The Orange Grove Center, a Chattanooga nonprofit organization for people with disabilities, has handled the city’s curbside recycling since 1992. The program helps provide employment for those served by Orange Grove; it also allows for “single stream” recycling in which residents put all their recyclable material, including newspapers, cans and plastic bottles, into one container. Single stream is becoming the norm nationally because of its convenience.
Orange Grove hopes to raise $1.6 million for new equipment to better process the mix of recyclables that comes into its materials recovery facility, or MRF (rhymes with “Smurf”), on the organization’s Derby Street campus not far from Memorial Hospital.
“This is the most significant upgrade to our facility in 27 years,” says Heidi Hoffecker, the center’s director of development.
The recycling program provides about 150 jobs to individuals with significant disabilities. The gloved workers stand alongside conveyor belts inside the MRF, a cavernous, barn-like building, and pull out different recyclables at different stations. The hand-picked cans, boxes, plastic bottles and bags go down chutes and pile up on the floor underneath the conveyor belt, which is on a raised mezzanine.
The volume of recyclables that comes to the center has skyrocketed since September, when the city of Chattanooga gave residents blue, 96-gallon curbside containers that can be picked up by a mechanical arm on garbage trucks. The new containers replace the recycling bins and blue, clear bags that residents provided themselves, which had to be picked up by hand curbside by city workers.