KAT Recycles

In the early days of our small business, (2018-2021) we met guests at our launch but we would arrive early and stay late to clean up the area!

In 2022 new outfitter regulations meant no one could meet us at the launch and we had to transport our guests from our parking lot for our trips. Our groups stepped up every single trip, all season long by participating in our KAT Challenge competing on our trips for who collects the most trash every trip! The whole area was insanely clean all season thanks to our groups!

Wanting to keep a focus on trash cleanup in the offseason and encourage all the winter hikers to Leave No Trace, we launched the KAT Trash Challenge that anyone could participate in! 

While we were encouraging everyone to participate in our KAT Trash Challenge in their own state, we made our own personal challenge for ourselves. The lake we operate on is 64 miles long and has over 400 miles of shoreline. Our goal is to clean every boat dock/marina at least once before the new 2023 season starts. We are 18 cleanups in as of January!

On our cleanups, we are realizing that we are throwing away a ton of plastic and cans! After brainstorming together, starting to recycle at least the cans and bottles was the only choice to make. So we expanded our trash cleanups by taking out all of the cans/bottles from the trash. We are even grabbing all the trash after local sporting games to fish out the bottles/cans. We acquired 4 metal bins to store them all at our house!

**Update! We got it thanks to your generous donations!**We found the perfect size plastic baler for our home that runs off of a compressor. We talked to the company on the phone and it meets all of our needs. We found a used one and just need help raising the funds for it and all that it will take to get it up and running! We are excited to take a step further in protecting the beauty of Tennessee and we thank you for considering helping us in reaching this goal! We will document our journey on here along the way for all to enjoy and participate in!

Thanks to your generous donations we were able to go and pick up the baler and it's now at our house. We did a practice bale last week and realized we need it to crush a little harder. We called on our Friends at Bella Welding to create something that will help. Until then we will continue to collect plastic from our lake, roadsides, communities and storing until the baler is fully ready! 

We were contacted by our local general store and coffee shop: Button Willow in Smithville, TN that they are going through a lot of milk jugs! They let us put out a trash can by their store to collect those every day! That keeps 15+ milk jugs out of our dumps every single day! Thank y'all for helping us make a difference! We've also reached out to some coffee shops in nearby Cookeville as well! 

We've got our backyard set up to meet our goals and have filled our bins to the brim! We are excited to go on this recycling journey and we are so thankful for all of your support! More updates coming soon!

We are making bale after bale and are excited to start making a big change in Tennessee. Here's to many more road/lake cleanups, community cleanups and baling our nights away! Heres our first bales of plastic bottles, cans and milk jugs!

We finally found a recycling center that actually recycles their plastic instead of sending it to the dump! So on June 15, 2023 we hauled over 1100 pounds of plastic collected from friends, shop owners, roadsides in our communities and our waterways to Cumberland County Recycling Center in Crossville, TN. We got a tour of the facility and were able to unload all of the plastic into the bins ourselves! Here's to many more trips to protect our communities and waterways from plastic pollution!

What a day! (November 7th 2023) We were able to take another 420 pounds of recycling to Cumberland County Recycling! Thanks to friends and Button Willow General Store & Coffee Shop (Smithville TN) for letting us collect all of their plastic so it goes to the recycling center instead of the dump!