MORGANTOWN — The Monongalia County Commission on Wednesday approved a one-year ground lease with Enrout Properties for the new home of the county’s recycling center – 34 Olin Street in the Morgantown Industrial Park.
The commission will pay $12,000 for use of the .75-acre site for the initial term of the lease. Concrete, fencing and other site preparation cost just over $48,500.
The parking lot next to Westover City Hall has been a recycling drop site for right around a decade. It’s been the lone free recycling option for county residents since COVID ended a supplementary Saturday drop site at the Grafton Road Walmart in March 2020.
“Westover has been gracious for five years, allowing us to use their site and parking lot. It got to a point where they need to use it, so we need to move,” Commissioner Tom Bloom said.
According to Bloom, the Westover location closed at noon Wednesday to allow time for bin relocation.
The new site will be open at 7 a.m. Thursday. To mark the occasion, Sabo Coffee Roasters will be on hand to offer free coffee from 7:30- 9 a.m.
Bloom said signs will help direct traffic to the location.
“We’re probably the only site that has barbed wire around it. I guess we don’t want people to come in and dump their garbage on our site,” he said. “We’re very pleased with it. Easy egress and ingress – very simple. That will give us more time for the individual there to work with the people dropping off recycling.”
While the Westover drop site has been active – more than $1 million pounds collected in 2024 – it’s been plagued with problems, primarily contamination and off-hours dumping.
In addition to being a more secure site, the new location is also closer to the Mountaineer Transfer Station – also in the industrial park – where the recycled material is ultimately dropped by the county.
“People have a lot of opinions about recycling. It’s very expensive. It costs the county a lot of money to do. We understand the importance of it to help with our environment in trying to reuse these materials, but it’s a very expensive endeavor. It’s a very labor-intensive endeavor,” Commission President Jeff Arnett said, explaining the reduced fuel cost and vehicle miles should help offset the additional cost of the lease and site work.
The county pays $81.25 per ton to drop its recycling at the transfer station. The fee amounted to $33,897.16 in the previous fiscal year.
