Have you ever wondered where that disposable plastic cup, old band aid, or chicken bone ends up after you chuck it in the garbage can? Sure, you haul it, along with the rest of your garbage to the dump. But then what, where does it go after that? Well, it gets hauled off the island by truck to the Skagit Transfer Station. And as the name suggests, it gets transferred, this time to a rail car. Then it takes a train trip across the state to its final destination, a massive landfill in Roosevelt, Washington. That's a pretty extravagant journey for garbage! Let's save the travel for something more fun by refusing, reducing, reusing, and recycling!

Did you know that food scraps are the single largest component of landfill waste in the US? What about on Lopez Island? We don’t have the answer and would like you to help us! We will be conducting a household survey to gather information about home composting on Lopez Island. Please help us by participating in the home composting survey the next time you visit the Lopez Dump! Why composting? Read on! There are many benefits to home composting, including: Save Money Reduce your garbage bill by composting food waste. Studies have found that about 35% of household waste is organic material. By composting, you could potentially reduce your garbage expenses by a third! Save Water When you compost, you build soil. Adding compost to your garden and flower beds contributes to soil health, and helps the soil retain moisture. Save Resources Lower your carbon footprint by reducing trips to the dump, and reducing the amount of material that has to be trucked off island and transported across the state to a landfill. Save the Planet When we compost, our food scraps break down into a healthy soil amendment. When we throw our food scraps into the garbage, all that organic material releases methane as it breaks down. According to the EPA, Methane is the third-largest source of human-related methane emissions in the United States. Methane gas is a source of significant greenhouse gas emissions and is 28 to 36 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat, and is a major contributor to climate change. Every time we divert organic matter from the landfill, we reduce potential greenhouse gas emissions. Inspired and want to start composting now? Here are some links to more information and resources about home composting. Would you like a little more guidance? Feel free to reach out to Larissa Mansfield at LSWDD with your questions. EPA, Composting at Home https://www.epa.gov/recycle/composting-home Recycle Now - Backyard Composting https://www.ecocycle.org/backyard-composting WSU Backyard Composting Guide (downloadable pdf) https://pubs.extension.wsu.edu/backyard-composting Are you an experienced composter who would like to share your expertise with others and/or help LSWDD promote home composting? Great, contact us!

Beginning August 13th, 2021, a 32 gallon can of garbage will be $10. Take It or Leave It and recycling remain free of charge. Why the fee increase? Unprecedented Growth in Garbage. Lopez Sold Waste Disposal District (LSWDD) has seen a dramatic rise in garbage at its drop-box facility. Lopez’s award-winning local facility handled over 295 tons of recyclable materials last year. Local drivers hauled off 760 tons of garbage on its District roll-off truck, a 7% increase over the previous year, and removed 137 tons of glass from the waste stream. Now LSWDD has gone from 239 tons of garbage in the first half-year in 2017 to 396 tons this half-year. Skagit’s mainland garbage fees on LSWDD have now increased 20%. LSWDD is no longer able to recycle paper on the mainland free of charge. Both San Juan and Orcas have charged for recycling but LSWDD has continued to opt for free recycling, including paper and glass. Additionally LSWDD created the Remakery so that more of Lopez’s cast-offs can be made into useable products and not go into the garbage. Take It or Leave It is still free for shopping and dropping. With more residents coming through the dump facility than ever before, LSWDD has opened the facility another reday a week. This has added additional trips to haul garbage to the mainland, along with higher ferry fares. LSWDD has hired more staff to keep the facility safe from accidents between pedestrians and other vehicles in a very crowded space. The tiny postage stamp of the Lopez Dump is a valued resource, and LSWDD is doing all it can to keep it open and available for ease of access to residents. The consequence of expanded service, additional staff, increased safety measures means that it costs LSWDD more to continue its unique and valued dump. Rather than increase the levy, LSWDD has decided to increase its can charge for the first time since LSWDD has been in operation. Beginning August 13th, 2021, a 32 gallon can of garbage will be $10. Take It or Leave It and recycling remain free of charge.

