Recycling In Wicomico County Maryland

Wicomico County does recycle, just not as well as it used to.  Why?  Well inmates from ECI are the real reason Wicomico County is able to recycle at all.  Pre Covid anywhere from 10-14 inmates would come to the landfill for the day to sort recycling. Post Covid, 4-6 inmates come regularly.  That can slow recycling way down when you have fewer bodies to do the sorting.  But since Adam Corry came on staff, the inmates that come to the landfill can be seen regularly on the landfill itself, cleaning up blowing trash.

Now you have to wonder how many landfills have blowing trash on them and you would probably guess all of them.  MDE (Maryland Department of the Environment) can fine a landfill with heavy amounts of blowing trash and they can be big fines.  So, Adam decided that fines were not happening on his watch and he has repeatedly sent the inmates onto trash mountain to clean up trash.  While that is great, when you only have a few inmates, that means that recycling wasn’t happening on those days.  And those days rolled into weeks and my wife used to say that they were going to need a metal detector to find the baler under all of the cardboard.  Because the cardboard room bled into the paper recycling pile and was just a huge mountain of cardboard.  But luckily staff were willing to work overtime during weekends to help get the mountain under control.

While we are talking about the inmates, for their help they are paid peanuts, about 4-5 dollars for the day.  They are given a bagged lunch and a water bottle and that feeds them for the time they are with us.  The landfill did at the time provide coffee and creamer for them so they could at least have a cup of coffee for the day.  Then the money for that dried up and staff were buying coffee and creamer for the inmates.  And whenever the inmates did work beyond the norm (which happened occasionally) staff would buy them lunch in the form of pizza or fried chicken.  Whatever the landfill staff could afford since it was coming out of the landfill employees’ pockets.  And while everything was cheaper before the pandemic, my wife spent hundreds of dollars of her own money to try and give the inmates a little comfort for their hard work.  Since Adam came on board, the inmates are getting county bought coffee and creamer and when they go above and beyond, the county pays for their lunch.  Funny that the higher salaried employees never even considered spending their own money to reward the inmates.  These days they have been getting rewarded more, because they are constantly doing whatever Adam deems necessary.  And that can translate to no blowing trash on the hill and a mountain of recycling waiting to get sorted.

Me personally, I would regularly go to Sam’s Club and buy 4 pizzas to give to the inmates until Adam got wind of it and it was immediately brought to a halt. In fact, I would regularly bring lunch, (enough to feed the entire staff) until Adam once again made sure I could no longer do so and rather than meeting up at the landfill offices and treat others my Wife and I decided to meet regularly away from her office two or three times a week.

Now before you say anything negative about the inmates, because some of you like to do that, these are not hardened criminals doing hard time. In fact, these are some people you and I would know personally just looking to get out of the jail and pay it back to the community. Anyhow, they are human beings, and the county treats them like sh!t. How’s your bologna sandwich with nothing but bread and a bottle of water for your eight hours!

In one of these posts, we’ll talk about Adam and the cats he wanted euthanized on the landfill. If you think the past story on killing a cat on the landfill, well, just wait.