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Thursday, December 20, 2007 |
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Going Green: Bigfork makes a push to recycle Posted: Thursday, Dec 20, 2007 - 10:01:35 am PST By ALEX STRICKLAND Bigfork Eagle
Marissa Keenan remembers when she was a little kid and littering was a big deal. "It was a big thing growing up," she said. "We think everyone knows not to litter, but do we?"Keenan felt a need to raise the seemingly easy question after her car got hit by a carelessly tossed yogurt cup. The answer isn't a simple one. We mostly know, it seems, not to throw trash on the street, but we're all too willing to toss reusable material into trash cans and the landfill. Keenan has been leading a push in Bigfork to encourage business owners to recycle -- especially cardboard -- to take pressure off landfills and their pocketbooks. "It's something businesses can afford and they can split it with neighbors," she said. David May, who runs the Bigfork Inn, said recycling doesn't save him any money, but it doesn't cost any either. The four-yard bin behind his restaurant is used by Showthyme, the Jug Tree and the Garden Bar and he said those four businesses can fill the container in a week. "About 50 percent of our trash is cardboard," he said. "Now instead of two dumpsters a week I just fill one." Keenan and May acknowledged that a big barrier to getting more bins downtown is the unsightly nature of anything that collects refuse, but May pointed out that the attitudes around trash and recyclables are completely different. "The stigma is different," he said. "People say, 'Eww, it's garbage,' or 'Oh, here's some recycling.'" Keenan said she hopes more businesses downtown will hop on board and that cardboard waste, which is so prevalent in the packing and delivery of goods at almost any commercial enterprise, can be funneled to recycling centers. Green box sites About 120 times each year the recycling bin at the Highway 83 green box site near Bigfork is emptied out and brought to Valley Recycling in Kalispell. Those 120 trips keep more than 250,000 pounds of cardboard, plastic, paper and metal out of the landfill and give all that material another go-round, according to Valley Recycling Manager Bob Morrow. "It fluctuates up and down, but we hauled 10 times in November," he said. Valley Recycling has eight drop-off locations around the Flathead, including ones in Creston, Lakeside and the Bigfork location. The company recycled about 7.5 million pounds of items in 2006. That compressed material was enough to fill an entire football field up to the top of its goalposts. Morrow said the recycling business is getting bigger each year as more people move into the valley and more people become conscious of saving some waste from the landfill. "We're making a push to add more materials in the valley," he said. "We're trying to make it easier for the customers." Morrow said that Valley Recycling is in a trial period to explore adding new types of plastic to its list. Currently only numbers one and two plastics are accepted. Having bins placed at some of the county's dump sites have made for increased participation, Morrow said, but curbside recycling could be on the way in the next few years, though probably only in Kalispell at first. "I can see it happening in the future," Morrow said. "Mostly because of how much we're doing here and how much we're putting the landfill." Where it goes Once Valley Recycling takes in all the cardboard, plastic and paper products, the road to being reused is still a long one. Morrow said that everything Valley Recycling takes in has to leave the valley to get processed, with cardboard traveling all the way to Seattle or Portland. Morrow said most newspaper and magazine-type paper products go to Spokane, Wash., shredded and office paper to Yakima, and plastics to a center in Spokane where they are sorted again and sent off to different processing plants in the region. All that trucking makes profit margins thin, Morrow said, especially in a time of escalating fuel prices. "It's very expensive to ship it out," he said. But keeping it in the valley isn't appealing either, since the factories needed to process the material are large, massively expensive operations that the relatively modest volumes in the Flathead could never support. Besides that, Morrow said, "when you say 'factory' people freak out." The push for glass In the recycling business, glass recycling is often talked about with the same sort of awe and reverie usually reserved for holy relics. Because of this, communities that can take bottles and other glass items are in short supply. Bigfork resident Catherine Haug is trying to change that after moving back to her hometown after years spent away. "I was very disappointed here to see what I can't recycle," she said. So when Haug heard that Kalispell's New World Recycling was allowing people to bring glass to their facility a few days a month for a small fee, she figured she had better get started. Haug, along with five of her neighbors, started pooling their glass waste to haul to Kalispell on the first and third Sundays of each month. A 32 gallon bucket -- the size of a standard trash can -- costs $10 to recycle to help offset the cost of trucking the material out of the Flathead, she said. "It takes us two or three months to accumulate enough to make it worthwhile," she said of her group. "I'd like to see different neighborhoods around Bigfork doing the same thing." The big change, however, would be if glass recycling could become economical for bars and restaurants and the piles of beer and wine bottles they go through. "I'd like to see us put containers on the sidewalk during the summer so people could put glass in them," she said. Of course, then someone must empty them and haul the loads to Kalispell, something Haug recognized there's neither money nor will to do at the moment. Moving forward Keenan figures that plenty of people in town are thinking about recycling -- she and Bob Young from Echo Lake Cafe were working on parallel ideas unbeknownst to the other for weeks -- but they need someone to spearhead the effort. Keenan figures she's just the woman for the job. "It's not just cardboard," she said. "This is a stepping stone. "I keep hearing about people who are interested and I have the energy and the time to help keep Bigfork green." Keenan is currently trying to get another multi-material bin at the Highway 83 site and trying to get more people interested in projects like the Lakeside-Somers schools' composting paper from classrooms. "I'd love to see us take that tone in this area," she said. And if it's not more expensive and it's better from the environment, Keenan and others think it should be a pretty easy sale. David May has bought in. "There's no reason not to recycle."
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