About NELArecycles

NELArecycles is a community rehabilitation program that was created to give people with disabilities or other barriers to employment the skills, resources, and opportunities necessary for full participation in the workforce through supported work in trash collection and recycling.
Our EIN is 87-1670933 and the official IRS determination letter can be viewed at: https://apps.irs.gov/app/eos/

A dirty community is a deteriorating community

If a glass window of a building is broken and no one repairs it, soon all other windows of the building will be broken as well.
If a part of the community begins to deteriorate and its citizens don't seem to care, soon the entire community will follow.
This is well documented as the "broken windows effect." It starts with a few bags of trash next to the dump, or litter on the road, then, with that social proof, others begin to litter as well.
Roadsides and dumpsites soon become covered in trash as more and more people think, “my little bit of litter in all this trash doesn’t matter.”
We can't restore North East Louisiana without picking up the trash first.

You create 4lbs of trash every day

North East Louisiana has roughly 110,000 people whose only means of trash disposal is one of nearly 400 rural dumpsters.
At 4lbs a day, a little over 2,000 rural dumpsters would be needed to adequately service a community of this size. There is no way we'll ever clean up North East Louisiana without recycling.

49-62% of all our trash ends up as litter

Around half of all the trash generated in North East Louisiana doesn’t make it to the landfill and ends up as litter or illegally dumped. Now that many Parish dumpsites are being closed, that's only going to get worse. We can't pick our way out of the litter problem. We need modern dumpsites.

45% of everything you throw away is recycleable

Every day in our community over 200,000 lbs of good reusable commodities are buried in a landfill. That's millions of dollars lost to the local economy; literally thrown away every day. Money we could use to provide better dump sites, fix the roads, and bring more jobs to Northeast Louisiana.
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Our plan

Step1: Create supported work environments that enable anyone to help pick up the trash and participate in restoring our home.

Step 2: Place more dumpsters in high traffic areas to reduce the burden on existing resources and enable recycling

Step 3: Sell the recycled products to offset costs and make sure donated money gets used for its intended purpose