 |
  |
 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
The
Jewel of Junk & Stuff These first true days of spring, the sun glints and shimmers through BRING Recycling Center so that every window pane and piece of broken glass sparkles like gemstone; so that every mishmash piece of sheet metal or metal tubing or metal frame, pipe or wire catches and throws back a little shine; so that every discarded ceramic sink and bathtub and toilet gleams softly, but so compellingly that something in you believes, no insists, it can all be resuscitated, brought back to life — that it can all be used again. Julie Daniel, general manager and co-director of BRING tells me that this spark, this belief in resuscitation — or more specifically in the reuse part of reduce-reuse-recycle — is where the future is at for a grassroots, nonprofit recycling center such as BRING. "The world of recycling is changing," she says. "And in a way, BRING is almost a victim of its own success." For more than 30 years, BRING has worked to make recycling a community value here in Lane County. "And it is a core community value," says Daniel. "Recycling is one of the things that defines us. We have incredible participation here and people are very loyal to the process." She explains, "When BRING started in 1971, we made recycling happen in the community. We introduced the concept and really built a market for a system that has now become part of the mainstream — what was started by activists and visionaries and environmentalists has become mainstream." And within the mainstream, recycling has grown up, become an industry. "So now," says Daniel, "your garbage haulers — not a nonprofit — are who pick up your recycleables. Materials are sorted in big facilities that handle enormous streams of material."
Don't get Daniel wrong. "I don't see that as being a bad thing, it's just a fact. Garbage and waste commodities are big industry, big companies. It's very capital intensive. You need very expensive equipment — and a lot of it — and big facilities and all kinds of capital investments that very few nonprofits can muster. And why would we?" she asks matter-of-factly. "Why would we do something that the for-profit sector can do far cheaper and more efficiently than we can?" But this brings into question the role of a local, grassroots recycling center such as BRING. The organization is an anomaly, Daniel explains. "Recycling was started by nonprofits, and by and large those nonprofits have gone out of business. There are only a handful — BRING among them — left in the country today." To maintain its survival, BRING will make some major organizational shifts, including even more emphasis on education, and relocating the center to a significantly larger site in Glenwood.
Roots to Reinvention About five years ago, when Daniel moved from an office position with BRING to take on the role of co-director with Business Manager David Wollner, the facility was starting to feel the for-profit squeeze-out in recycling. She says, "I think that when David and I put our heads together and started looking at the organization, we realized that recycling would not be in our future forever. We can't really compete as processors or collectors of materials. We just don't have the capacity, and there really isn't the volume of materials in this town." This organizational examination led the directors right back to BRING's mission statement: to promote "a healthy, sustainable environment through education, innovative waste reduction, reuse and recycling programs and by involving the community in resource conservation." And it suddenly became clear that there was a direction in which a nonprofit recycler could grow. Says Daniel, "BRING from the very beginning was a little different from other nonprofit recyclers in that we did more than just recycle. We've always had an educational component. Back in 1974, before environmental education was even a twinkle in the eye of government, BRING had an environmental educator." And so BRING has decided to focus more intently upon education. If grassroots could make recycling mainstream, could education make reuse and reduction mainstream, as well?
More Radical Change While BRING heartily endorses recycling as not only a core community value, but also as a true step toward conserving resources, Daniel still admits: "It's not enough."
Daniel and Wollner had taken a hard look at the statistical information on recycling provided by the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). "They keep very detailed statistics," Daniel explains. "And that's where you come up with a thing called the recovery rate," or the percentage of materials recovered and recycled. "What we noticed," Daniel says with some shock, "was that the recovery rate was climbing higher and higher and higher. We went from 20, 30, 40, into the low 50s — an incredible recovery rate. But why wasn't waste diminishing?" Problem is, we create waste at a rate as fast or faster than the rate at which we recycle. "So," she explains, "No matter how much we recover, we're still creating more waste." BRING realized that the educational component of its mission statement might be able to redistribute the energy people were putting toward recycling to include more deliberate reuse and reduction. Daniel says, "We love recycling — but it has a bit of a double edge." The fact that something is recycleable, ironically, can justify its use and the creation of more waste. "The example that stares me right in the face," she says with a laugh, "is the plastic water bottle. I have two of them right here in my office. Instead of going to get a glass of water out of the tap, we're all buying water in a bottle." "This is a completely recycleable item," she says. "But does it have a cost — to both extract the material and to manufacture and recycle this item? Absolutely." Daniel says that on top of that cost, "only about 28 percent of [the bottles] are actually going to be recycled — the rest will end up in the trash." So recycling alone is a relatively small behavior change. "You're asking people to take an object they already use and put it in this bin instead of this bin," Daniel says. It's not the harder change of trying to figure out how not to use the object in the first place, which, Daniel says "is a much more radical change in behavior."
Seduce to Reuse With a sly smile, Daniel calls it, "BRING's Cunning Plan for World Domination." BRING's formal goal is "to help people make the connection between the way they live, the stuff they use and discard, and the clean air, water and healthy environment we all depend on — without preaching or boring them to death ..." Daniel believes that people — and a broader range of people than BRING is currently reaching — can be persuaded to make reuse an integral, interesting part of their lives. "We do environmental education, which is essentially kind of serious and preachy — you're telling people, 'Do this. Do that. Don't do this. Don't do that …' There's a real tendency for social change organizations and environmentalists to sound incredibly preachy." Thing is, this doesn't really work. Daniel explains, "Very few people change their behavior because somebody says they should. You need to inspire them. You need to make them feel this is a lifestyle that looks fun and interesting and exciting and innovative — that it has some element of delight to it." In the effort to promote reuse in the general public, BRING wants to emphasize the creative, visionary quality one exercises in the process. "Reuse," Daniel says, "is essentially a very creative act. To see a used sink as a birdbath or a discarded toilet as a fountain or a door as a desk takes vision. We want to promote the message that people should use used stuff because it's fun and creative, and it's good for the environment. We want to celebrate reuse as part of a lifestyle that is very much this community."
