Central Georgia resident launches recycling business

When recycling centers in Bulloch County, Georgia, stopped accepting plastics as a result of China’s restrictions in September 2018, Jon Cook, a resident in Statesboro, Georgia, who serves as the missions director at Grace Community Church, says he decided he needed to do something about it. 

“For too long, we’ve relied on China to accept what we didn’t want to deal with,” Cook says. “We have a relatively small county—a rural county in Georgia. But with that, we were throwing 50,000 pounds of plastic a year in recycling. We were likely throwing away more than that in waste. My wife and I have always been avid recyclers, trying to teach our children about conservation. I didn’t want to toss away our plastic to waste and hope for the best. We don’t have to walk away from plastic completely.”

So, in response to the county’s restrictions on plastics, Cook started up his own recycling business to service Statesboro called Boro Recycling. The company will provide curbside collection of plastics Nos. 1-7, metals and glass. The business officially launched Wednesday, Jan. 9. 

Cook says he’s received a lot of positive feedback about his business among Statesboro residents so far. While he started with just a two-man team of himself and one part-time employee, he says he will have to hire several more employees to handle the volume of requests for service he’s received. 

“I underestimated what the response would be,” he adds. “A lot of people who signed up the first week didn’t receive a bin, so I had to scramble to come up with bags for them to use and find a distributor who could get me more bins quickly.”