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Nearly two years after taking over sanitation services in rural Troup County, Martin Environmental discussed what things are going well – and what isn’t – with the Board of Commissioners.

Brandon Hurst, President/CEO of Martin Environmental, gave a presentation to the board on how garbage pickup and the convenience centers are going now that they have had time to iron out some kinks and get residents acclimated to the new normal.

Hurst said before starting in July 2023, they didn’t know how many customers they would get when they took over sanitation from the county. He said they onboarded for 90 days, with about 3200 residents signing up. By the time the first pickups rolled around, another 2600 people had signed up. By August 2023, they were at 6600 total customers.

As of January 2025, Martin Sanitation has about 8400 customers in Troup County.

Hurst said he designed the routes so that the back-door service route would run the day after the main route, so if someone is missed, the smaller back-door truck can get them the following day.

“If you were to forget to put out your can, or if we make a mistake, which absolutely happens, we can come back and get it,” Hurst said.

Martin is keeping track of missed trash pickup calls, saying they have had at least 185 missed trash pickups.

“There were 185 missed reports. That doesn’t mean that’s all that there is. A lot of people don’t necessarily fill up their trash can, so a lot of them don’t always call,” Hurst said. “We know that mistakes will happen. Our goal is that when a mistake does happen, that it’s fixed within 24 hours.”

Hurst said that for those who called, 172 of those misses were resolved within 24 hours, and all were resolved within 48 hours. 

“This does not include when we had snow days. We were delayed about a day and a half. The roads were shut down. You just couldn’t be on the road, or it was on holidays,” Hurst said.

Hurst said the number fluctuates, but around eight percent of their pickup customers receive backdoor service, and the vast majority of them don’t pay extra for it.

“[The number] gets up to around 700 sometimes and never really falls below 650, but backdoor service, that is a service that’s free if you are disabled and have no one else able-bodied in the household. You can get it with a doctor’s note at no additional charge from your regular fee,” Hurst said.

Out of their current 694 backdoor customers, only 77 pay for that service, which is also an option for those who are able-bodied but just don’t want to take it to the curb.

Hurst said that because of Troup County’s size and backdoor customers being spread out, a single route can take eight or nine hours..

“This is a challenge sometimes, just to be upfront, if something were to happen with a driver or with a truck, it just takes longer to cover the ground, to make it up,” Hurst said.

Hurst said continuous onboarding and offboarding are also a challenge.

“We repossess about 300 to 400 carts each quarter. That’s really a challenge, the continuous on and off boarding of routes and making sure that you’re balancing [routes],” Hurst said.

Hurst said that even though they have gone through a huge inflationary period, they haven’t increased their prices from the original agreement.

“None of these prices have changed. We have been committed to and always have in pretty much every contract that we have to try to hold our pricing for three to five years. We went through, obviously, a large inflationary period, and we still feel comfortable with our ability to be profitable and make adjustments operationally to do that,” Hurst said.

One thing Martin has added for customers who create very little trash is a punch card option. The option allows customers to drop off 10 bags of trash for $25.

“We have several people who buy those cards and that lasts them a few months, and so they’re paying $25, but it’s lasting them, sometimes three or four months,” Hurst said. “I was pretty proud of that, because we all know people that their income is limited.”

Hurst said they have had trucks and compactors go down, but for the most part, they have adjusted.

“The big thing that I’m proud of is that we have missed no days or hours of service [at the convenience centers],” Hurst said.

“We have had no recordable injuries at the sites. To our knowledge, there have been no customers who have been injured. We allow civic clubs and volunteers to dump for free. There are several people who pick up trash on the side of the road. If they let us know that’s what they’re doing, we’ll let them dump free,” Hurst said.

Hurst said they haul approximately 100 loads to the dump in a month, amounting to about 260 to 320 tons a month from the four sites. That doesn’t include metal or cardboard recycling, which is diverted to New Ventures for them to bail and sell.

Hust said another challenge is that when the sites are less full, their workers let people dump extra trash, but when they are full, people get upset when they aren’t allowed.

“People get upset and say that we always let them dump extra trash,” Hurst said. “The guys out there, they’re members of the community, just like everybody else. They have aunts, uncles, and grandmothers who live here. They want to serve the community. They don’t want anybody mad at them, and so they try to do that. And then sometimes that kind of bites us a little bit.”