Leechburg Recycling Center still going strong after about 40 years

Leechburg has taken recycling into its own hands.

The Kiski River town in Armstrong County operates its own recycling center with an all-volunteer staff of about a dozen dedicated people from the Leechburg, Apollo and Allegheny Township areas, said Leechburg Council President Tom Foster. And it has been doing it for close to 40 years.

“We couldn’t do it without all of our volunteers,” said Foster, noting that the recycling center on Logan Avenue Extension is open three hours each weekday morning. Even during the covid-19 pandemic, when people were afraid to gather, Foster said, “our volunteers kept on coming.”

Although Leechburg has a trash hauler that takes waste to a landfill, the borough’s public works crew collects recyclables from residents twice a month and brings them to the recycling center warehouse, Foster said. Volunteers sift through the single stream of recyclables — the various colored glass, cans, paper and cardboard — doing the dirty work to separate the items.

But it’s not just Leechburg residents who travel to the hilltop center toting their glass, metal, newspaper, magazines and cardboard.

“We get people from all around Leechburg who drive here and drop off their recyclables. They lost their ability to recycle” in their towns, said Debbie Dykes of Allegheny Township, who volunteers with her husband, Jack.

The center typically processes about 500,000 pounds a year. It gets enough recycled materials that it fills a truckload a month with crushed glass, bundled cardboard, plastics and mixed paper, Foster said.

The machines that bundle paper, crush cans and smash glass into cullet fragments were funded by grants from the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The recycling center is not a moneymaker. What the borough makes from the recycling processors pays the utilities and operating costs of the center, Foster said.

“It’s a breakeven proposition,” he said.

But it’s worth it, Foster added.

“It’s keeping all this stuff out of the landfills,” he said.