Unique recycling center hosts Kids Day this weekend

DECATUR, Ga. - What do you do when you can’t find the kind of place you need? If you’re Peggy Whitlow Ratcliffe, you create it yourself.

"My parents passed away, and I needed a place to get rid of — or properly dispose of — all the materials they had in their home," she says. "From pesticides, herbicides ... to all of the clothing, old plastics. I needed a place to drop all of that off."

And that’s how Ratcliffe came to create nonprofit organization Live Thrive and its Center for Hard to Recycle Materials, otherwise known as CHaRM. The drop-off facility (located at 1110 Hill Street in Atlanta) accepts a long list of items — including Styrofoam, books, paint, chemicals, and more — which generally end up in landfills. CHaRM workers say more than 90% of items brought to their facility will be recycled, repurposed, or re-engineered; last year, they took in more than 5.7 million pounds of materials, including more than 250,000 pounds of Styrofoam and 4,000 mattresses.

In honor of Earth Day, Live Thrive and CHaRM will host a special Kids Day on Saturday at the site of its upcoming DeKalb County location. From 9 a.m. to noon, children and families can stop by the site (located at 1225 Columbia Drive in Decatur) to learn more about the importance of recycling through hands-on activities and on-site vendors. Leading up to tomorrow’s event, local students in metro Atlanta have been collecting plastic bottles as part of a Plastic Bottle Collection Contest, and winners of the contest will receive prizes during Kids Day.

For more information on CHaRM and to see a full list of the items accepted by the facility, click here.