The Haines Friends of Recycling released their 2023 Reducing Our Waste Together guide this week. The new guide asks residents to not only deal with their waste, but to consider not buying too much of it in the first place. KHNS’ Brandon Wilks reports:

The Haines recycling guide, called the ROW Together, was first released in January of 2021. It’s a collaborative project that involves all of the members of the Friends of Recycling, their 125 active volunteers, and 38 local businesses and organizations. According to the Chilkat Valley newspaper, residents in Haines dumped 2.3 million pounds of household trash at the landfill in 2022. That’s approximately 1,100 pounds per resident over the year. The large amount of waste prompted Melissa Aronson, Chairwoman of the Haines Friends of Recycling, to focus on this year’s theme.

Aronson: “So the theme there is no, we can do better. We don’t need to dump that much. That’s a lot of resources that are just being dumped into a hole in the ground and left for future generations to have to deal with. We can do better, we should be more responsible to the future that we’re leaving to the next generations.”

ROW together provides many suggestions to Haines residents to reduce the amount of waste generated based on what Melissa calls the 5 R’s.

Aronson: “Well, there used to be the three R’s. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But that’s sort of been expanded now to the first one being just starting right at the very beginning, rethink about what you want to buy. Because we, we buy so much stuff that we don’t need that’s heading right to the landfill,
or the packaging and that is, you know, maybe not recyclable and heading to the landfill. So the first thing to really do is to start by rethinking about what you want to buy.
And then the next R is to reduce what you buy and particularly pay attention on how to reduce packaging, there’s a lot of ways to do that. The third is to reuse. So, buying used, like use clothing, think about other ways to use what you have. So you have a container. And number five plastic container can’t be recycled, poke a hole in the bottom of it and use it as a planter. There’s just all kinds of things you can do like that. Then the fourth R is to recycle.
And main trends recycling is, is here for that. And the fifth is to rot. And that is basically to compost what we can. So those are the five R’s.

ROW Together covers an extensive list of different waste that can be generated, from home appliances and batteries to fluorescent lightbulb tubes and even medical supplies. While there is no end to the kinds of waste, Aronson is especially concerned about plastics.

Aronson: “Right now, we have such a huge volume of plastic, it’s very hard to recycle it. We have problems with plastics, getting into our waterways and causing entanglements for marine life and for fishermen. And there’s a lot of emerging evidence of the dangers of plastic to our health, and particularly the microplastics plastic plastics break down, they get small enough, they become what’s called micro plastics, and they can be ingested by marine life and eventually work up the food chain to to us. And there’s a lot of problems with plastics. So whatever we can do to reduce that and the use of plastics and particularly at the rethink stage of things.”

Despite the enormity of the task, Aronson is optimistic about the progress being made in Haines.

Aronson: “You know, I think here we were, the average in the US is 4.5 pounds of waste per day per person. In Hanes, it’s about three pounds. So that is hopefully, due to people rethinking what they’re doing, and recycling and composting and so on, to reduce their waste. A more jaded perspective might be that people dumping things in the river, but we hope not.” “So we’re doing well. And there are places in the US that are doing very well there are a lot of places that aren’t there many countries around the world that have really strong recycling, and waste reduction programs, and others that don’t. So it’s something we all need to be working on. There’s 8 billion of us on the planet, we need to get serious about what kind of a mess we’re meeting future generations.”

The ROW Together guide can be found online at hainesrecycle.org. There is also a hard copy at the Haines Friends of Recycling center and one on display at the Haines Public Library. The Friends of Recycling is also starting a new segment on KHNS called Talking Trash with Haines Friends of Recycling. It will premiere on February 14th at 8:45.
For KHNS in Haines, I’m Brandon Wilks.

NOTES:

Yeah. So the theme there is no, we can do better. We don’t need to dump that much. That’s a lot of resources that are just being dumped into a hole in the ground and left for future generations to have to deal with. We can do better, we should be more responsible to the future that we’re leaving to the next generations.

Well, there used to be the three R’s. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. But that’s sort of been expanded now to the first one being just starting right at the very beginning, rethink about what you want to buy. Because we, we buy so much stuff that we don’t need that’s heading right to the landfill,
or the packaging and that is, you know, maybe not recyclable and heading to the landfill. So the first thing to really do is to start by rethinking about what you want to buy.
And then the next R is to reduce what you buy.
and particularly pay attention on how to reduce packaging, there’s a lot of ways to do that.
The third is to reuse. So, buying used, like use clothing, think about other ways to use what you have. So you have a container. And number five plastic container can’t be recycled, poke a hole in the bottom of it and use it as a planter. There’s just all kinds of things you can do like that. Then the fourth R is to recycle.
And main trends recycling is, is here for that. And the fifth is to rot. And that is basically to compost what we can. So those are the five R’s.

I think some places are doing a much better job than others. You know, I think here we were, the average in the US is 4.5 pounds of waste per day per person. In Hanes, it’s about three pounds. So that is hopefully, due to people rethinking what they’re doing, and recycling and composting and so on, to reduce their waste. A more jaded perspective might be that people dumping things in the river, but we hope not. So I’m going to try to be the optimist here. And so nationally, average is 4.5 pounds per day per person. In Haines, it’s three pounds per day per person. So we’re doing well. And there are places in the US that are doing very well there are a lot of places that aren’t there many countries around the world that have really strong recycling, and waste reduction programs, and others that don’t. So it’s something we all need to be working on. There’s 8 billion of us on the planet, we need to get serious about what kind of a mess we’re meeting future generations.

one of the things that can happen is that we can become so overwhelmed with everything that we see needs to be done, that we just call our head, our arms and stick our head in the sand and say, it’s too much I can’t do anything. So ego Bill is an activity that’s designed to help people identify some things that need to be done, what it is that they are currently doing, because it turns out, we are doing something and then identify one goal, just want to work on for the next month. And then once that goal is part of your normal behavior, pick another goal and move on and over time, you can become a lot better at reducing your waste stream. So we, you know, we can’t change every behavior. But we can change one at a time. And if we all do that, it makes a huge difference over over time.