The Repair Cafe is where you can bring in items that need simple repairs in four main categories: appliances, furniture, textiles/clothes, and jewelry. This event is to help get all those old, beloved items out of the corners of your house and closets and back into use! If your item needs a replacement part, please get that part and bring it with you. Simple fixes are what we do, not major rebuilds. There are thousands of Repair Cafes happening worldwide. If you want to learn more about the history and the movement, check out www.repaircafe.org If you are interested in volunteering for this event, or future Repair Cafes, contact nikytap@lopezsolidwaste.org El Repair Cafe es un lugar donde puede traer objetos que necesitan una reparación muy simple. Hay cuatro categorías principales: electrodomésticos, muebles, textiles/ropa, y joyería. ¡Este evento es para ayudar a sacar todos esos artículos viejos y amados de los rincones de sus casas y armarios y volver a usarlos! Si su artículo necesita una pieza de repuesto, consígala y tráigala. Lo que hacemos son arreglos simples, no grandes reconstrucciones. Hay miles de Repair Cafe en todo el mundo. Si desea obtener más información sobre la historia y el movimiento, visite www.repaircafe.org Si está interesado en ser voluntario para este evento o para futuros Repair Cafe, comuníquese con nikytap@lopezsolidwaste.org

When driving down Lopez roads, it is common to see a bearded man in a baseball hat alongside the road with a bag in hand picking up trash. If one didn’t know him or his story, he might just seem like a curiosity— not the incredible Zero Waste Hero that he is. That man is Mike Moore, and he has been performing this amazing community service of keeping our roadsides clean for many decades. He is receiving the first “Golden Grabbers” Zero Waste Hero Award on Saturday, April 24th at 10 am at the registration for the Great Islands Clean Up. Moore tells the story like this: “I have always been a hiker and when I came to Lopez I enjoyed walking Lopez Hill, Watmough and the Iceberg trails. Later I became a bus driver for the Lopez School and I began to notice the amount of trash on the roads, even the back roads where the students lived. So instead of hiking the trails I started walking the Island roads and picking up what I found. This was back in the days before aluminum, when you could find rusted beer cans made of metal, and there were even trash piles in the salal left there in pre-Dump days. Today much of the ancient trash is gone but you can always find more so (carefully) join us on the Great Islands Clean Up to leave a cleaner Island for the school kids to enjoy.” Mike Moore has recently turned 80, and Lopez Solid Waste Disposal District and the Lopez Trails Network have come together to honor him with a Lifetime Achievement Award, the Golden Grabbers Zero Waste Hero Award. “Grabbers” are a long pole with a grabber at the end used for litter collection, so it was a fitting gift that is also utilitarian. Moore has been part of the Great Islands Clean Up Leadership team since 2015, empowering all Lopezians to get in on the fun keeping our roads and beaches clean and tidy. This year, at the Spring Great Islands Clean Up scheduled for Saturday, April 24th, Mike will be presented with the first ever Golden Grabber Award at 10 am in the lot behind Public Works, just next to LSWDD aka the Dump. Due to Covid considerations, this year’s registration from 9- 10 am will be a drive through event, but folks are encouraged to sign the large thank you poster as they come through which will also be presented to Mike with his award. In addition, now when you see a bearded man collecting trash along the side of Lopez roads, you can smile and wave in thanks for his many years of work! Mike Moore is happy to accept this gift in the hopes that his actions will continue to inspire Lopezians to be good stewards of our lands and seas, and each do our part to make our island, and the world a cleaner place. Here are two short videos, one of the New Golden Grabbers Award and Mike's lifetime achievement award:https://youtu.be/XCdvOf9kpiQ The other of Mike receiving his award at the Spring Great Islands Clean Up, 2021: https://youtu.be/-QCxqniAIVY Both videos made my Ken Kortge, with great thanks from LSWDD and the Lopez Island Community.

