Asheville Greenworks hosts Hard 2 Recycle drive-thru for Buncombe County residents

Old TVs, batteries and broken appliances had a sanctioned exit at A.C. Reynolds High School, where Asheville Greenworks turned a spring cleanup chore into a drive-thru drop-off for Buncombe County residents on May 9.

The quarterly Hard 2 Recycle East event ran from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 1 Rocket Drive in Asheville, with volunteers unloading vehicles outside while drivers stayed in line. Asheville Greenworks said the event regularly draws 600-plus vehicles, a sign of how much bulky and hazardous material piles up in garages, basements and office closets long after curbside pickup has run out of options.

The list of accepted items was built around the things most people cannot set out at the curb: TVs, small household appliances, food-grade clean styrofoam, broken lawnmowers, weedeaters, batteries and electronics. Buncombe County supports the program because it gives residents an outlet for items not accepted in curbside carts, including styrofoam, personal care products, computer equipment and flexible plastics.

Cost mattered, too. Asheville Greenworks’ accepted-items page says all TVs and CRT monitors carried a $10 recycling fee, and wooden console televisions were not accepted. That kind of detail can save residents a wasted trip, while also steering hazardous or outdated equipment into the right processing stream instead of into household trash.

Eric Bradford of Asheville Greenworks has said the organization will usually take anything that has had electricity running through it, a rule that captures the growing pile of electronics, batteries and motorized equipment many households replace but never quite know how to discard. After pickup, those materials are routed to processors that can break them down for reuse or safe disposal rather than sending them to the Buncombe County landfill in Alexander.

The program’s footprint has become sizable. Asheville Greenworks says Hard 2 Recycle has kept 1 million pounds of material out of the landfill since 2016, across 60 events, with 1,905 volunteers contributing 8,580 volunteer hours. A donor page says 933,000 pounds of recyclable material had been kept out of the landfill under earlier posted totals, underscoring how steadily the program has grown.

The environmental payoff is not abstract. Asheville Greenworks says diverting these items helps extend landfill life and reduce methane and other harmful emissions from landfill gas, while lowering health risks tied to chemicals that can leach or offgas from plastics, styrofoam and electronics. After Hurricane Helene, Asheville Greenworks officials said thousands of pounds of recyclable items ended up in landfills, a reminder that one day of careful sorting can keep a lot of avoidable waste out of Buncombe County’s trash stream.