To Higher Ground As with every public venture, BRING's ability to stay competitive and grow the way they want to is all about location, location, location. The center is currently located on a dusty corner lot of Franklin Boulevard, near the I-5 and a big Texaco station out toward Mount Pisgah. The lot, as Daniel describes it, is "one and a half not very usable, swampy, flood-prone, blackberry-briared acres." At a certain point in the growing popularity of recycling, the community made the leap that a resource was a resource was a resource. Daniel says, "They had glass jars that they could recycle, and they wanted to recycle window panes and windows, because they saw that glass was glass. And they saw that you could recycle a tin, and they wanted to bring in metal sinks. So they made that leap between how a resource is valuable, no matter its form, and we became a collection point for this wild assortment of junk and stuff." It turned out that the "wild assortment of junk and stuff" was, in large part, a lot of used building materials, and BRING realized this specific reuse could be a focus for the organization. Damien Czech, BRING's operational manager, has been instrumental in, as Daniel says, "trying to make some kind of order out of the chaos of people's detritus and stuff — kind of putting all the windows in a row together and putting all the doors together, instead of it just being heaps of stuff surrounded by blackberries." The layout now is a little rough. You might find gravel-lined or dirt paths that serve as aisles between the rubber hose and discarded barbecue departments; there are even some outbuildings — wooden sheds, pole and tarp tents — that house everything from dresser drawers to medicine cabinets to whole kitchen and bathroom countertop and cabinet units. Czech and the BRING crew keep things well-organized, but the stuff seems to take on a life of its own — bike frames spilling here, rolls of chain link fence there, sparkly shards of glass just about everywhere. With help from a $10,000 grant through the UO Planning and Public Policy Management department, BRING has been able to do some market research and feasibility studies to see how well the current facility was serving the community as a whole.
Daniel says, "We found that there were people who loved our facility. But we also discovered, not surprisingly, that there was a segment of the population who found our facility fairly horrifying and scary. In order to promote reuse and to get more people to reuse and to broaden our audience beyond people just like us, we realized we were going to have to go out and meet them, that they weren't going to come to us. If we were really going to promote reuse in our community, we needed to change the way that we approached the public." This information sealed a significant decision for BRING, to move its reuse facility to a more expansive, people-friendly location. This has not been easy. "We've always been a grassroots, counter-cultural organization," says Daniel. "It's been a challenging process to reinvent ourselves as an organization that's going to have a bigger affect on more people. Organizational change is not easy to do, but BRING will not survive without this transformation." A flat, paved, nearly 3-acre parcel of land also on Franklin Boulevard in Glenwood became available for sale last year. And having had a profitable stretch, BRING was able to put a down payment on it as the site for its expansion. It will cost nearly $2 million to put the necessary buildings on the new site and to relocate the current facility. BRING has just begun a capital campaign to raise these funds. Daniel says proudly, "BRING has always been self sufficient. Now we are in the position of having to raise some major funds for the move. Meyer Memorial Trust is our earliest foundation funder. Even though we've no prior history of fundraising or grants, they stepped up with a $110,000 grant, including a $60,000 challenge grant, which we are halfway to matching … and a $50,000 capacity building grant to help us get the tools and systems in place to make the transition." BRING has also received funding from the U.S. Forest Service. The new facility will give BRING a chance to showcase creativity in reuse. Daniel says, "We want to make this place a living demonstration, a place where people can see what they can do with reused materials." Thus far, BRING has secured the land, changed the zoning, and has a site plan approved by Springfield. The facility has permits filed, and it's had to expanded the BRING board of directors, now 12 members strong, plus a UO board intern. "This is a huge, huge effort for a grassroots organization," Daniel says; the successful start is due in large part to this "dedicated and really wonderful board of directors."
Opportunity to do Right Daniel envisions the new facility as a destination, as something that follows in the footsteps of another counter-cultural phenomenon all grown up — Saturday Market. "It has bridged that gap. It's managed to stay grassroots-y, but appeal to a broad group of people. We looked at this and felt that there was an opportunity to follow this example," Daniel says. The characteristic elements that these organizations have in common include creativity, art and humor. Daniel says, "Humor and art will be our way to make a smooth transition. There is inherent humor in stuff. By using humor and fun and a lighthearted approach, we can bridge the gap between who we were and who we are going to be. Humor and fun are dear to our hearts. There's so much we can do by making this fun." But Daniel knows the ramifications are about more than fun and humor and creativity. She says, "Resource conservation is about social change and social justice. Many of the things we angst about in the world today are somehow connected to consumption of resources." In an effort to resolve these problems, and to get more of the wide swathe of mainstream society to participate in that resolution, Daniel explains, "We have to look at changing our consumption. And we at BRING believe that people change because of something appealing to them, rather than something looking bad to them." Daniel sees the expansion as a way to empower more of the community in BRING's effort to conserve resources. "We're an organization that isn't just idealistic. We don't just tell people to do things; we give them the means by which to do them. We don't just say recycle. We run recycling programs. We provide people the opportunity to do the right thing. We encourage them. There's kind of a balance between being philosophical and idealistic and visionary, of having that fire in the belly about social change, and also having the practical means to do it." |
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
