Sedona Recycles: Education comes first

posted in: News | 0

Sedona Recycles has been around Sedona and the Verde Valley since 1989, and its philosophies existed long before that. Many people think that we are just a ‘bottles and cans’ kind of place; the guys that have those free drop-off sites but that is a mere fraction of who we are and what we do. As a 501(c) 3 non-profit we are an educational organization first and foremost. The scope of the information that we share the lives that we reach, and materials that we work with extend outward on a global scale.  Anyone who has visited our location at 2280 Shelby Drive is amazed at how we do so much with so little.  A person can at anytime come into the center and ask for a quick tour of the facility without an appointment because we like to operate like a transparent machine. Similar to an ant farm a visitor can see every aspect of our center inside and out, down to the gears that run our sorting line.  Given the opportunity we will explain everything about our field with that same level of transparency.

To say that there is only one way to do things is an oversimplification at best, and a disservice to your audience at it’s worst. Right and wrong, black and white, these are terms that really should not exist in the industry that we work in because everything is far more nuanced than that. As the primary educational and outreach point-person here at the center I have made it my personal mission to give my time and attention to everyone that walks through the door. If the situation permits I will teach someone from the public as much as he or she is willing to learn on the subject of his or her query. Some of my conversations have lasted nearly an hour, and some folks only have time for the cliff-notes version, but everyone leaves knowing more than when they started. We have received messages, e-mails, phone calls and letters from all over the United States as well as our visitors from foreign countries, some of whom even sign up for memberships and donate because they are in support of what we do.

One evening while working late a gentleman on vacation from Argentina who had seen our sign on 89 came down Shelby   Drive to check out the center. It turned out that he was the founder of a major non-profit recycling program in Argentina that is dedicated to cleaning up the beaches, offering recycling to the local residents and businesses, and doing the same education that we do about waste, plastics, and disposability. After doing the full tour we talked at length about what possibilities there were for them to expand to accept more materials and provide additional services. It turned out that one waste item that they had to send to the landfill was all of the cigarette filters that people discarded into the sand by the thousands. I was able to connect him with a North American company that accepts cigarette filters! Gaston will return to Argentina now able to recycle even more than before, invigorated with our new partnership, and ready to move towards a more respectful and respectable zero-waste culture. He showed me pictures of the alternative to aforementioned progress: a smoldering pile of ‘garbage’ that had been burning all day. In many developing nations it is not uncommon for them to burn their waste.

Garbage is a term that should just be done away with. There are few things that cannot be recycled or composted and that is something that is constantly changing and in most cases improving. While we are educating people about recycling disposable products, or how to avoid them all together, we are trying to find ways to recycle the things that aren’t conventionally taken. We already take a more diverse range of materials than any other recycler, but there are still just a few things that we are not taking that we potentially could. The reality is that recycling companies are responsible for the availability of programs. Recycling companies of all kinds are the limiting factor when it comes to recycling availability. All other recycling companies are for-profit enterprises so recycling everything they can is not really in their business model. That said we are talking about resources here. Waste not; want not. There are scores of programs for recycling just about everything including toilets, dirty diapers, and toxic waste around the world and just because a company doesn’t take something doesn’t mean it isn’t recyclable. However don’t expect us to take dirty diapers anytime soon.