Potomac Edison, FirstEnergy Corp’s subsidiary, has reportedly unveiled a utility pole recycling program in its West Virginia and Maryland service territory.
This launch comes as a part of the firmwide sustainability initiative of FirstEnergy to repurpose and recycle utility poles. The company will stock utility poles that will be redistributed to mills, charitable organizations, farmers as well as employees for direct reuse. Other uses for poles generally comprise fencing, guide rail posts, parking bollards, treated wood or landscaping construction.
According to President of FirstEnergy's Maryland operations, Linda Moss, the company is dedicated to curbing waste and enhancing its recycling efforts. The program is an opportunity for FirstEnergy to integrate an environmentally friendly practice and find new applications for used utility poles.
If a utility pole is no longer useful, Potomac will take away any utility hardware from the pole and keep it at one of the company’s participating service centers. Every pole, which weighs nearly 50 pounds per cubic foot, must be around eight feet in length to be eligible for the reuse program.
When a Potomac Edison service center collects a complete load of nearly 30 poles, the company will collaborate with Blackwood Solutions, a materials and transportation management company, to collect them and distribute them for reuse.
The poles will be delivered for free to willful parties who are interested to accept a complete load, are situated within a certain distance from the collection facilities and can be accessed by a tractor-trailer.
Previously, the discarded poles of Potomac Edison were cut into smaller pieces and stocked on the facility until a waste management firm took them to a landfill for disposing them. The program is expected to significantly curb the waste stream of Potomac Edison over time, as most of the poles weigh around 300 to 4,100 pounds.
The pole recycling program was first initiated in 2020 at Ohio Edison, the electric subsidiary of FirstEnergy in Ohio.
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