Sometimes It Only Takes One Person

Sometimes, it only takes one person. One person with an idea and the tools and capability to implement that idea, if only there is support.

Sometimes, it only takes one person. One person who recognizes a new idea has merit and offers support to provide the infrastructure to get the program from concept to implementation.

When I took my youngest on a college road trip in his high school years, we headed to Burlington, Vermont to check out the state university there. UVM overlooks Lake Champlain above the downtown streets, with the Adirondacks to the west and the Green and White Mountains to the east. It is a beautiful location and one where thinking…and acting…green is highly respected. 

It was the first place we saw three hole trash sorting stations not only in campus buildings but even on the lawn in the tent that was used to host parents and families.  It was the first place I visited that had banned the single use plastic water bottle and offered fill up stations designed for reusable containers.  It was the first place I visited that had electric charge stations for cars in the parking lots.

It was the first place I heard of a program to collect kitchen scraps, gathered daily by students riding bicycles and pulling a small cart.  It turns out I heard wrong. 

I was amazed that students were willing to ride down to Burlington’s main street (Church Street) and gather compostibles and then bike uphill in all kinds of weather to bring the stuff to campus.  Turns out that was not the project.

The State of Vermont has mandated composting, recycling and other sustainable practices for all towns and cities. The local solid waste provider takes care of the compostibles from the Church Street restaurants as part of the normal trash service.  Same thing for the dining halls and other eateries on campus.

So what was this bicycle program?  It was the brainchild of an avid bike rider who was a student. He saw there were other places in the campus system that were not being serviced and designed a cart, pulled by his bicycle, that could facilitate access to offices and other administrative locations. Collected once or more each week, compostibles from those staff lunchrooms made their way to a larger compost collection point at the campus facilities management center.

The program ran only a few years during the time that student and a few of his friends kept it active. In the past few years those places that still want to participate are given collection bags and requested to take them to other collection points on campus. Easy for some located near dining halls. More dedication is needed for people in places further from those kind of sites. And you know what? There typically is someone who is willing to carry it home/to another location.  But even better, the campus waste management program is going to institute a collection system again.

Sometimes all it takes is one person who understands that we are a tiny part of a huge ecosystem which we can easily ruin or heal our environment.

When systems are easy, like having a mingled collection barrel for recyclables as we do here in McMinnville’s curbside trash pick-up service, more people tend to participate. When a system that actually works more efficiently  is implemented, it requires people to sort into separate bins, and participation drops as many people just do not buy into the need to take the extra moment.  We need to encourage change for that issue.

McMinnville, as well as other municipalities throughout the Pacific Northwest, now has a new problem to overcome. China had been a reliable purchaser of our unsorted recyclables, but they are reducing what they will take because much of our collection is tainted.  As easy as it is, people are not sorting correctly, throwing food waste into the bin that collects paper, for example. It should not be that hard to be compliant.  Any suggestions on how to persuade people to participate fully will be welcome!

However, we understand it IS a bit more confusing than it first seems. To be told many plastics are recyclable, even to see a recycle symbol on something selected in the hope of being sustainable, gets frustrated because our waste service, Recology, can not handle all kinds of plastics.  So we still have a way to go to get the best system in place.

We are getting to a point where we probably will need to increase our personal trash collection fee in order for Recology to set up a sort system in house.

OR, instead, we can individually  opt to not buy products with packaging that causes problems like this. Believe it or not, there are laws in many nations that the manufacturer of an item must have a system in place to collect back packaging that is not workable in the locality. In other words, if applied here, each time you receive a package with styrofoam, you would also receive a way to send back that plastic.  By putting the responsibility on the manufacturer,  alternative packaging ideas that are sustainable will be developed.

For example, back in the 1980s I purchased items from a company that marketed water filters, air filters, nutritional supplements and nontoxic effective cleaning supplies. Ordered items arrived in recyclable cardboard with puffed rice packing peanuts. They were actually edible (not tasty, though). I understand the environmentally minded cosmetics and personal products company Lush uses these for packing.

It really is up to each one of us. Each one of us, in the interest of living on a planet that can be healthy, needs to opt for the healthier choice. 

Reducing use of nonsustainable materials is the FIRST step, not recycling. Recycling is the lazy way….and not particularly as effective as we hope. But learn what you can do and we’ll get further along the way to becoming Zero Waste.

So it only takes one person…..YOU.

What’s YOUR Legacy?

