Greenville launches circularity study to cut waste and pollution

Greenville, Mississippi, has started a circularity assessment with the MidAmerica Clean Future Alliance and the University of Georgia’s Circularity Informatics Lab, a move aimed at tracing where waste and material use leak out of the local economy. The same kind of data gap matters in Cleveland County, where landfill rules and recycling sites already shape costs, operations and what residents can drop off.

The Circularity Assessment Protocol was launched in Greenville on June 18 with support from Mayor Errick D. Simmons, and the University of Georgia describes it as a standardized community-level tool for policy, infrastructure and innovation. In Greenville, student interns from the Greenville College Access & Attainment Network will help with fieldwork, data collection and outreach, while the project is being used to map how materials move through the city and where single-use plastics and other waste escape into waterways. The framework has now been used in 56 cities across 16 countries.

Greenville is not starting from zero. The city already operates a circularity and recycling center at 1512 Hwy 82 West with Replenysh and the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, starting with plastic beverage bottles and aluminum cans. City public works says the setup is meant to reduce litter and landfill costs while giving manufacturers valuable recovered material, and the center has also been described as the first in Mississippi and the second of its kind in the country.

Cleveland County's system is more traditional but already shows some of the same pressure points. County sites run Monday through Saturday, with convenience and recycling centers open 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and landfills open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.; the county says the Self-McNeilly landfill in Cherryville handles municipal solid waste while the Airport Road site in Shelby takes construction and demolition debris. County policy bars commercial, industrial and institutional waste from convenience sites and bans items such as beverage containers, aluminum cans and recyclable rigid plastic containers from landfilling, while the health department offers year-round recycling programs for household items, electronics and unused medications.

That makes Greenville's citywide audit a useful test case for Shelby, Kings Mountain and the rest of the county's manufacturing base, where employers include Nippon Electric Glass, ABB, Eaton, KSM Castings and Clearwater Paper. If Cleveland County wants to lower hauling costs, keep more material out of the landfill and build reuse work instead of simple disposal, local officials and those employers will need the same kind of inventory Greenville is now buying: not just where trash ends up, but where it begins, who handles it and what can be recovered before it becomes a fee or a leak.