Slabtown Convenience Center now officially open

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By Stan Welch

The northern end of Anderson County now has a new, modern, and spacious convenience center. The cramped, dangerous facility on Three and Twenty Road is no longer in use. The new Slabtown facility opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony last Thursday. Located on Pickens Road, which runs off of Highway 88 alongside the Slabtown convenience store, the new facility accepts a wide array of recyclables, as well as several automotive waste products, like antifreeze, that many other facilities do not accept.

 Car batteries, cooking oil, used motor oil and oil filters, heavy cardboard, as well as lighter materials such as shoe boxes and cereal boxes can be separated for disposal.

Pictured – Anderson County Council Vice Chairman and District 6 representative Ken Waters (with scissors) joined other county officials for a ribbon cutting celebrating the official opening of the new Slabtown Convenience Ceter on Pickens Rd. just off Hwy. 88.

Despite, or perhaps because of, an extended weather delay in construction, people were using the facility even as County Council Vice Chairman Ken Waters thanked a number of county employees for their help in making the facility a reality. Waters said the new site has been seventeen years in the making. “This is a facility worthy of the people in this part of the county. It is safe, and while I am proud to say that individuals can dispose of one private truck or trailer load of yard debris, or construction and demolition debris, there will be no commercial use of the site. “

The one truck/ one trailer exemption allows private citizens to avoid having to haul yard debris all the way to the Starr C&D landfill. County solid waste director Greg Smith pointed out that the facility is the largest one in the county, which he called appropriate in light of the growth in the area. “The site is user friendly and safe, with traffic flow patterns that simply weren’t possible at the other cramped site. “

Despite the dangerous location and the cramped quarters, the old site still served an average of eighteen hundred customers a week. Smith said he expects that number to increase, especially once word gets out about how spacious the new site is. The new site comprises seventeen acres.

The hours of operation are eight in the morning until seven in the evening, every day but Wednesday and Sundays.