Richard and Christy Bracken have manned booths at many community events in both Franklin and Gulf counties as they line up customers for their new recycling venture. [ David Adlerstein | The Star ]
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Indian Pass couple to launch recycling company

A Gulf County couple is planning to launch an ambitious effort next month that promises to provide a reliable low-cost opportunity for homeowners from St. George Island to Mexico Beach to recycle most everything that can.

Based in Port St Joe, Florida 27 Recycle, Inc. is the brainchild of Christy and Richard Bracken, a pair of retired accountants who have been busy reaching out to local governments, the environmental community and the general public to persuade them that for just $20 a month, they can be good stewards of Gulf and Franklin counties’ natural resources. 

They plan to provide businesses, residents, and visitors access to recycling everything from aluminum. already being collected at various spots such as Apalachicola’s Farmers Market and the volunteer fire department on Cape San Blas, to cardboard, which Franklin County now collects, to glass, plastics, and styrofoam, which as it stands now have been earmarked for the landfills in both counties.



The Brackens said they plan to launch their pick-ups the first week of November, and are targeting communities that include Apalachicola, Eastpoint, St. George Island, Cape San Blas, St. Joe Beach, Port St. Joe and Mexico Beach.

Richard Bracken said the couple has leased a site on former Arizona Chemical property at the Port, where they plan to sort and store the various materials they have collected on their pickup truck on a regular basis.

After that, they will sell off the materials to facilities in Tallahassee and in Troy, Alabama. After starting off with a multi-faceted array of prices, they have settled on a flat $20 a month, with additional charges if the customer wants more frequent pickups.

They are not using Dumpsters for collection, which eliminates the problem Franklin County had a few years ago when residents within the unincorporated portions of the county, which does not have mandatory pickup, chose to secretly deposit all their garbage into the large containers.

Instead, customers will have the choice of having an 18-gallon tote, or a 48-gallon bin, placed on their property.

For more information, visit FL 27 Recycle, Inc. on Facebook, email Hello@FL27Recycle.com or call (850) 774-5908.



Meet the Editor

David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.

Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.

In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.

Wendy Weitzel The Star Digital Editor

2 Comments

  1. Good luck!! We have tried recycling on a much larger scale in the past. It is a real struggle. Very labor intensive to sort the items. Then you get to plastic and there are so many different types. They all melt at different temperatures so it has to be sorted into each kind. The manufacturers are no help. They combine several different types of plastic into one product. Example 2 liter pop bottler. Bottle, top, label are all different types of plastic. Hope it works for you. We found no money to be made in recycling.

  2. I hope this endeavor is a success. My husband and I attempted this twenty-plus years ago in our neighborhood. Us and the HOA community gave it all up. Let the county dump sites fill up. People were so lazy they put construction and house trash in the recycling dumpsters. Even though the household dumpsters were nearby. If the dump sites are out of your backyard and not an old smelly nuisance, people don’t care.

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