Jessica Mathews / news@whmi.com


A long-awaited ribbon-cutting ceremony is planned next week to mark the opening of Recycle Livingston’s new office and baler building.

The non-profit Recycle Livingston and the Kellogg Family Foundation are hosting the event on Monday at from 4 to 6pm. The facility is located at 170 Catrell Drive in Howell.

The new office and baler building was funded through grants from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy or EGLE; and matching funds from the Foundation. The new building has been named the “Kellogg Environmental Center” and construction got underway last April.

Executive Director Julie Cribley thanked everyone involved in the project, as well as the City of Howell for all of its support as it leases the property from the City.

Recycle Livingston is a mostly volunteer, non-profit recycling drop-off center that’s been serving Livingston County and surrounding areas since 1989. It started out in the VG’s parking lot and moved roughly a year later to its current location on Catrell Drive – about a mile east of downtown behind ACE Hardware.

Cribley told WHMI they’ve grown exponentially over the years and learned that even with curbside recycling programs, drop-off centers still have a purpose as they can accept materials that curbside programs cannot. She says they focus on hard-to-recycle items and their recovery rate is also higher because they’re “source-separated” – meaning people bring in items sorted and they work with a lot of different vendors. Cribley also stressed that people can be assured that whatever gets dropped off is being recycled

Cribley says they’ve been operating out of a very old mobile home trailer that someone donated to them in 1990 for an office – which was great at the time but it was also already old. She says that office has literally been falling apart and they’ve long needed a new facility but being a non-profit with mostly volunteers, they don’t have a lot of working capital.

Cribley said they were fortunate to receive a state grant to build the new baler building and locate their office inside, on-site.

As with most projects, Cribley said there are always issues along the way. She said first it was COVID so they were shut down and then later it was learned the property next door had contamination so they had to wait to make sure their site was clean - which took another year. Further, Cribley said the landscape changed in terms of supply chains and pricing and their building costs grew. She said they had to scale back plans but ended up with a nice building with one baler and a great office - although it’s not everything they had hoped for.

Cribley said it is a start and now by baling cardboard, it will be market-ready and they can take it to a recycler and sell it at a much better price. She added that various materials will continue to be accepted but that will still be on site outside where the weather is a factor – meaning there will continue to be times when they’ll have to close due to weather and volunteer staffing.

Longer term, Cribley said they designed the building so the back wall at some point could be removed and they could add on to it and become more of a full-time drop-off center with paid staff and not have to rely so heavily on volunteers. She said the new facility is really about getting them up to speed because they needed a good office to work from and wanted balers to have material market-ready. Cribley said they are looking to expand programming and the new building will allow them to hold classes, such as composting classes in the spring and fall to promote that aspect of waste reduction.

Anyone interested in volunteering is asked to contact Recycle Livingston by email at recycleliv@sbcglobal.net or by calling 517-548-4439.

Meanwhile, Monday’s event will be in open house format, with the ribbon cutting at 4pm. Cribley said they’ll have tours of the facility and a chance to meet those involved in the operation and community partners, as well as drawings and demonstrations.

An event flyer is attached.