Building to raise Valley recycling to new heights

PALMER — The Valley’s recycling community has big plans and, with any luck, the facility being built next door to the animal shelter will help accomplish them.

Mollie Boyer, executive director for Valley Community for Recycling Solutions, said the new, 20,000-square-foot building should be complete by November.

“Next year at this time we will have been in our new building for several months,” she said.

What that means for the organization is, at least to hear Boyer tell it, hard to overstate. For one thing, the center will have a place to teach classes and a safe way to show school children how recycling is done.

“Right now they get a presentation and we walk them through,” Boyer said, but to do that the center has to “kind of stop everything, hold it for safety”

The new facility has a spot to overlook the recycling operation from behind a pane of glass. That classroom will also be valuable, Boyer said, in plans to partner with Alaska’s colleges and the Palmer Job Corps center to use the facility as a learning laboratory. The hope is that in addition to learning the ropes of the recycling industry, students will be able to generate ideas for what to do with recycled materials the center collects.

A good example of that is Thermo-Kool, a company that moved to the Valley from Anchorage and is taking most of the center’s paper and turning it into insulation.

“The majority of the paper that we’re recovering through our program is now going to a local company,” Boyer said.

She also hopes the new center will allow VCRS to take in more types of materials. For instance, Boyer would like to expand the number of types of plastic the center can handle. There is also a spot reserved for a glass crusher.

“If anybody’s got good ideas about outlets for this glass, let us know,” she said.

The building is being built to meet the LEED Gold standard, which is the second-highest rating on the national system for evaluating green construction. Along the way, VCRS is working with the contractor to collect all of the scraps and other building materials that would otherwise go into the landfill.

“We want that to be a model for other construction projects,” she said. “That’s nice to really walk the talk with our building.”

And she plans to take that further. The building has a space built in for a battery bank, which she hopes to feed with solar panels and other types of green-power generators.

Further down the line the center might even start treating its own septage on site, possibly through that partnership with Job Corps. She said the Palmer center is the only one in the nation that trains people to work in water treatment.

The final goal? In five years the center hopes to reach its first diversion rate goal— 25 percent.

Would that be 25 percent of recyclables going into the landfill?

“No, 25 percent of the waste stream,” Boyer said.

Which is no small order, considering the landfill takes in about 190 tons each day. But Boyer said it’s doable and she’s got a study from the economics consulting firm Northern Economics to prove it.

“It really is exciting,” Boyer said of the building and the possibilities it represents. “Overall, it’s such a big step for our community.”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.