ReMakery Grand Opening, Saturday, May 1 from 11 am - 4 pm Located in Lopez Plaza behind Holly B's Bakery, the ReMakery! 37 Weeks Point Way, Units #10 and #11. In January of 2021, the Department of Ecology announced that due to Covid, there were grant funds that needed to be spent by June 30, 2021. LSWDD applied for their Recycled Market Grant in January, and in February was awarded $50,000 to begin the ReMakery: a new maker space for transforming materials from the recycle plaza and TIOLI into new and usable goods. The ReMakery will be offering classes, workshops, Repair Cafes, Maker in Residence programs, and a host of other maker events. The ReMakery will have industrial sewing machines, sergers, regular sewing machines, 3D printers, jewelry making, leather working tools, electronics repair and tools, and soon a laser cutter, along with host of other useful tools to upcycle and transform materials. The goal of the ReMakery is to educate our community about the value of reduction, reuse, repair, and repurposing items locally to increase the local circular economy (see diagram below). It will provide the Lopez community with space, tools and instruction to help transform materialsthat might have otherwise been exported off the island and to landfill, or far away recycling centers across the globe. The localization of reuse helps decrease green house gas emissions, creates potential revenue sources for local makers and entrepreneurs, and most importantly, continues to keep LSWDD's Zero Waste Mission in the forefront of the minds of the community. Just to help put the need for the ReMakery into context, Pre-Covid, LSWDD was shipping off nearly 1,000 lbs per WEEK of textiles. This equates to nearly 50,000 lbs a year that go through the Goodwill industries, with many traveling to far away countries increasing emissions and green house gases which contribute to climate change. What if we could decrease just a small percentage of these textiles by remaking items locally? What are your ideas? You are welcome to get involved and continue to make our world more sustainable with a reduction in waste. For questions or ideas, or to volunteer to teach a class or create a zero waste item contact Nikyta at nikytap@lopezsolidwaste.org.

Here is the link to the google map of all 70 pins of Free Piles all over Lopez Island! Tour begins Saturday, June 27 at 8 am and goes until Sunday, June 28 at 6 pm. Map: https://goo.gl/maps/18PSt3Av8yrW16Yc6 Please be respectful, follow signs, and give plenty of physical distance. Thank you for participating in the Free Pile Tour of Lopez! Also, here is a list of all the addresses:

SWAP awards the Sarah Eppenbach Scholarship of $500.00 towards higher education to a graduating high school senior. Applicants need to practice an active interest in caring for the environment. Because of the generous donations to the scholarship, SWAP awarded three scholarships to members of the 2020 graduating class. Hazel Arden, Ty Greacen, and Quinn Steckler have each demonstrated a care for the planet, leadership and an understanding of team. The scholarship is given in honor of Sarah Eppenbach, founder of SWAP. Sarah Eppenbach was a force of nature, albeit in a quiet/determined way. Lopez was very blessed with Sarah’s commitment and involvement in the Community, bringing her experience and wisdom to each situation she encountered with gentle diplomacy and grace. With each Community activity Sarah chose to embrace, she demonstrated two critical skills that all should learn to master. The first skill is 'leadership'. For Sarah, leadership was an art. She knew when to lead, and when to follow; when to speak and when to listen. She was always thoughtful and fair. Most importantly, she understood that a strong leader encourages others, which leads to the second skill, team player. All successful enterprises, of which SWAP’s support of the Lopez dump is one and our library is another, are comprised of teams that include both good leadership and complementary skills. Sarah understood how necessary teamwork is, and surrounded herself with people that worked well together. Assembling and maintaining great teams is also an art that Sarah understood. Realistically, Sarah stands as an example to us all, as one who knew few limits as to what could be accomplished with good leadership, a great team, and of course, a fair amount of effort.

