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In this episode, we discuss how rural communities are providing recycling options to citizens and businesses.
What happens to your garbage after it leaves your house? ‘State of Waste’, is an audio series about landfills and solid waste management in Nebraska...from electronic waste to the trash you throw away every day.
VO: The whirr of sewing machines can be heard in the panhandle’s largest sewing shop, where the walls are lined with patterned quilts and fabric of every color. Pat’s Creative sits on a family farm in the village of Hemingford. The farm, the sewing shop and a tree planting business are based out of the area. Sonya Buskirk is co-owner of Pat’s Creative and said a local hauling service would typically take all the waste created by these businesses straight to a landfill.
Buskirk: We had so much cardboard and recyclables that they only take to landfills and they won't separate anything. So everything was just going to landfills.
VO: The businesses are now saving a wide range of materials to be recycled, from twine used on the farm to the plastic that fabrics come wrapped in. The items are stored in containers until they’re ready to be picked up by Keep Alliance Beautiful, otherwise known as K-A-B, who collects them every two weeks.
Buskirk: We were throwing so many, I don't have a clue what poundage would be, but the cardboard, the fabric bolts, the boxes and things that they picked up here is... I mean, it has to help somebody somewhere.
VO: John Weare is a resident of Alliance and works at the K-A-B recycling center, which processed seven hundred and seventy five thousand pounds of material last year. He said the facility serves as a recycling center for a large area of the state, where centers are scarce.
Weare: North of us, there's really no recycling service and in the panhandle, there really isn't much of anything at all.
VO: In some areas in the northwest part of the state, K-A-B doesn’t have the resources to offer pickup services. In those cases, Weare has seen people come as far as an hour away to deliver their recyclables.
Weare: We've had people from the Sandhills come with horse trailers full of things where it's been,you know, months where they've been collecting recycling and bringing it to us.
VO: K-A-B is just one part of a larger operation. The model, Hub and Spoke, aims to make recycling more accessible in rural areas. Within the model, recycled material moves along a route, otherwise known as a spoke, in order to reach a central processor- a hub. Similar systems are being implemented in different areas state and nation-wide and have the same basic design. Former Nebraska Recycling Council Program Director Leah Meyer said this process is vital for smaller communities who may not generate large amounts of waste.
Meyer: They can't send their materials to a processing facility, or to a broker on their own, when they're only collecting, say, four to eight cubic yards of material a month.
VO: Once smaller communities send their materials to a hub, the hub uses equipment to sort and bale the materials. They are then sent to a processing facility and eventually end up in an end market. Keep Keith County Beautiful Executive Director Chris Vail said the process is intuitive for many reasons.
Vail: The idea of moving stuff through the Hub and Spoke programs, I think number one, is the most logistical way to go about it. And number two, it’s cost effective.
VO: Leah Meyer said she’s found that hubs serving around ten thousand residents are each recycling around four hundred tons of material annually. These numbers make her think about communities that don’t have access to a hub.
Meyer: It's easy to extrapolate how many tons are actually going into the site without having that kind of outlet.
VO: Nebraska’s recycling rate is around seventeen percent. In comparison, the national recycling rate is just above thirty five percent. Meyer said the main roadblock to increasing recycling in the state isn’t a lack of interest. She found in areas where recycling was available, eighty percent of residents were highly motivated or somewhat motivated to recycle.
Meyer: In Nebraska, it's access. I don't think it's a lack of desire.
VO: One key element to the hub and spoke model is investment in the equipment needed at hub facilities like Firstar Fiber in Omaha. Firstar is the largest materials recovery facility, or M-R-F, in the state. It serves as a main hub for many parts of the state, as smaller hubs may not have the equipment to fully process materials. In those cases, they may send their recyclables to Firstar for further processing. Danielle Easdale is Firstar’s director of sales and marketing.
Easdale: Wastes are a resource. If we can take that piece of waste, put it back into the economic stream, you’re not only creating jobs, you're benefiting the planet, you know, you've been benefiting the state of Nebraska in terms of manufacturing.
VO: M-R-Fs work by separating recyclables into streams and bailing them up to be sent to end mills, where they’re made into new products. Easdale said Firstar is utilizing a variety of new technologies to streamline their process, from optical and robotic sorting equipment to overhead magnets for steel products. The machinery needed in M-R-Fs like this doesn’t come without cost. The Nebraska Department of Environment and Energy, known as N-D-E-E, provided a grant for three hundred seventy four thousand, seven hundred and five dollars to Firstar for equipment in 2021. Aaron Miller is N-D-E-E’s Grants Supervisor. He said unique projects are more likely to stand out and receive funds.
Miller: The more, you know, innovative or more, you know, different maybe outside the box thinking that they have, the more likely they are to get funded as well.
VO: Chris Vail said Nebraska in particular provides many opportunities to expand recycling with the available funds.
Vail: You can ask them for anything, and they will most likely give you the grant funds, because truly, it's not that competitive. It's not like we're in California, where we have 9,000 people vying for these kinds of grants.
VO: Some funding is generated from fees charged for waste disposal in landfills, as fifty percent of this fee is put toward N-D-E-E’s Waste Reduction and Recycling Grants Program. Nebraska’s fee rate is a dollar twenty five per ton, significantly lower than the national average, which is fifty five thirty six per ton. Meyer said the Saline Seward Waste Management Agency is one case of fees funding recycling efforts.
Meyer: So the cost of the drop off container, the maintenance, you know, when these things wear out or they need new repairs, or even reimbursing for the cost of gas. That has made Saline and Seward a lot more stable in the recycling service they can provide.
VO: Vail said the largest grant she receives is for public education, which goes hand and hand with recycling efforts.
Vail: If we teach people how to recycle right and they learn it from a very early age, they will do it forever. It's basically behavior modification.
VO: When considering the future of recycling in the state, Meyer said it’s important for individuals to recognize their own habits while keeping track of what their local representatives are doing.
Meyer: hold their public policymakers to a higher standard with our solid waste collection.
VO: On November seventeenth, twenty twenty one, Chris Vail met with Nebraska’s representatives to do just that. She urged them to put infrastructure funding towards recycling efforts.
Vail: It was really kind of cool that I got to talk to them about what we're doing here in Nebraska, and really get them to champion from the federal level, how we bring EPA money into our state.
VO: In communities like Hemingford, residents like Sonya Buskirk want to contribute to recycling efforts.
Buskirk: If we can keep it out of the landfills… We're agricultural farmers so we do anything we can to keep our lands clean and cared for.
VO: And although the desire to recycle is there, Buskirk said it’s up to the community to make the process easy.
Buskirk: K-A-B does an absolutely excellent job trying to make it simple for people to recycle. They get gold stars for that.
VO: The success of the process hinges on the accessibility provided by programs like hub and spoke, accessibility which has the potential to make a real difference in rural communities across the state.