Reuse for Recycling Bins

Arcata Garbage Company has recently distributed brand new dual-stream recycling toters for curbside recycling collection to Arcata households. Until this time curbside customers have been using a hodgepodge of bins for containing their recyclables at the curb. It is anticipated that the distribution of new toters will leave behind a wake of now obsolete plastic totes and crates, many of which bear the Arcata Garbage Company logo.

Curbside recycling customers are encouraged to find a new use for their old plastic bins. However if unwanted, the Arcata Community Recycling Center’s (ACRC) 9th and N Street drop-off yard is poised to accept these bins for repurposing.

This winter the rollout of Arcata’s curbside recycling program will continue to include multifamily housing establishments. Space for recycling storage may be minimal in these residential arrangements. ACRC will make clean, repurposed recycling bins available to Arcata residents in such a situation free of charge at the Reusable’s Depot Thrift Store to help alleviate storage issues. Please call 445-4321 for more information about this reuse opportunity.

Minimize Holiday Waste

ACRC Education Specialist Patti Johnson tells us about the 5 Best Gifts You Can Ever Give

It’s December, which means sharing celebrations and gifts with friends and family. Unfortunately, it can also mean the generation of lots of trash. According the Environmental Protection Agency Americans throw away 25% more trash between Thanksgiving and New Years. This equates to about a million tons a week! Generating more trash translates into more natural resource consumption on a planet that is already over taxed; and more landfilled trash which means the creation of even more methane gas as organics slowly decompose underground. And what’s the problem with methane? It’s a greenhouse gas 20% more volatile than the other climate choking carbon gases. This is not exactly celebratory news. Nonetheless it is a fact. I’m not going to get all eco-humbuggy and tell you not to celebrate or give gifts. Instead I would like to invite you to green up your Holiday. The goal is to give gifts with the least amount of packaging or none at all and to make purchases that meet the 4R gift giving criteria: returnable, refillable, reusable and recyclable.

The Five Best Gifts You Can Ever Give:

1. Give an Experience
Sharing yourself with another human being is one of the best gifts you can ever give. It cost only your time and does not require any packaging! When my kids were young every year one of my girlfriends would give me a coupon for several nights of babysitting in exchange I would give her use of my washer and dryer on those nights. It seemed like such a small thing but it gave us both so much. Here are some more of my favorites:
• A massage
• Music lessons
• A themed hike (count banana slugs, look for salamanders, find the tallest tree)
• Host an evening fire at the beach
• Share a sport or hobby
• Pet sit or Dog walk
• Clean the house
• Prune trees or Roses
• Wash the car
The list is really endless!
Not sure you have time to share yourself; you can still give the gift of an experience. Numerous places offer certificates to purchase or you can create one with the tickets attached. Just be sure to ask the stores for a paper certificate, one that can be recycled once used. Those little gift cards available everywhere this time of year are really colorful & perky but can’t be recycled once used.
• Movie or concert tickets
• A round of bowling
• A pass to a state park
• A certificate for a massage or hot tubing


2. Give a Plant
Plants give us so much compared to the little care they require. Indoor plants help purify the air, and, of course, all plants absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Growing your own food, even the smallest amount, is one of the healthiest things you can do for yourself and the planet. The average American’s annual carbon footprint is around 20 tons. Each year we would each need to plant about 16 trees to offset this. So give a plant because every little thing we can do counts. Of course the size and type of plant will depend on the recipient. Keep in mind that native plants may also help our friends the bees, which ultimately is a gift to us all.
• Fruit Tree
• Seeds and Pots for a window garden
• Indoor air purifiers such as Philodendrons and Dracaenas
• Herbs
• Bird (and bee) friendly native plant such as a Ceanothus (Wild Lilac) or Epilobium (California Fuchsia)


3. Give a Donation
There a several ways to give a donation. You could give a monetary donation to a non-profit or charitable donation on behalf of the recipient. You could invite the recipient to join you in donating your time as a way to support an organization or project. Wrap presents together for Toys for Tots or take the kids to choose a child from their angel tree and together buy the gift donation. If you choose the later pick a quality long-lasting item that also meets the 4R gift giving criteria listed above.

