Published: May 16, 2008 07:19 am      

Recycling of paper no longer available

For three years now, Bubble Kubala has conscientiously taken all of his recycling to the Woodward Public Works Department near Crystal Beach Park because he thought the city performed a recycling service.

Recently, he took his saved up cans and newspapers to Woodward Public Works where he has been taking them to drop them off, only to learn they will no longer accept the recycling.

“I have 300 pounds of newspapers and no where to take them but the trash,” Kabala said.

That’s the problem, said public works director, Tom Golf.

The City of Woodward has never been responsible for recycling and it has never been involved in its own recycling enterprise, Golf said.

“We have just provided the plastic bins for people and the recycling people were supposed to do the pick ups on it,” Golf said.

Those recycling people that Golf is referring to are the Recyclers of Northwest Oklahoma located southeast of Woodward.

According to Golf, the organizers of A Crystal Christmas arranged with the original owners of Recyclers of Northwest Oklahoma to allow people to drop off their recycling at Crystal Beach and it was supposed to be picked up by the recycling company.

“But it was never picked up,” Golf said.

Golf said he believed the recycling business changed hands and he thought that the new owners had simply not continued the agreement made by the old owner, Robert Wells.

That has lent to an increasingly bad situation, Golf said. “It was a mess here with newspapers that finally blew down in our sewer plant.”

Like most puzzles though, there is yet another piece that paints a picture of a good plan that fell flat.

According to the Cathy Wells, her husband, Robert (Bob) Wells is and has been the owner of The Recyclers of Northwest Oklahoma for about 15 years. For more than a year now, Wells’s health has been failing. That coupled with the loss of a couple of long-term employees who moved from the community, created a backlog of work as well as other problems that arose as a result of changes the city made, Wells said.

Wells originally made the agreement with the organizers of Crystal Christmas to pick up recycling at what she calls the “clock tower” in what is now an empty parking lot west of Cowboy’s Tack Shop. The aluminum cans that were picked up were then purchased by Wells and a check was sent to the Chamber of Commerce, Cathy Wells said.

“We used to go and pick up there in the evenings,” she said. “We would sift through all that stuff and there was always trash in with the recycling and we would sort through it and take the recycling from there.”

But because of the massive amounts of left over trash, city officials choose to move the drop point to Crystal Beach to get it out of downtown Woodward, Golf said.

That created a difficulty for Wells, who did not begin his pickup route until evening hours and had to contact someone with a key to Crystal Beach each time he needed to do a pickup.

At the same time, Wells was struggling with health issues and his ability to keep up with the hauling away of debris that he was called on to address began to get ahead of him. Add to that, the breakdown of his paper baler recently and he finally had to let his customers know he could not take any more paper products.

Now, the recyclers are only taking metal products, which they haul to a vendor who has the equipment to melt the metals and use them.

At present, the business can still accept most recycling except for paper products which there is simply no other outlet for in this region of Oklahoma, Wells said.

As a result of Bob Well’s health, the business is also for sale, Wells said. It is presently listed through United Country Home Realtors in Woodward, she said.

“After 15 years of my husband serving this community we are selling the business,” she said.

If the business does not find a suitable buyer who plans to purchase and run the business, it will signal the closing of the last recycling center in the entire Northwestern Oklahoma region as well as southern Kansas, Wells said.

There used to be a center in Greensburg, Kan., and one in Ashland, Kan., she said. “Both were hit by tornadoes and now there are people from Greensburg coming here to us for recycling.”