By Jill Fennema –

November is National Recycling Month. In Edgerton, for just about two years, residents have been able to use large green totes to collect all their recyclable materials – a mix of plastic, glass, aluminum, cardboard, and paper.

Norm Van Dyke, owner of Van Dyke Sanitation in Edgerton, says that the program has been going very well. For over a year after the totes were delivered, he would go around towns and check what people were putting in their big green totes – because many people forget, or just don’t care – to make sure they are only putting recyclable materials in that bin.

Some things – like styrofoam food containers – seem like they should be recyclable, but they are not. Neither are packaging peanuts or the plastic bags that are sometimes used to cushion items in shipping.

Norm says that even now, after two years of trying to educate people – they still have residents who will stuff a bag of trash in the recycling bin when their garbage tote is full. “There will always be ten percent of the people who have to make a problem,” he said.

Norm explained that because Van Dykes is a small family owned company, they take the time to look over their recycling before they drop it off at Millennium Recycling in Sioux Falls, the destination for most of the recycling materials collected in Pipestone County. Brad Van Dyke, who primarily runs the recycling truck, said that he regularly looks in the bins before he dumps them into his truck. When he finds things that don’t belong there, he tags the tote and does not pick it up.

By and large, the single stream program is going really well. In 2019, Pipestone County recycled 736 tons of residential material. That was up from 485 tons in 2018.

In 2019, paper was the most recycled product in Pipestone County. Up until about a year ago, most paper in Edgerton was being collected by the Edgerton Volunteer Fire Department and was recycled into insulation. However, the fire department no longer does this as a fundraiser because the place that bought the paper cut the price. It was not worth the effort the firemen were putting in sorting the paper and boxes and garbage that inevitably ended up in the trailer.