4. Give Something Yummy to Eat
For most people receiving a little gift of food is a nice extra treat during the holidays as long as the food isn’t too excessively sweet, overly rich, or just plain weird! Reach into your own kitchen cupboard to create a small collection of homemade cookies, fresh baked bread, or the recipe and ingredients for a winter soup, though not extravagant, are all nice gifts. Package these food yummies in mason jars and you have met the reusable criteria of the 4R’s of gift giving.

5. Give a Gift that Keeps on Giving
There are lots of ECO gadgets, gizmos and what-cha-ma-call-it’s of all kinds out there for you to buy, but these items keep giving, by saving resources or reducing air pollution, every time they are used. Therefore, they are some of the best items you can purchase.
• A tire pressure gauge (Keeping up on tire pressure saves fuel and air pollution)
• A Refillable Water Bottle (According to research conducted by the Natural Resource Defense Council production of the plastic for the annual American consumption of disposable water bottles produces about 800,000 tons of global warming pollution per year (the amount produced by 8 power plants, or 140,000 cars).
• A Travel Mug or Reusable Coffee To-Go Cup (North Americans consumes 50 million trees a year for paper cups! Trees are elegant and amazing organisms that deserve better than to be pulped into coffee cups.)
• A Reusable Shopping Bag (There is an array of styles and designs to choose from, practical & pretty. But the bottom line is according to research conducted by the Washington Post the U.S. uses 100 billion plastic bags annually, made from an estimated 12 million barrels of oil. Ouch! That is a serious misuse of a very valuable non-renewable resource).

Now that you have the list, and you are conscious of the 4R’s of gift giving get out there and celebrate an excess free Holiday Season. Through a few thoughtful actions we can ease the environmental burden of our holiday consumption.
Greening up your holiday will make this season a merrier one for the environment and that is news always worth celebrating!

Recycling Update on the EcoNews Report

Did you catch last week's EcoNews Report on KHSU? I was joined in the studio by Mark Loughmiller, ACRC's Executive Director to talk about recent updates in recycling services. With Arcata and Eureka both rolling out their universal curbside recycling programs we had much to discuss -- Intersting stuff!

If you missed the show you can download the podcast. Scroll down the list of shows to "The EcoNews Report" and click on "Previous"". Enjoy!

Eureka Curbside Kicks Off

September was the first month of collection for the City of Eureka's new curbside recycling program. If you have driven the streets of Eureka lately you have surely seen the blue recycling carts poking out from behind a front hedge, stashed under a garage overhang, or lining the sidewalks on collection day. Assembling and distributing over 8000 of these carts was quite a task. Did you wonder what that late summer swath of bright blue was along the Eureka waterfront? Cart assembly!

Now that Eureka's curbside collection program has been operating for a solid month we can get an idea of how effective it is at diverting discarded material from disposal at the landfill, as this is the big goal after all. So, how's it going?

September Stats:
176.6 = Tons of Papers and Containers collected through Eureka Curbside
110.1 = Tons of Papers and Containers brought into the Eureka Recycling Center drop-off yard

The astounding thing is that these 176.6 tons collected through curbside represent mostly new tonnage, materials that were previously being landfilled. We know this to be true by comparing September's drop-off yard tonnage to preceding months -- this number does not drop-off as we would expect it to if the material was just shifting over to collection at the curb. Well done Eurekans!


The downside to this successful new approach to diversion is that the piles of materials collected through curbside contain many more hazardous items than those collected at the drop-off. The curbside recycling is sorted at ACRC's Samoa Processing Facility using a combination of machine and human power. That's right -- people are handling the recycling, therefore it is incredibly important to keep medical sharps (needles and syringes), bio-hazards, and chemicals out of the recycling stream as these pose a real hazard for processing staff. While ACRC takes every precaution to minimize employee exposure to hazardous items, it increases the inefficiency of a system that strives to be efficient when sorting machinery comes to a standstill each time an individual syringe, I.V. bag, CFL, or even TV shows up in the material. To find out the proper disposal option for materials not accepted though curbside recycling check out www.humboldtrecycling.org, our countywide recycling guide.

