The Centralia Recycling Center will stay open under new ownership.
Keep Centralia Beautiful director and recycling center coordinator Mike Morris says they reached an agreement with Contained Storage and Shredding to buy the building and keep it open for community recycling.
“We were struggling for the last two years, always managing to keep things open, but the recycling market had gotten bad,” Morris said. “The prices we were getting were significantly lower. We had enough cash on hand to make it perhaps through the end of the year. Then this opportunity with Contained came along, and it seemed like that was the right time for us to transfer this operation over to someone else who could keep it going.”
Contained Storage and Shredding owner Roger Campbell says it made sense to bring the recycling center into their operation.
“We have some equipment that the recycling center doesn’t have, and they have some equipment that we don’t have,” Campbell said. “It became a situation where there were two entities here that could function better maybe merging together than trying to operate separately, so it seemed to be a win-win situation for all of us. It was a deal that we got together, put our heads together, and we think we made something work that will be good for the future.”
Campbell says he has also bought some new equipment to improve the operation of the recycling center.
“We intend to continue on and try to keep doing everything that the Centralia Recycling Center has done. Personally, I appreciate what Keep Centralia Beautiful has done for that. They’ve done a good job, and we hope to try to keep it going.”
Campbell says that includes working with other communities, including Salem, that brings their recyclables to the Centralia center.
The recycling center’s lone employee Greg Bone will be undergoing minor surgery at the end of the month and will return to run the operation when he is released to go back to work. In the meantime, Contained Storage and Shredding employees have learned the operation to keep it going during Bone’s absence.
Morris says since Campbell is bringing in more equipment and has trucks available to haul recyclables, some of costs can be reduced. However, the two believe financial support from the communities and from other business owners utilizing the facility will be needed for the center’s long-term success.
