Sam Raudins is reporting for Columbia-Greene Media the Greene County Legislature Public Work Committee July 12, approved a proposal from the engineering firm Barton and Loguidice to build a new recycling center to the east of the existing Catskill transfer station. The committee approved an $82,650 agreement to begin development of the project. The purpose of the new facility is to improve and increase the efficiency of the recycling process, Greene County Administrator Shaun Groden said. Currently, haulers dump municipal waste at the Catskill station and take recyclables to a another facility for packaging. Under the proposal, recyclables can be packaged and shipped to a processing facility without the extra trip, Groden said. He said the hope is to complete the recycling facility before year’s end. Greene County Highway Superintendent and Solid Waste Department Director Scott Templeton said the facility will be the first of its kind for the county and will cater to commercial haulers, which can dump recyclable items without being sorted. The facility proposed will be similar to the recently constructed Hunter Transfer Station, a single-story building with an upper-level dump floor and a lower-level trailer load area. The construction of the Catskill recycling facility comes after the Hunter Transfer Station was reconditioned. Templeton said the Hunter facility has saved 1,100 man-hours usually put toward driving to the Catskill facility, and shipped 3,300 tons of waste directly from Hunter to landfills that would have previously been shipped from Catskill. Read the full story at HudsonValley360 [dot] com.