"I Love Trash" -- An Interview With the Filmmaker

Tune into The EcoNews Report on KHSU at 1:30 today to hear my interview with David Brown, filmmaker of the acclaimed documentary I Love Trash. The film documents a challenge David and a friend tackled: Subsist entirely from items they found in dumpsters for 90 days. This means all the food they ate, all of their clothing, entertainment, and utilitarian items (enough to completely furnish an empty apartment they rented for the occasion) came from other people's waste. David provides a fresh point of view on Trash Reallocation, otherwise known as Dumpster Diving.

If you miss the show and would still like to hear this interview, each edition of The EcoNews Report is archived for two weeks by KHSU. Download here.

Plastic Bags -- What's the Deal?

As many avid recyclers have keenly noticed, as of March 1st Arcata Community Recycling Center stopped accepting film plastic (plastic bags and wraps – the stretchy stuff) at both the Arcata and Eureka drop-off sites for recycling. You may be wondering what this is all about and what to do now with the bags of plastic bags you have saved up.

Film plastic recycling is a complicated issue. It's not that the material is not recyclable. Plastic bags are recycled into all sorts of durable goods including decking, parking curbs, shopping carts, and even new plastic bags. However, with the recent slump in the global economy has come a decrease in demand, and therefore value, of recovered materials. Less recycled plastic decking being made means less plastic bags are needed as feedstock. As a result manufactures can afford to be more particular about the quality of that feedstock. All of the commodity values for materials ACRC processes have dropped sharply since the summer of 2008 -- the value of film plastic has dropped to $0 per ton (actually to a value of negative $800/ton when shipping costs are factored in). But demand does remain for “high quality” materials – those with very little contamination (i.e. trash, non-recyclables) in the mix. ACRC’s film plastic was generally being recycled into decking where any darkly colored plastics are seen as less desirable contaminants.

Have you ever recycled a brown soil bag or black garbage bag at ACRC? I have.

Luckily California, being the progressive state that it is, recognizes that plastic bags pose a significant hazard to our environment when left unattended to blow “away” in a slight breeze as well as their utility as a recyclable material. AB 2449 (Levine) was passed in 2006 and creates a system for recycling plastic bags in the state. This piece of legislation, effective July 1, 2007, requires large grocery stores and pharmacies (over 10,000 sq. ft.) that distribute plastic carryout bags (and sell bagged or plastic stretch wrapped products) to have at-store plastic bag recycling programs. AB 2449 also requires these stores to make reusable bags available to customers for purchase in lieu of paper or plastic bags.

Since this system already exists for plastic bag recycling, ACRC made the economic choice to let stores handle the recycling of their bags and allocate shrinking funds towards the recycling of other valueless materials for which there is no other system. Mixed plastic containers are such an example. Yogurt cups, salsa tubs, to-go plastic clamshell containers, laundry soap scoops, and red plastic “keg” cups are all #1-#7 plastic containers which in today’s market have no value. Factories continue to accept this material from ACRC for recycling but are not paying for it.

Before ACRC ceased to accept plastic bags all of the major grocery and pharmacy retailers in the Humboldt Bay area were contacted to make sure they were informed about the plastic bag recycling regulations. Each store already had bins in place. Additionally, store managers assured ACRC staff that bins would be convenient and visible for customer use and that plastic bags from other retailers would also be accepted.

Of course it’s always best to answer the question “Paper or plastic?” with “Neither, thank you. I brought my own bag.”

Welcome Recyclers!

Since it's inception in 1971, the Arcata Community Recycling Center has relied on a community of dedicated recyclers to truly make recycling efforts a success. ACRC has been touted as the "oldest continually operational non-profit recycling center" in the country -- a lengthy title that our entire community can be proud of. It really does take all of our individual recycling efforts to add up to a big difference.

The purpose of this blog is to provide interested community members with additional recycling information -- to answer the questions that at some point surface in each conscientious recycler's brain. Topics will vary as questions arise and processes evolve, but will surely include information on best practices, recycling protocol, and the Who-What-When-Where-Why-How's of waste reduction for the North Coast. Writings will also be sprinkled with observations on life from the perspective of a compulsive recycler.

I welcome your recycling questions. Please comment or email allisonp@arcatarecycling.org.

Happy Recycling!