Garbage trucks and semis roll in and out of Leveda Brown Environmental Park, each carrying up to 22 tons of garbage. Most of that waste didn’t have to be there.
A tour of the Leveda Brown Transfer Station was one of the events scheduled during Zero Waste Gainesville’s 7th annual Zero Waste Week, which runs through April 4. It’s designed to show residents where their waste actually ends up and how to reduce it.
The answer, according to staff at the facility, is simpler than most residents think.
The facility processes 600 to 800 tons of waste on a regular day, and up to 1,000 tons after Florida Gators football game days. All of it is trucked 35 miles north to New River Landfill in Union County, the result of a community protest decades ago against a fifth local landfill. That site, in a forest near Windsor, still sits permitted and ready. For now, it stays empty.
Not everything makes it to New River. Scrap metal travels down the street to Trademark Metals, yard debris is converted to free mulch on site, and Alachua County remains one of the few recyclers of glass in Florida.
Contamination is the facility's biggest obstacle. Sifting through the piles is a necessary but tedious task to save the materials, with items such as lids in the glass pile, non-recyclable black plastic and recyclables that aren’t separated to begin with.
That’s exactly what Zero Waste Gainesville wants people to recognize. The organization is pushing the city toward a zero-waste goal by 2040, and the tour is its argument that awareness is half of the battle.
Waste alternatives specialist Shelley Samec put it plainly: “We get a lot of people that are just like, ‘Oh, it gets thrown away.’ It doesn’t get thrown away.”
Her advice for residents? “Just follow the instructions. It’s that simple.”
The facility also runs one of the only household hazardous waste centers in north central Florida, accepting everything from lithium batteries to paint and cooking oil. In fiscal year 2025 alone, the center processed more than 1.1 million pounds of hazardous materials. That includes nearly 279,000 pounds of electronics, 38,636 gallons of motor oil, and 14,775 gallons of latex paint.
Paint is the most common liquid item they receive, a reflection of Gainesville’s transient college population. Students leave at the end of every semester and dump what they can’t take. The usable paint gets put out free for anyone to pick up. Local artists behind some of Gainesville’s downtown murals have taken supplies there, turning one community’s waste into another’s raw material.
Lithium batteries, which are capable of burning at 3,000 degrees if punctured and are found in laptops, smartphones, and some toys, are among the most dangerous items the waste center handles. Collected cooking oil gets converted into biodiesel, which is blended with diesel fuel to power county trucks. Around 440 gallons get recycled per month in a closed circuit that never touches a landfill.
The tour is one of 11 events this week organized by Zero Waste Gainesville, Life Unplastic and The Repurpose Project in collaboration with the City of Gainesville and Alachua County. From clothing swaps to composting orientations, each event circles the same problem from a different angle.
The facility accepts hazardous waste, recycling, and household garbage drop-offs year-round, Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 7 a.m. to noon.
Tours can be arranged by calling the Leveda Brown Transfer Station. The recycling guidelines, Samec noted, haven’t changed much in a decade. The advice is simple: Just follow the instructions.