A local Walmart Supercenter and Sam’s Club are now home to Community Recycling Hubs, where you can drop off several materials that couldn’t go in your recycling cart.
The new hubs are available at the Elm Springs Road Supercenter in Springdale and Highway 112 Sam’s Club in Fayetteville. They’re open 9 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 9 a.m.-7 p.m. Friday through Sunday.
The locations work as collection points for TerraCycle, a recycling business that focuses on difficult-to-recycle materials such as packaging for toothpaste, lotions and other products.
These things can’t go to a curbside program or city drop-off for a variety of reasons — they’re too pricey to collect at the needed scale, for example, or they can be contaminated by non-recyclable substances. TerraCycle gets around these issues by gathering the materials from individuals around the country, then sending them in bulk to manufacturers that reuse them for new products.
Materials you can leave at the Community Recycling Hub include:
- Several varieties of bags, including shopping bags, bread and chip bags, pet food bags and soil and mulch bags.
- Plastic (non-electronic) toys.
- Ink and toner cartridges.
- Fabrics and clothing.
- Coffee pods and capsules.
- Toothpaste tubes and dental floss containers.
- And more. Find the list at Walmart’s website.
Be sure to bring only the accepted materials and to leave them out of recycling programs that don’t explicitly accept them. A given method of recycling can accept only certain things, and throwing in the wrong stuff actually makes it harder for the correct materials to get reused in the end. To learn more about what to recycle and how, go to our how-to page.
