Remember all those old paint cans and chemicals you forgot to get rid of last summer?

Well the hazardous waste collection season is almost here again, and you now have another 20 chances to dispose of them.

The Household Hazardous Waste collection schedule has been mailed to every household in the county and we will begin the season in the city of Freeborn on April 27.

To quickly review our program, it is a Household Hazardous Waste program, emphasizing household. We are licensed by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and must follow the DOT and OSHA regulations as well.

Two of us in the department annually attend the numerous required training courses for safety, packing, bulking and transportation of hazardous materials and the training has paid off.

After offering this program for eight years we have yet to experience a serious accident, injury or problems with our license restrictions.

Our license does not allow our program to collect farm agriculture chemicals. These containers are usually larger than one gallon size and we do not stock lab packaging supplies to ship those containers.

The same holds true for commercial waste. We do offer written information about disposal options if someone does bring waste from either of these sources. The Department of Agriculture by statute (chapter 18B.05) is required to collect agriculture chemicals and a tax on all farm ag sales provides funding for their collection program.

Unfortunately,

the Department of Agriculture has currently discontinued their collection program and has been trying to push that responsibility on the individual counties.

Counties are told to charge the customer a disposal fee if their local funding is insufficient. You may want to contact our elected officials on the state level about making legislative changes so the sales tax you pay goes where it is needed.

Many volunteers help us throughout the collection season.

These volunteers come from our local service clubs, city council, city employees, township officers, churches and often individuals who enjoy being a volunteer.

These volunteers are an important part of our hazardous waste program. They help us unload vehicles, open paint cans and dump them into appropriate containers and to set up before hand and clean up after a collection.

A lot of preparation goes into our collection sites.

We must conform to OSHA safety procedures, meet the guidelines set forth by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and package all materials to meet Department of Transportation requirements.

For these reasons the MPCA has a requirement that anyone bringing material to us fill out a registration form.

We need to keep these forms on file for a specific time and information we collect from the forms helps to plan future collections. One question on the form asks, &uot;Would you help volunteer in the future?&uot;

This is how we obtain our &uot;call&uot; lists to find volunteers for collections. It is illegal in Freeborn County to drop off hazardous waste materials prior to a collection and leave them unattended.

We encourage people to attend collections other than the one held in Albert Lea at the transfer station on West Richway. The reason for this is because of the number of vehicles and the long waiting lines.

If it is convenient, consider taking your items to one of the small cities during the week.

Residents may attend any collection in any city. You must be a Freeborn County resident.

Collections in the smaller cities are generally held at a fire hall or city hall, in locations easy to find.

If you did not receive a collection schedule in the mail, please call our office at 507-377-5186 and we’ll make sure

you get one.

(Randy Tuchtenhagen is the Freeborn County Solid Waste Officer.)