The Recycling Foundation, a Louisiana-based recycling company, recently had its contract with the city of Lafayette, Louisiana extended an additional ten years. The extension will come in handy as the company is looking to convert its collection operations from a dual stream system to a single stream program. The company has operated the recycling program in Lafayette for the past 116 years.
Adding to the program, the company has recently landed a ten-year contract with Baton Rouge, LA, to handle the recyclables collection program in that city. While initially the program, slated to start this November will be dual stream, the company will move that program over to a single-stream program.
Stanley Cheatham, president of The Recycling Foundation, says that the company has a single-stream system from Bollegraaf installed, although he anticipates there were will be three to four month period where the company will be working out some of the kinks in the system, as well as completing the distribution of the collection containers.
All the material collected by the two cities will be delivered to the company’s facility in Baton Rouge, which is expected to be operational by the first half of next year. At the present time the company is operating out of a facility leased by the city.
Cheatham expects that the two cities will result in about 160,000 households serviced by the company. While at the present time the company takes in around 1,400 tons of recyclables a month, he anticipates that once the single-stream collection program is up and running the amount of recyclables collected could increase by between 35-50 percent.