Mid Valley Recycling announces the winners of grant offerings for local remanufacture of local recyclables

Mid Valley Recycling announced the winners of grant offerings for local remanufacture of local recyclables. Last summer Mid Valley Recycling (MVR), with the financial help of Mat-Su Health Foundation, launched a contest in two categories, one for adults and one for youth 21 and under.

There is always a need for local jobs and what better way to produce them than by using low-cost, locally-sourced and recycled materials to make something new and useful. Our Valley recycling center in Palmer, Valley Community for Recycling Solutions or VCRS, already sells some of its corrugated cardboard and newspaper to Thermokool of Palmer which produces insulation, hydro-seed and animal bedding. Nine jobs are produced in that process.

Mid Valley Recycling’s winning grant offering projects have the potential to increase local job growth and in the process reduce the Valley’s waste footprint. The winners proposed projects using plastics, glass bottles and recycled refrigerator shipping containers. Because the applicants had varied and important solutions to recycling needs, MVR members opted to award a second prize in the adult category. This was funded through the donations made by recyclers using the Big Lake transfer site.

The Adult First Place winner Patrick Simpson has developed a plan for a mobile recycled plastics-to-plastic-lumber (known as RPL) facility. In a long development process and formation of his business Alaska Plastics Recovery, Simpson has already produced a prototype currently located near the Palmer Alaska State fairgrounds.

As Tam Boeve director of VCRS states, one of the great aspects of this project is that it uses some types of plastic that VCRS does not collect and sell. Simpson’s facility recycles molded plastic discarded by the oil industry, plastics picked up during local beach cleanups and items like plastic toys and bottle caps none of which are currently recycled at VCRS. A great advantage of this prototype is that Simpson can move his prototype to any location in Southcentral Alaska. It can also be put on a barge and moved to village locations with no road service.

One of the products manufactured using funds from this first prize will be a plastic lumber picnic table to be housed at VCRS. Mr. Simpson already has a stockpile of plastics and will be making lumber in March and April. He has uploaded a video of RPL production to YouTube.

Making plastic lumber uses a lot of recycled plastic. So consumers are encouraged to save their plastic for recycling rather than tossing it in the trash. Currently, this RPL project uses two people but can be up-scaled to employ more people in more locations around the state.

When Marissa Senna entered her Adult Second Place “glass bottle to sand” grant application, all the judges were excited. Valley recyclers are always asking when and where they can recycle their glass. Currently, VCRS has no buyer for glass so it is not collected. Recyclers have to drive to Eagle River or Anchorage or consider making glass bottle walls or greenhouses to use their glass locally.

Senna proposes an alternative. She researched and found a small glass bottle crusher which, using water, can turn bottles into sand without the usual dust production. She also found a business - Meier Lake Resort - willing to house the machine and use the end product. This crusher has a small carbon footprint so is a very “green” project.

Working with Meier Lake Resort will allow her to implement a functional system for housing and operating the glass recycling program in a safe and sustainable manner, as well as create a drop-off location that is easily accessible to residents.

Since this second place prize comes from MVR donations, Mid Valley Recycling was not able to provide all the funds needed to get this project started. Senna is already looking for further funding sources to complete her work. If she does, Valley recyclers can avoid the guilt of tossing that glass jar in the trash. So here is another way to keep more recyclables out of the landfill.

A group of seventh grade students from Teeland Middle School calling themselves the Banana Botz won the youth award of three thousand dollars for their Extreme Ecobrick housing proposal. The six students – Emmerson Michaud, Wesley Quimby, Cyrus Rader, Connor Rush, Ayden Shaw and Mason Szybnski – with the assistance of their parent-mentor Mary Collins Quimby, researched the feasibility of using recycled forty foot refrigerator containers (think getting meat and dairy into Alaskan supermarkets) to make affordable housing. They researched cold weather insulation, power sourcing and even developed a floor plan. They took tours and contacted experts about green building practices. They developed ideas about powering each housing module separately through solar occupant-produced power using a stationary bike.

These “Ecobrick” homes can be used individually in remote locations or stacked and arranged for urban spaces as shown in their 3-D model. Jobs created by such a project located here in the Valley could employ two or three people to start and can grow from there. .

The Banana Botz are a Lego Robotics team. In a Lego Robotics competition there are essentially two parts. The first is robot games. Teams design, build and code a robot to perform various tasks or missions. They get points for each mission that the robot is able to complete. The second part is an innovation project. For the year of 2022-2023 the project had to deal with some “green” topic. The team started their investigation and was struck by the carbon emissions from residential housing. This began them down the road that eventually led to developing the Extreme EcoBrick.

The Banana Botz will use their prize money to travel to a national Lego Robotics competition they have been invited to in Boston, MA this summer.

Looking to the future, the boys are interested in pursuing work in various engineering specialties (robotics, architectural and mechanical engineering) or medicine. In the short term the boys are looking to improve their robotics skills and qualify for the Lego Robotics World Competition during the 2023-2024 school year.

The judges like this concept and hope these young men continue developing these ideas as they grow. MVR president Patti Fisher says these middle schoolers give her hope for the future.

Information courtesy of Mid Valley Recycling.