Rumpke Expands Medora, Indiana Recycling Facility to Uphold Capacity

At the end of 2020, Rumpke Waste & Recycling based in Colerain Township, Ohio, announced the expansion of its Southern Indiana recycling center. The 9,520 square-foot facility in Medora, Ind., features a larger tipping floor to accept recyclables, push walls to better contain material and an overhead enclosure.

In 2019, Rumpke was awarded a $175,000 grant from IDEM’s Recycling Market Development Program to expand the Medora Recycling Center. Rumpke invested an additional $175,000 in the project.

“This expansion project is the result of support from community and industry partners that align with our goals to expand access to recycling services in Southern Indiana and provide quality recyclable material for end users,” says Steve Sargent, director of recycling for Rumpke. “Without support from IDEM, the Jackson County Recycling District, customers and Indiana end-users – this project would not have been possible.”

The Medora Recycling Center is a recycling transfer facility located on property adjacent to Rumpke’s landfill in Medora, Ind. Site features include a tipping floor to accept recyclables, conveyors to move material, a manual pre-sort station to remove contaminants, an enclosed compactor for single-stream material and a baler for commercial cardboard.

Loose cardboard is baled on site and shipped to Pratt Industries in Valparaiso. Residential material is compacted and sent to Rumpke’s regional recycling facility in Cincinnati, Ohio, for final processing.

The Medora Recycling Center accepts single-stream recyclables and source-separated cardboard from municipalities, schools, businesses and institutions located throughout Southern Indiana. The expanded facility now has the capacity to process and transfer approximately 15,000 tons of recyclable material each year.

“Since opening in 2017, the facility has processed nearly 22,000 tons of cardboard and residential recyclables. While that’s tremendous growth, it exceeds initial volume projections originally outlined when the facility was constructed,” says Sargent. “As we continue to promote recycling services and develop partnerships with solid waste districts, municipalities, schools and commercial entities, the newly expanded facility provides ample capacity to process incoming recycling volumes and provide clean material for end-users.”

Modeled after successful “hub and spoke” recycling projects in other parts of the country, the Medora Recycling Center serves as a delivery “hub” for the delivery of recyclables collected from smaller towns and rural counties that function as “spokes” for supplying recyclable material.

Rumpke owns and operates 11 recycling facilities and processes one billion pounds of recyclables each year. In the past 10 years, the company has invested more than $60 million in recycling infrastructure throughout the Midwest.

“Over the past 10 years, Rumpke has invested more than $60 million dollars in recycling. Our team is constantly exploring new partnerships and making significant investments to put society’s trash to good use. This includes researching additional markets for recyclables, expanding existing infrastructure and adding new technology at our material recovery facilities,” says Sargent. “Finding better uses for waste is our tradition – and continued innovation and new technology goes hand in hand with our mission of providing communities with complete solid waste solutions.”