Recycling center cuts ribbon on expansion

By ANDREW WELLNER

Frontiersman.com

PALMER — In the past few years the Valley Community for Recycling Solutions operation has moved from a parking lot, to a set of temporary buildings, to a dedicated, energy efficient facility that Thursday cut the ribbon on a new expansion.

The $5.5 million upgrade includes a wind-sheltered drop-off area — wind has long been a problem at the facility — and, according to a center press release, “a Harris Badger, 2-stroke horizontal auto-tie baler fed by an in-floor conveyor.”

Which is to say a big piece of machinery that compacts cardboard and ties it into big, heavy bales for shipment.

Dewey Taylor, who sits on VCRS’s board of directors, noted that the baler spits out bigger bales, faster and they come out pre-tied. The old baler, he said, spit out bales they had to tie by hand.

“This will allow us to double our capacity,” Taylor said, as he watched a loader dump cardboard onto the conveyor.

Executive Director of VCRS, Mollie Boyer, handed credit for the expansion to the volunteers and employees.

“It is a group effort. It has always been a group effort,” Boyer said.

Those volunteers also got a shout out from Lyda Green, the former Valley state senator who secured a lot of the funding for VCRS.

“No project deserves this many volunteers. This is over the top,” she joked.

She said that the usual evolution of a non-profit is a lot of initial interest that slackens over time, necessitating an influx of money from another source, often the state.

“That hasn’t been the case here. I don’t know what you people live on but share your secret with other non-profits,” she said.

Janet Kincaid, a well-known Palmer hotelier and restaurateur, said that she started her involvement with VCRS on what she thought would be an honorary basis, just lending her name, but not her efforts, to a worthy cause. But she said she her involvement quickly became much more hands-on at the center and in her personal life.

“At the hotel, I recycle the boxes and I have a sign up that says, ‘help Janet save the planet,’” she told the crowd.

Nearly everyone who spoke had something to say about Boyer’s tenacity. Green said that Boyer was constantly checking in on the status of state grants.

Assemblyman Darcie Salmon recalled his time as mayor during some pretty crucial milestones in VCRS’s history. He said that Boyer was vehement about recycling and made herself very hard to ignore.

“She’s an attractive nuisance,” he joked, using a term probably more common in his day job in the real estate field. “It could not have happened without Mollie.”

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