A rendering of the new recycling center which will be constructed just north of 2210 Graham Road next to Under One Woof pet boarding business. Provided rendering
Construction will start soon on a new county recycling center in Franklin.
The Johnson County Solid Waste Management District Board awarded a bid to Runnebohm Construction Co. last month for the construction of a new 10,000-square-foot recycling center. A bid for $2.5 million was approved, but the county council has approved a $3.2 million total bond that also includes soft costs and contingency funds.
The project is expected to be complete in the second quarter of next year, or spring 2025. The current recycling center will remain operational until closer to construction completion.
The current recycling center is a drive-through operation in a rented building at 900 Arvin Dr, Franklin. The center has been at that location for approximately 15 to 16 years, said Jessie Biggerman, executive director of the Johnson County Recycling District.
“Anybody who’s gone through there knows that there’s some quirks to it, and so we have had on the table for quite some time the desire to build a facility that would incorporate all of our needs,” Biggerman said.
Johnson County Commissioner Kevin Walls said talk on creating a new recycling center started two to three years ago when the county started to look hard at eliminating building rent as rates continued to rise.
“We’re trying to bring a lot of these services under the county’s umbrella. We own the buildings, we manage the buildings, we don’t have to be subject to outside whims,” Walls said. “Once these buildings are paid for, they’re paid for, they’re ours. We don’t continue on with leases, and … we control our destiny.”
The recycling district and county took advantage of the opportunity to purchase land a parcel of land immediately north of 2210 Graham Road about a year and a half ago, she said. The Franklin Board of Zoning Appeals previously granted the county a special exception to use the land for a recycling center in December 2022.
Walls said the new building will be in a more accessible and visible location and have easier in-and-out access. With the new space, improvements are also on the horizon for the recycling center’s operations.
Biggerman said the 10,000-square-feet new center will have a bigger internal footprint to collect materials, despite being the same size as the old center. The building will also be able to handle the weather better than the old center.
“It is our hope that we’ll be able to weather the weather,” she said. “Right now, a lot of times like if it’s excruciatingly hot, we have to close because we don’t have passed-through air, we can’t open those sides, we don’t have fans. So we’re hoping to not have to worry about closing because it’s too hot … “
The building may also be used as a collection spot for major storms, like how the county fairgrounds are used, she said.
The new center will not have a creative resources center but within the first couple of years, Biggerman said she hopes to create different education spaces in place of it.
“We are hoping over the first couple of years to create an outdoor education center (with) trees, gardens. We’ll have our rain barrels outside that we’ll be using to be able to educate the public, so kind of being able to do some more of the outside things that we can’t currently do inside,” Biggerman said. “There will also be an education space, so a room that we will utilize certainly for our programs, but that we are going to set up for communities who also will be able to utilize (the space).”
Another change with the new center is that household hazardous waste, which is currently housed at the highway garage, will be able to be housed onsite. People will no longer have to make an appointment and the waste will be collected at the same time as recycling.
Biggerman also said the new center will take all the same materials they currently take with the hopes of adding to the list. In the future, the center may offer food waste composting services, although Biggerman said she doesn’t know what that will look like yet.
With these developments in the new recycling center, Biggerman said she is most excited about the opportunity for growth.
