Supervisors: Residents Must Start Using County-Issued Garbage Cans Jan. 1

The Lafayette County Board of Supervisors announced in Monday’s meeting that all garbage in Lafayette County must be placed in a county-issued garbage can as of Jan. 1, 2018.

“No loose garbage or garbage in other cans will be collected,” the announcement reads.
The county plans to buy automated trucks that will pick up the cans, but Supervisor Kevin Frye said any old trash can won’t work. The trucks are designed specifically to retrieve the county-issued cans, which were provided to all county residents earlier this year.
“Instead of having guys on the back of the trash truck driving down highways and these county roads – it’s really dangerous – the idea is to have these new automated trucks,” Frye said.
In other board news, supervisors planned to cast votes on a proposed zoning ordinance in Monday’s meeting, but after receiving public comment following the Dec. 4 meeting, another public hearing has been scheduled for Jan. 16.
A few additional changes, which Frye said were minor, have been made to the ordinance and updated on the Lafayette County website. 
If no additional changes are made during the public hearing on Jan. 16, the board will then immediately cast a vote.
Also in Monday’s meeting, the board amended the Three Rivers Planning & Development District’s solid waste management plan to incorporate a medical waste facility operated by GreenServ, Inc. GreenServ has been transporting Lafayette County’s waste to Birmingham, Alabama, and Hattiesburg over the past six years because the Three Rivers solid waste plan doesn’t cover certain types of waste.
A new 15,000-square-foot facility will be built in Lafayette County to process and sterilize some types of medical waste, which will then be transported to a landfill in Pontotoc. Jimmy Spencer, an engineer with Cook Coggin Engineers, Inc. and a representative of Three Rivers, said the waste consists of “sharps, gowns, things of that nature. Not to be shocking, there’s no body parts that will be taken in.”
This type of waste cannot be disposed of in a regular dumpster.
“The same technology that we use to sterilize instruments for surgery is the same technology we use to process this waste so that it can go into a Class D landfill in Three Rivers,” said John Alford, an owner of GreenServ Inc.
Alford explained that the proposed building would add 40 jobs to Lafayette County over the next 36 months.
“Having this facility in the county will allow us to take everything that we’re spending outside of the county and outside of the state… we can keep it in the state,” Alford said. “[We can] help add to the economic development in Lafayette County.”

By Randall Haley, associate editor of HottyToddy.com. She can be reached by randall.haley@hottytoddy.com.