We are thrilled to announce that we are redundant.

Our First Sunday Styrofoam and Plastics collection program began in January 2019 as a way to provide a service that did not exist on the island.

Many of us had known about StyroRecycle in Kent or the transfer station in Tacoma and had been shlepping our light-as-air nuisance packing material there when running errands. I was one of those people and decided to see what could happen if we put our loads together.

Jacquie Perry joined in, and in partnership with the dedicated folks at Zero Waste Vashon (notably Will Lockwood and Steve Bergman) we teamed up with the Food Bank as a way to maximize the usage of their truck by having it full in both directions of their weekly food runs.

A crew of extraordinary volunteers was signed up to operate our “First Sunday” monthly collection events.

Next, I discovered that there were many small companies in the region that recycled individual types of plastic items: polyethylene foam, urethane foam, rigid polystyrene — and for a while, we collected and sorted these and our drivers drove all over the Kent Valley delivering these assorted goods.

Then we would stop at Northwest Harvest and Food Lifeline to fill up the truck for the Food Bank and head home.

We found an incomparable home base at the Sheffield Building. The owner, Tom Bangasser, became our chief supporter.

A big change occurred when I learned about DTG Recycle, which made an alternative fuel for the cement industry.

So we contracted with DTG Recycle, and with this addition, we became the only post-consumer general plastics recycling program in the country. With a couple of notable exceptions (PVC and fiberglass), if it was hydrocarbon-based, we took it.

What began as a personal experiment grew into a weekly plastics collection event, each run by a team of 10-30 volunteers.

We are all so proud of this: proud of our volunteers, of our community for showing up, of the enormous amount of plastics we have diverted from the landfill. In the last two and a half years alone, our tiny program has diverted over a hundred tons of plastics and 3000 cubic yards of styrofoam from the Cedar Hills landfill.

This is with the participation of 10 percent if the island’s households —over 600 per month.

We are grateful for the generous contributions that have enabled us to maintain a donation-based system.

I have always based the decision of what we collect on having a very clear path to recycling. Each downstream process has been vetted before an item is collected.

So it was extremely difficult to make the decision this summer to pause our collection of materials that went to DTG Recycle, which has stopped making its alternative fuel for the cement industry from mixed plastics.

For the last year, they have been sending mixed plastics to the Vancouver, Canada-based Merlin Plastics.

In some ways, this is better than the path to cement fuel because Merlin carefully extracts everything that can be made into hydrocarbon feedstock. So more material is actually recycled before it is made into an alternative fuel.

I was able to meet with the general manager of Merlin at the Washington State Recycling Association Convention. But our conversation elicited more questions than answers and made it clear that more editing of our collection needed to happen if we were to continue this pathway.

In the meantime, a Seattle-based and nationally growing company, Ridwell, has been expanding its curbside collection program.

At first, we had a small overlap in our collection categories. As Ridwell has grown and as our list has notably shrunk, we are now collecting the same categories of plastic, and Ridwell is actually collecting some of the materials that we can no longer accept.

This is good news for all of us.

As a business, Ridwell has the resources to manage this material at a much higher level than a volunteer organization. And I believe that this type of service is justifiably fee-based.

But there are so many hidden costs in the plastics industry. Trash collection should not be one of them. The producers of these plastics should be responsible for the plastic waste created. Zero Waste Vashon and Zero Waste Washington continue to work on this front.

We developed several goals during this program:

• Educate the community about alternative ways to manage plastic waste.
• Show proof of concept that people will change their habits involving plastic waste management. People do not want to throw this material away.
• Collect data to share with King County Solid Waste in order to convince them that we have a viable market.
• Have King County Solid Waste (KCSW) set up a collection of styrofoam and plastic film at the Vashon Transfer Station.
• Work ourselves out of a job!

We have now achieved nearly all of these goals.

It looks like KCSW will be adding styrofoam and plastic film to the options at the Vashon Transfer Station by the end of this year.

Between that and the arrival of the Ridwell program on the island, we have decided that our job of collecting styrofoam for the community is redundant, and it is time for us to close down the program.

As this door closes, it leaves more time for us to continue to develop programs to minimize the impacts of plastic waste in our community (and others) — focusing on models for business, organization and neighborhood collection.

I am also dedicated to figuring out ways to maintain a similar relationship with the Food Bank. The model of full trucks leaving the island is too good to lose.

Plastic recycling can be confusing. We are fortunate to live in a region that has access to plastic recycling. Many communities around the country do not.

These are thriving markets and are based on mechanical recycling methods, but there is a growing concern that these methods add to the already phenomenal load of micro- and nano-plastics being sent into our environment. Many new “advanced “ recycling technologies (pyrolysis and gasification) do not carry the burden of microplastic production but require great energy input and have not performed as efficiently as expected.

Both of these styles of recycling plastics have benefits and problems and generate fierce controversies.

The common thread is that we have been led to believe that recycling plastic (by any means) is the answer to the plastics pollution problem. This could not be farther from the truth.

To stop plastic pollution we must stop making plastic.

We can continue to decide to purchase non-plastic goods whenever possible, and be aware that almost half of plastic production is for “single use,” mostly packaging.

Most importantly, we can help enact legislation that holds manufacturers responsible for the end of life of the products and the packaging that they create.

These so-called “extended producer responsibility” laws are the next generation of tools at our disposal to help curb the massive production of plastic. Please check out the helpful resources at beyondplastics.org.

Thank you for all of your previous and future support and involvement. Please contact me with comments, ideas or questions.

Nadine Edelstein (nadine@itwouldbeawonder.com, 206-235-8453), along with Jacquie Perry, Steve Bergman and the Zero Waste Vashon Team launched Vashon’s plastic and styrofoam recycling program in 2019. Photo by Terry Donnelly.