The Durango Recycling Center will be closed for most of February for maintenance on its materials baler.
Durango Public Works operations manager Joey Medina said the Recycling Center will be closed starting Monday through Feb. 23 or Feb. 24, depending on how the maintenance goes.
The baler is due for a realignment, he said. The city hired Denver-based company Ultimate Specialties to perform the maintenance, which Medina described as a total refurbishment of the baler.
“They're gonna go into it, basically reline the metal floor, the sidewalls, the top, putting new cutting edges on it, new hold down rails,” he said.
He said the materials will cost the city between $80,000 and $100,000.
Medina said balers “take a pretty good beating” from heavy materials and the best practice is to perform realignments every five to seven years. The city obtained its current baler around 2012, and it had its last partial realignment five or six years ago.
Trash and recycling collection services won’t be interrupted by the center’s closure.
“We'll be collecting material off our everyday recycle routes, we’ll be bringing them to the recycle center up here and we'll be putting them into roll off dumpsters and having them transported down to the waste management processing facility in Crouch Mesa, New Mexico,” he said. “ … And then what they'll do is they'll process material and then get it ready for shipment and ship it out to another processing facility for us.”
Medina said the city wants to prevent any recyclable materials from being dumped into a landfill while the baler is down for maintenance.
“We'll do everything we can to make sure all the material we're in taking is going to be recycled and process just like we do here at our facility,” he said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
