Trash to treasure

April 22, 2005

BOB MARTINSON/Frontiersman reporter

Today is Earth Day and April is Resource Awareness Month, which brings up the question - How much stuff thrown in the garbage could be used again, and how much waste does that generate?

Mollie Boyer thinks about these questions all the time. She is the force behind recycling efforts here in the Valley and gets out the message that cardboard, glass, plastic and other items can be reworked into other products, instead of putting an estimated 150 tons each day into the Mat-Su Borough landfill.

"Well, when I moved back up here in 1997 after living here in the 1970s, I saw all the junk on the side of the road and the apathy about recycling, I decided maybe I could do something, because I'm tenacious," Boyer said.

Boyer is originally from Portland, Ore., where she was a firefighter and produced the play "The Devil and Daniel Webster." She moved to Montreal to live with her brother and build wooden toys for a couple of years. Boyer has five brothers and a sister, and 32 nieces and nephews.

She then moved to San Francisco, finally coming to Anchorage in 1973. She drove a cab during pipeline construction, painted houses and was an "editing monkey" at KTVA channel 11.

She stayed in Anchorage until 1979. Boyer had a roommate in San Francisco who had been working against apartheid and was not able to return to South Africa, for fear of being jailed. When apartheid ended, her friend returned to Africa. This was when Boyer went to South Africa for a two-month visit to see her.

Once there, she found out what kinds of things could be made out of recycled materials. Boyer said people in South Africa were enthusiastic recyclers, making hats, canes and bowls out of plastic. She still has a cane constructed of old telephone wire.

When she got back to Alaska, Boyer saw the littered highways, and said they reminded her of the things she had learned about recycling years ago. The recycling center here in the Valley started out as a volunteer organization and Boyer began bringing much of the gathered material to Anchorage.

She began collecting plastics, glass and cardboard at the Alaska State Fair, which she has now done for years.

"In December of 1997, the Valley office of the Alaska Center for the Environment put out a message that anybody interested in seeing recycling out here could discuss it at this meeting, and I went to that meeting," she said. "And at that meeting we talked about what we could do and what they could help us with and that was it."

It was all-volunteer for several years and the volunteers had their first "one-stop" in 1998. Several meetings later, Boyer says, they started doing quarterly one-stops that usually took place at Wal-Mart.

"Our long-term goal was to make a permanent program that could be sustained," she said.

The operation is autonomous, but operates with the Alaska Center for the Environment and uses the name Valley Community for Recycling Solutions.

"The community part of it is very important, we all work long and hard on it," Boyer said. "Dedicated volunteers have created this organization, are great folks to work with and they cross all the different elements of our community. We have got kids and older people, business people, students, civic leaders, farmers, white-collar and blue-collar workers, rich and poor, everybody recycles."

Boyer is proud that everybody is getting involved and points out the importance of it.

"Our strength is in our community building, that everybody has that in common, and that we want to take good care of the place. It's significant that we see a future and that we want to take good care of our resources. It's called resource conservation development and recovery," she said.

As Boyer walked back to work in her center at the corner of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway and North 49th State Street, she turned and said, "I love this community. I love Alaska, and from Alaska, I can really understand the importance of being a steward of this Earth."

The center can be contacted through www.valleyrecycling.org or by calling 745-5544.