Recycling Rewards

Twice now,  I've braved a cold Montana Saturday morning to meet with fellow volunteers to work for the non-profit Ravalli County Recycling (http://www.ravallirecycling.org/). We get dirty, we get chilled, we get hungry (for lunch), we have a blast. I plan to do it again and again.

A little fellow is as fascinated by the new cardboard-compacting truck as are us volunteers.

This mostly-volunteer recycling effort is just about two years old.  It took a number of progressive folks with foresight -- and with very little help from local conservative county officials -- to see that this part of the Bitterroot Valley was sending tons of recyclable items into landfills each week. A first location at the County Fairgrounds was tried but proved unworkable. A second and current location is just across the street from the fairgrounds, next to Habitat for Humanity. It is going gangbusters! 

Steel cans inside one of many recycling sacks.

The sacks are huge, old grain storage bags. Above each sack dangles a necklace of examples for what's proper to toss in.

Meanwhile, county government had for months stalled on releasing funds from a federal grant to purchase the truck for much-needed compaction of corrugated cardboard. In the end (almost exactly a year ago -- March 20, 2012), the new site got a beautifully renovated garbage truck (http://www.ravallirepublic.com/news/local/article_c5e99808-7282-11e1-a43c-001871e3ce6c.html).

This truck makes for more effective transport of cardboard, something that should help insure the sustainability of this public recycling service.

I can tell you that excitement was palpable last summer as we drove into the new site for the first time and unloaded all of our collapsed moving boxes. Volunteers greeted us with the warmest of smiles, grabbed our trove of cardboard and flung it into the waiting vehicle. They still do.  Random acts of kindness also are frequent. Last Saturday, for instance, a guy in a pickup truck full of cardboard took on a smaller load from the car behind him to lessen the wait in line. A volunteer -- finding glass bottles in the back of another truck -- offered to take them 40 miles to Missoula with her on a planned trip (most glass isn't accepted by this and other Montana recyclers; the Target store in Missoula does,  hauling it off to Washington state for recycling). And yet another volunteer dove deep into a Habitat customer's trash can for stinky milk containers with lids long left on! She had to unscrew each lid, throw it away and toss the offending container into a bin.  No lids are accepted!! They are not recyclable and, if left on bottles, they may endanger the recyclability of an entire load!

Take all lids off of bottles and containers before recycling!!

When folks bring aluminum cans -- whether in small garbage bags or crammed into the backs of pickups -- a bank of solar panels atop the "office" (a recycled school bus) kicks in to weigh each load on a solar-powered scale. There's more than a little Rube Goldberg ingenuity at work here.

The recycling office/storage unit/solar-panel support at RCR.

Donated aluminum cans are pulled aside to weigh and help pay for operation of this valuable site.

Huge, old grain sacks are recycled items, themselves.

Even egg cartons get a special kind of recycling: They're saved for a recycling friend's chicken farm. Nothing, it seems, goes to waste now in Ravalli County.

Egg cartons get pulled out of the waste stream for a chicken-tending friend of RCR.

Oops, I buried my lede (lead paragraph, in newspaper terms).

There is news out of the recycling effort:
 -- Effective April 1, curbside pick-up of recycled items gets underway, for a fee. For example, curbside fees in Hamilton, Corvallis and Victor are $15 monthly; $28 bi-weekly; $52 weekly. Call (406) 375-5398 for news about Darby, Florence and Stevensville pick-ups, for route schedules or any other information.
-- One very specific type of glass is about to be accepted -- Bayern brewery's beer bottles (9 inch brown bottles with smooth re-capable tops). Bayern has begun a bottle re-use program. Same is true for its cardboard six-pack holders.
-- Also April 1, summer hours get started. That's Monday's from 3 to 6 p.m. and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to noon, Old Corvallis Road across from the Fairgrounds.
-- Interested in volunteering? Call (406) 961-4959 to sign up!! I can't think of a better way to spend a Montana morning or afternoon.