As more recycle, county pilots programs to take green waste and more

Published 9:15 pm Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Nearly one year after King County Solid Waste changed recycling procedures at the Vashon transfer station and expanded its list of accepted materials, the island has decreased its trash and increased its recyclables, while further earth-friendly changes are planned.

Beginning last June, islanders were able to begin combining the items they took to recycle at the station, a move that put Vashon in line with the rest of the county, according to Eric Johnson, a program manager at the county’s Recycling and Environmental Services division. This step encouraged islanders to recycle more, he said, and set the stage for the next improvement: two compactors for recyclables.

Slated to be put in place this July, the compactors will be able to take all the items that can be recycled now, Johnson said, and will provide financial benefits for the county and environmental benefits overall.

The current recycling containers, which are hauled to Republic Services in Seattle for processing twice a day, are 25 feet long and hold 1.5 to 2 tons of material. The compacting containers, however, will be 40 feet long and able to hold 6 to 7 tons and greatly reduce the number of trips to the sorting facility.

“It will save money and reduce our carbon footprint,” Johnson said.

Later in the summer or early fall, the collection of green waste — food scraps and yard waste — will begin. A group of islanders has been working toward this project, a one-year pilot program, for the better part of a year, according to Shannon Brundle, a member of the group Zero Waste Vashon, which has been working closely with county officials to create it.

For her master’s thesis, Brundle studied Vashon’s waste stream and was surprised to learn that the island had no centralized composting facility and that yard waste was either burned or taken to the landfill. Her thesis work provided Zero Waste Vashon with a starting point for its efforts in trying to stop the flow of waste off the island.

Last year at this time, group members were hoping to develop an island system for anaerobic digestion, in which many types of waste, including food scraps, yard waste and manure, would be turned into fuel and compost to be used on the island. Jim McRae, a member of Zero Waste Vashon who worked in the solid waste industry for more than 12 years, said the group has had to slow down on that goal to determine just how much green waste Vashon has and islanders’ willingness to participate in the program.

“Part of it is a mystery,” he said. “This will be a social experiment as a well as a waste experiment.”

Once the program is under way, islanders with food scraps and yard waste, including piles that have been accumulating, can drop it off at a designated spot at the transfer station. In turn, it will be trucked to Cedar Grove Composting in Maple Valley.

Zero Waste Vashon members say transporting the material off-island is not what they are ultimately aiming for, but the program is a start.

“Our ideal is that it be kept on Vashon for Vashon residents,” McRae said. “We would like to get where less is shipped off.”

In the pilot program, when residents drop off a load, they will pay a reduced fee compared to trash drop-off. The fee will be a $12 minimum, or $75 per ton, according to Doug Williams, a spokesman for the county’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks. Current trash disposal costs are  $22 as a minimum and $129 a ton. The fees on Vashon will be the same as in other green collection areas in the county, Williams added.

As the program gets closer to its launch date, group members say they will work hard to get the word out.

“We are really going to promote this program. We really want people to participate,” Brundle said.

It is not known yet what will happen once the pilot is completed, McRae added, as next steps will be informed by what occurs over the course of the program. He noted that when it comes to processing, it is often easier to scale up than scale down, and that what happens on Vashon would likely be useful to many other communities.

“We’re a microsystem in the county’s mind,” he said. “There is a lot to learn from us.”

The efforts set for this summer come at a time when the amount of recycling has increased substantially on Vashon. When the public was able to begin co-mingling recycles bound for the transfer station last summer, the county also increased its list of items that can be recycled, which now includes paper cups and numerous plastic items, from large lids to pill bottles and food trays.

People tend to recycle more when they do not have to sort things, Johnson said. That change, combined with additional acceptable items, bumped Vashon’s recycling from 760 tons in 2013 to 1,098 tons in 2014. In that time, recyclables jumped from making up 16 percent of the waste leaving Vashon to about 21 percent, Johnson added. He noted that the volume of the increase was initially a surprise, and county employees had an adjustment period for keeping the containers well serviced and open for new drop-offs.

In January of this year, the transfer station also began accepting compact fluorescent bulbs and tubes, and Johnson said the county will continue trying to decrease what goes in the landfill, with the hope of accepting Styrofoam, tires, mattresses and plastic film, such as shrink-wrap. While Vashon might not be selected to recycle all of these items because of its small size, the county is moving ahead and will soon launch a pilot program in Shoreline to test taking plastic film and Styrofoam.

“We will expand it as we can,” Johnson said.