Polk County Recycling & Beautification

06/12/2026

The state’s environmental regulator will hold a public hearing June 15 on its proposed rules for how the toxic wastewater can be reused. Here’s what you should know.

06/09/2026

It is with great sadness that we make this post. Due to several reasons, we have made the hard decision to end our plastic recycling program. We are as disappointed with this as you are. Our organization is facing its most difficult year yet. Plastic has always given us issues. We should've listened when they told us to just start with clear drink bottles and milk jugs, but we wanted to recycle all the plastic we could. We were led down paths that went nowhere. As we grew, the roadblocks escalated, and we had to keep making changes to our program. This made it seem like we were moving backwards. Equipment, labor, storage, and transportation issues have negatively affected our operation. The investment needed to have an awesome recycling program is currently unattainable. Markets for recycled PET( #1) plastic crashed early this year, and it won't improve soon. PET accounts for 80% of the plastic we collect. We have 17k lbs of PET bales that we can't sell. Those 31 bales took 21 months to collect, and they are the equivalent of ~900k water bottles. We should have sold a truckload of plastic 6 months ago, but if we can't sell PET, we can't sell other plastic. We just don't collect enough to sell truckloads of one type of plastic, so we must sell mixed loads. We still struggle with contamination sometimes, and we really appreciate everyone that recycles right with us! Some of you have been coming since the beginning, and we really appreciate all the support we have been shown over the years! Our organization will be going through some major changes this year, and we may not survive, but we will try to continue to offer some recycling and beautification programs for our community.

05/28/2026

05/28/2026

Mosquito buckets target mosquitoes before they hatch—without harming bees, butterflies, or other pollinators.

05/26/2026

We started shipping material in 2022. We have shipped over 300k lbs of recyclable material. We have received an average of 7.7 cents per pound of material shipped, about $155 per ton. Hopefully, we'll be adding 42k lbs of cardboard to the shipped total in June.

05/23/2026

The Recycling Center will be closed on Saturday, May 23, Memorial Day weekend.

05/22/2026

To the person that thought we pay for cardboard: we would currently receive $62/ton for corrugated packaging, on a minimum 21 ton truckload. Your load weighed 300 lbs. That's $9.30 worth of cardboard, if it's baled and shipped as a full truckload. That doesn't factor in the labor of baling the cardboard or loading the truck. That doesn't factor in any costs associated with our recycling operation. Factor in those costs and there is little monetary value to us. The value is that it won't end up in our landfill and will be recycled. That saves water, energy, trees, and pollution.

05/19/2026

Anyone want to save this depressed dog? She could use a new home. She's very skinny. She's calm, likes attention, and just wants some love. She hangs out at the Recycling Center. As far as we're concerned, she's been abandoned.

05/16/2026

A ridiculous waste of taxpayer money that will cause irreparable damage to unique and beautiful ecosystems. A $1.7 billion contract has been awarded for border wall construction in Big Bend National Park.

Just like in this image, dark clouds are gathering above the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park.

Of all the stories I’ve written and updates I’ve shared about the increasingly insane Big Bend border wall saga, this is probably the biggest bombshell of them all.

Earlier this week, I wrote that the administration’s top border official Rodney Scott had said in an interview that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) wouldn’t build a physical wall in Big Bend National Park. According to CBP Commissioner Scott, they’d construct paved roads along the Rio Grande instead.

“Big Bend National Park has some just, like, unbelievably huge granite cliffs. It would be kind of silly to put like a 30-foot border wall on top of a 90-foot granite cliff,” Scott said. “So what we’re trying to convey is that we are going to have meaningful border security in that entire area.”

As “silly” as it is to put a 30-foot-tall steel bollard wall on top of cliffs and in some of the most remote and wildest country in the lower 48 states, it now appears that’s exactly what CBP intends to do.

This week, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract of $1.7 billion of our taxpayer money to the industrial construction company Southwest Valley Constructors Co.

This is the biggest border wall contract ever awarded to a single company in American history.

How do we know this contract is actually for a border wall in Big Bend National Park? Because it literally says so: “AWARD OF CONSTRUCTION TASK ORDER FOR BORDER WALL IN BIG BEND TEXAS, SEGMENT IDENTIFIED AS BBT-4.”

BBT-4 is the section of border in the Big Bend Sector that runs through the national park, as well as through the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area.

The effects of this wall on the environment and the area’s tourism industry would be catastrophic. This is a wall that would sever wildlife migration routes, cut off river access to both people and animals alike, remove campsites and trailheads, annihilate the park’s world-class night sky viewing, and cause massive pollution.

Riverside camping: gone. Multi-day floating trips: gone. World-class stargazing: gone. Soaking in historic hot springs: gone.

Read the full story here: https://ourpubliclandsandwaters.substack.com/p/largest-border-wall-contract-in-us