Writing Sample: Recycling's Rebirth

I wrote the following article for the newsletter of First Alternative, a grocery cooperative in Corvallis.

When I was little, we would drive 45 minutes to shop there. It had that health food store smell, bulk bins, and lots of idealistic propaganda strewn around. A vibrant quilted banner urging us to "Think Globally, Act Locally" hung on one wall. The panels were made by various individuals, and depicted fabric foodstuffs, or multicolored hands joining together, or ...toothbrushes.

In retrospect I realize how effectively I absorbed a progressive agenda by osmosis while my mother filled canning jars with soy sauce and ground peanut butter in the big machine.

Today I'm back in Corvallis, and volunteering on the recycling crew at First Alternative. This earns my household a 15% discount on groceries--which amounts to real money very quickly--in exchange for two hours of (wet, smelly) work per week.

The old "Think Globally, Act Locally" banner has been taken out of the store, and is hanging in the nearby "meeting room". This small cinderblock building in the parking lot was, back in the day, a scary, grimy bar sitting bizarrely on the edge of a hippie utopia. Now it's been absorbed into the co-op empire. And the banner is now severely faded, a relic of some other time. The colors have gone muddy, and only in my memory are they still bright and clear.

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Recycling’s Rebirth

Everything we throw “away” has to end up somewhere, and thanks to First Alternative’s recycling program, a substantial stream of waste is diverted from the landfill to see a new life. The recycling compound behind the South Store parking lot serves households all over the Willamette Valley, and is the only location in Linn and Benton counties that accepts freezer board, aseptic containers (typically milk and soymilk cartons)—and even clean Styrofoam. These are all processed, sorted and packaged by volunteers. The packaged materials are hauled away for recycling: Styrofoam is taken to Portland by Parrott’s Home Furnishings, and First Alternative owner-workers haul aseptics and freezer board to Eugene.

This program—an outreach effort by First Alternative that touches many, many lives—is currently being reworked to make the recycling experience more pleasant and efficient for the community. It’s also being rebuilt from the inside, as a model for implementing the Owner Relations Committee’s recommendation that owner-worker committees become more self-governing. We hope you’ll appreciate the changes as they come, and consider joining us in this pioneering volunteer model.

Casual users of the recycling area can look forward to improved signage, instructions on how to prepare your recycling, increased neatness in the midst of inevitable chaos, and an overall streamlined experience.

You can help this community effort by remembering that another person must handle everything you leave behind. You’ll save the volunteers a lot of work—often dirty work—by bringing your recyclables in a state that makes the job easier:

Remove plastic spouts from aseptic containers—both the short square spouts that grace soymilk-type cartons and the tall round spouts on orange juice cartons.

Items should be clean of dirt and food residue. We can’t clean dirty Styrofoam or filthy bottles—these items are just thrown in the garbage. Excessive food waste also encourages mice, which is bad news for everyone, including the mice.

Flatten cartons and cardboard.

Sort your recyclables rather than leaving us with the proverbial mixed bag.

If a collection container is full, stack items neatly nearby. Disorder breeds disorder, and a little bit of mess soon leads to full-scale chaos.

Don’t dump nonrecyclable items. The range of items that can be accepted is pretty well-defined. Tires, car batteries, and household trash aren’t among them! And although larger pieces of Styrofoam are accepted, packing peanuts aren’t.

Dumping is unsightly, strains Co-op resources, and is potentially harmful to recycling workers. You can bring small batteries to Customer Service at the South Store for recycling.

Consider joining our team for spirited work parties, an exploration of the self-governing model, a 15% discount on your groceries, and—most importantly-- a deeper appreciation of the vast amounts of waste we generate, and the potential for positive change.