The East Central Indiana Recycle and Reuse Center opened a little over a year ago to provide Wayne County, Indiana, access to expanded recycling options. Richmond offers curbside recycling, but most of the county relies on a few scattered drop-off locations, or simply sends recyclables to the landfill.
The center is a work of love for Executive Director Penny Ausmus. She's long been active in green initiatives and recycling, but was inspired to create the hub after a visit to Cincinnati's Recycling and Reuse Hub.
"I watched our towns place dumpsters around over the years for people to drop off their recycling, only to watch it become abused time and time after time. ... I knew there had to be a better way to do this," she tells WVXU. "When I stumbled onto Cincinnati, it was like, there's the answer to the question — this place is manned and people can't abuse it without somebody seeing what they're doing. That's kind of what led me here."
Like its counterpart in Cincinnati, the East Central Indiana Recycle and Reuse Center — or RE Hub for short — takes items that are harder to recycle or aren't accepted in curbside bins. Think: ink cartridges, cellphones, blue jeans, packaging materials, egg cartons and more. It also takes more standard items like plastic, glass and paper from folks who don't have access to curbside recycling. It also collects items that may still have some life left in them, and people can "shop" the shelves for project, classroom or other needs.
Ausmus says the community response has been fantastic since the center opened in Richmond in September 2024.
"It's been absolutely wonderful. I have people coming in just grinning ear to ear. They're telling me they love me; they are thanking me for what I did," she says. "It's overdue for us to have anything like this, and so it's been really positive."
Going mobile
The center is preparing to expand its reach and make it easier for people across Wayne County to recycle. Ausmus recently partnered with Earlham College to flesh out an idea for a mobile education and collection unit. The partnership earned a $5,000 grand prize from the Community-Engaged Alliance’s Idea to Action Incubator program.
"We came up with a project to build a traveling trailer that's going to be designed to collect particular materials," Ausmus explains. "We want to partner with all the individual towns around Wayne County that don't have access to recycling so that it will cut their carbon footprint from having to drive all the way to Richmond to the RE Hub and drop it off. So not only are we going to try to collect materials and keep them out of the landfill, we're going to cut the carbon footprint on top of that."
Ausmus says she's hopeful the mobile recycling center could be ready to roll in May.
She aims to find companies that will partner with the RE Hub, allowing them to park the trailer on their property for a few days — say, over a weekend — allowing people to drop off their items over several days, then the RE Hub will come back and collect the trailer.
The trailer also could be used for targeted collections if there's high demand or need to collect a certain type of recyclable.
It also will provide education around recycling and try to clear up misconceptions about what happens to the collected items.
"I want to make recycling cool," she says. "I want it to be something that everybody becomes interested in and realize that we're the ones that have to take care of this ground we're walking on. Nobody else is going to do it, and there's just been too much abuse to it, so if I can do a little piece of it to help clean it up, then that's my goal."
The RE Hub is open Thursdays from 1–6 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m.–2 p.m.
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