In 1989 Carol King released a new album, City Streets. Included in that album is a song, Legacy, which is worth your listen for the few minutes it takes. Until I heard that song the word “legacy” generally meant financial assets to pass on to others, and since I had not nor expected to accumulate anything much in that category, I never thought that much about it. However, the song raises the issue very clearly that we pass on much more to our children and people we love than just money. We pass on values we hold dearly. And we do that by acting while we are alive.

There are so many issues that call for my attention and, of course, it is impossible to be involved in all.  Many of my interests relate to how I can help provide a positive influence on issues that affect health. I chose to work on food issues and it was through working with the local food system that I became involved with Zero Waste McMinnville.

Each of us has our concerns, our loves.  The first Earth Day event back in 1970 was our teenage/young adult angst at our parents’ generation destroying the physical environment. We fought for reducing toxic emissions into the air, into the water, into the soil. We are still fighting these issues and probably will continue to be a voice calling for remembering we are passing our environment on to our children and grandchildren. We should not think only about what we can “get” from the earth.  That legacy should not only be about the money we can make but a balance between “enough” and the needs of future generations to live in a healthy environment.

Zero Waste McMinnville started with a very small dedicated group of people who saw that we CAN have a positive impact on our local physical environment that will have a ripple effect around us and even into the Pacific Ocean basin. Setting a ten-year period, efforts were undertaken to achieve a mission to reduce the amount of trash going to the landfill to under 10% of the total discards from area households, businesses, and industries.   Successful diversion happens when people understand that much of what we have been dumping into our “trash” can either be recycled or composted. It requires a massive educational process, overcoming reluctance to change old habits.  We are not quite halfway to our 2024 goal but here are some of the projects and activities the group has achieved:

• Diversion of waste at Zero Waste events in McMinnville, including the seasonal downtown farmers’ market, TurkeyRama, the UFO Celebration, 4^th of July fireworks, the IPNC annual event held at Linfield, and more has been increasingly successful as vendors serving food learn to offer items made of compostable or recyclable materials and people attending the events are willing to learn the new habit of sorting their garbage into three categories.
• Adoption by the City of McMinnville (joining several other cities in Oregon) of an ordinance to eliminate the distribution of single-use plastic bags at large stores on September 1, 2017, encouraging shoppers to carry in reusable bags for their purchases.
• Introduction of a system to collect kitchen waste from 3^rd Street restaurants to turn it into compost. (Recology offers a curbside pick-up from homes and businesses for yard waste and pre-cooked kitchen vegetable and fruit scraps and also sells compost and other garden products from the items collected.)

Other projects that need to be started to address other waste issues in town include:

• Collection of Styrofoam. As we enter the holiday shopping period you will notice how many packages, particularly those with electronics or fragile components, are packaged with Styrofoam. As much as we receive in our households, several businesses in town are major users,  forced to send their huge amounts of trash Styrofoam to the landfill. Since it is made of plastics, it will essentially never decay. Zero Waste McMinnville has been establishing relationships with some recyclers in the region and hope to have collection points in place for drop off. Stay tuned.
• Construction debris which includes wood, metal and more also presents problems to solve in terms of collection and then reuse or modification into another product. Stay tuned.
• On a more personal scale, most of us know the frustration of some appliance or other item in our home failing. Perhaps it might be a zipper broken on a pair of jeans, an air mattress that has developed a leak, or a small appliance that no longer runs. We’re hoping to host Fix-It clinics where repairs can be made for a small fee, permitting continued use of the item instead of sending it to the landfill and then the need for a higher expense to replace the item. Stay tuned.
• Similarly, many of us have items in our homes that are just no longer being used. Reducing clutter helps improve the home living environment. We’re considering hosting a Flea Market so sales or exchanges can be made. My trash may indeed be your treasure. Stay tuned.

We need more people to get involved. Seriously. Although there is some strong recognition that this work is of high value, we have a core group of less than 25 active volunteers. Over 150 people are listed as wanting to get involved, but I suppose, like any other worthwhile activity, it really comes down to identifying the task that would be comfortable and of course the time factor. 

In the middle of November we are going to have our annual dinner where we present what projects have been successful and information about others that are coming up.  We have room for 70 people at this free dinner but it is also a fund raiser. Anything helps but we truly benefit by monthly recurring donations, even if they are not large. Our activities are basically self funded with some help from grants. 

If you would like to join us, if you care about helping clean up our own environment, please let me know. We’ll be happy to set a place for you at the table.