Are truck driver shortages and recycling collection delays over in Burlington County?
Curbside recycling collection throughout Burlington County is back to the regular biweekly schedule this week after weeks of delays, according to the recycling contractor. The nonprofit Occupational Training Center (OTC) in Westampton, the longtime recycling contractor for Burlington County government, plans to pick up trash from all 40 municipalities every other week on the normal rotating schedule by municipality. The county RecycleCoach hotline at 609-267-6889 also is telling callers collections are "now back to normal." James McGurl, OTC recycling collections coordinator and county officials said the delays were caused by a national and local truck driver shortage. OTC has hired three new drivers and is using enough temporary drivers from other agencies to start collecting again every two weeks in each town until it can hire more drivers of its own. McGurl said this means the next collection for Willingboro, which had a recycling pickup last Thursday, will be two weeks later on July 22 while pick-up in the countys most populated municipality, Evesham, will be collected on its normal day this Friday. He discounted any prior reports that future Willingboro collections were being delayed until August. Local: Mount Laurel police chief defends officers' handling of bias reports  We have some new drivers in the process right now of qualifying and others in the training process, so I think by the end of this month or certainly by August we should be back to our normal complement of 17 drivers," he said. In the meantime, OTC is using borrowed drivers from the county bridge commission and other truck drivers from a temporary agency while county highway truck drivers picked up any slack on the weekend, according to the collections manager. Additionally, McGurl said there is a new hiring incentive for truck drivers: The salary has been raised to $21 an hour as a result of an union contract adjustment with OTC. Meanwhile, all recyclers of cans, glass bottles, plastic, paper and cardboard are accepting all material without issues and are even handling a huge increase in the volume of cardboard resulting from online sales and deliveries since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic last year. To check a the collection schedule by municipality visit www.burlcorecycles.com  Carol Comegno loves telling stories about South Jersey life, history and military veterans for the Courier Post, Burlington County Times and The Daily Journal. If you have a story to share, call her at 856-486-2473 or email ccomegno@gannettnj.com. Support local journalism with a subscription.