Rogers “retiring” from recycling

Broughton Rogers is calling it quits. He is telling everyone that he is retiring from collecting and hauling recyclables.

“I’m worn out,” says the 70-year-old Demopolis native.

But he really isn’t ending the career that has saved thousands of dollars in landfill costs and gone a long way toward keeping some of that trash from littering the Demopolis streets.

Sometime this summer Rogers plans to end the cardboard side of his recycling business. Because of the trade war with China, he explained, the market has collapsed. Instead, he will focus his efforts on all other paper and metals such as aluminum and steel cans.

He gave up the task of recycling plastic bottles because the cost of the equipment was prohibitive. The only plastics he will continue recycling is the hard kind such as that found in television sets, vacuum cleaners and children’s car seats.

All of it will be hauled to his collection site on East Jefferson before he sells it to recycling centers, primarily Waste Recycling in Tuscaloosa.

Rogers estimates he hauls away almost 425 tons just of cardboard each year, plus another 12-15 tons of books, office paper and newsprint. That doesn’t count the plastics and metal he collects. At a cost to Advanced Disposal of $52 per ton for tipping fees, that is a significant savings.

Rogers can remember as a little boy picking up “bones and bottles” and turning them into money. Even as a teenager he “picked up lots and lots of cans on the road.”

Recycling, he emphasized, is of vital importance. “I believe in it so hard…I think it’s insane” that Americans don’t do more toward reusing recyclables instead of exploiting limited resources and polluting the planet.

After two tours in Iraq and working in South Carolina for several years, Rogers returned home to Demopolis to care for his gravely ill father. He also began teaching remedial math, social studies and driver’s education in Linden. While at that post he began a school recycling program.

Even with three full-time employees and two who work part time, Rogers said he has “overextended myself,” but it helps when he is “seeing that cardboard being picked up, baled up and hauled off to the paper company.”

He finds the most challenging part of his job has been the “frustration of never-ending phone calls.” Still, he will pick up recyclables when called at 334-216-0749.