “But we’re going to try every day.”
In storage lots, heaps of broken shipping pallets are ground into mounds of chips. The shreds are seasoned by sunlight and air before winding up as mulch or compost in garden beds. A truckload costs $5.
Started as a flagship in 1983, the depot’s recycling center has become a model for others. Workers at the center are helping Jacksonville State University start its own program.
“Like everything else we do, the leader,” said Joan Gustafson, a depot spokeswoman.
The recycling center is necessary. Every tank the U.S. military owns has to come through the depot in some form or fashion. That generates a lot of scrap metal – 541 tons in fiscal 2003. The depot also recycled 499 tons of used office paper, 6,000 tons of scrap wood and 500 tons of plastic – materials that can be reused and that otherwise would have been sent to a landfill.
Much of it finds its way into the hands of local residents.
On the first and third Saturdays of each month, from 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., the recycling center opens to the public. It sells two-by-fours, plywood and other scrap wood for $5 a truckload. Old credenzas go for $4 and metal file cabinets for the same or a dollar more. Doors are $1 each, chairs are two.
“We’ll really break your pocketbook,” McCullough said.
There is no limit to what the public can buy, and they can pay by check. All people need to do to get in is show a driver’s license and proof of insurance at the depot’s gates. They will be escorted the rest of the way.
To do the recycling job, McCullough has a fleet of 35 trucks and trailers and 13 employees, including a mechanic. The trucks drive as far south as Florida, as far north as Tennessee, as far west as Mississippi and as far east as Georgia to take their products to markets.
In a sense, even the building is recycled. It used to be an old mule barn, “and it’s turned into what we have today,” McCullough said proudly.
Outside, tractor-trailers are filled with cardboard and paper bales ready for delivery. The cargo, which weighs 60,000 pounds, will sell for $2,000 to $3,000, she said.
“The way the depot is operating right now, we can fill one of these a week,” McCullough said.
The center’s profits cover all of its costs. It has to operate on solid business principles, McCullough said. No federal appropriations are used.
The center does hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales each year. Profit after overhead costs are covered goes to the depot commander, who uses the money for pollution control and for buying such extras as ergonomic chairs.
The center gets “very, very good” command support, McCullough said. “And it’s not just because of the money.”
McCullough is aggressive in her pursuit of the best prices and newest uses for the recyclable materials.
The depot’s gymnasium just got a new floor — made of old tennis shoes. She handed out a little white handbag woven from two-liter bottles. It feels like cotton.
Such practical uses are called “close-the-loop recycling,” and while some might think them of lesser quality, “not so,” she said.
She’s constantly testing her employees on their knowledge of recycling, not just because it’s their job, but to make them believers in its importance. Our national resources are shrinking, McCullough said. “You have to live, breathe, eat, sleep recycling.”