The Take It or Leave It (TIOLI) has been closed for nearly three months and LSWDD estimates there are 40-70 TONS of donations just on Lopez Island. Many households have reported that they used the extra time at home during the pandemic to do deep spring cleaning and have accumulated large piles of donations. The TIOLI is planned to re-open in Phase 3, but to help us manage this huge amount of goods, we put together an idea we are calling “Free Pile Tour of Lopez” for the last weekend of June: Saturday and Sunday, June 27-28. Very similar to the studio tour and home tour, where folks drive a self guided tour following a map, we invite folks who have donations to create a “free pile” on their driveway. People who have lived in metropolitan areas might already be very familiar with this phenomena of leaving free goods in piles on the curb or at the end of driveways for anyone to take what they wish. In this case, we are also inviting folks who have large amounts of free goods or want to be featured to send us their address so we can put pins on a downloadable map comprising the “Free Tour of Lopez”. Participants assume all responsibility for their goods, obtaining permissions to place items on driveways, set up and clean up. This is simply an opportunity for a socially distanced and safe gift exchange of goods, neighbor to neighbor. Helpful hints for making reusable goods desirable for adoption are to make the offering neat and tidy, to add clear signage, and attractive displays. Like familiar mainland days of Garage or Estate sale hopping, the “Free Pile Tour of Lopez” hopes to be a fun and engaging way for Lopezians to exchange reusable goods. We hope that you enjoy the “Free Pile Tour of Lopez” in the spirit of reuse that is such a hallmark of Lopez Island culture. If you would like to be added to the map, or have questions, please email Nikyta at nikytap@lopezsolidwaste.org.

On site changes at LSWDD as precautionary measures for Covid-19: Changes to drive up window: -Two Lanes: To reduce person to person contact, we now have two lanes of traffic when you come up the hill. You will now see a sign that says: PAID GARBAGE to the left: this will direct you to the cashier booth so you can pay for your garbage disposal. The same sign directs RECYCLING ONLY to the right lane, where you will bypass the cashier booth and head directly into the recycle plaza to get in and out as quickly as possible. You will be stopped here as we are metering cars, only 9 cars allowed into the recycle plaza at one time. Changes at the cashier booth: -New faces: LSWDD has reduced it’s staff to three teams. So you may see some new faces in the cashier booth depending on when you come. This way if one team gets sick, we have non-contaminated coverage with another two teams. -No Cash, please: We have requested that you NOT pay in cash if you can help it. We prefer checks or credit cards. -6’ distance from Cashier Booth: You may be asked to pull in 6 feet away from the cashier booth, and use a long handled basket to pass payment into the booth. This is to protect our employees and YOU. -No Receipts: We will not be issuing receipts at this time unless requested. This helps reduce in the passing of items back and forth. -Metering cars: If car volumes are higher than we can accommodate parking in a 6 foot spacing between each car, you will be metered into the site. We only have capacity for 9 cars to be recycling at a time. So please, be prepared to be patient, and PRE SORT your recycling at home so you can get in and out QUICKLY. We also recommend coming at lower volume times— which are Fridays and Saturdays. Sunday afternoon is our HIGHEST volume time, and we recommend you avoid coming then if at all possible. Changes to Recycle Plaza Layout for Self Separated Recycling: -No volunteers on site: we will have an employee in the cashier booth and one on the “floor” so please be patient with us if you have questions. We have asked our volunteers to “stay home and stay healthy” per Governors orders. -6 foot space around each tote: You will see two totes in a row for the same material. For example, there will be two identical totes right next to each other to collect #1 plastics, etc). We have done this to reduce the amount of times an employee needs to change the totes during the day. The totes will be clearly marked, and there are no new changes to the materials we currently recycle. -No TIOLI donations: And just a reminder that the TIOLI is closed for the foreseeable future and is not receiving any donations. Thank you for your patience and flexibility during this challenging time.

Take the survey to give your input for the Lopez Island Tool Lending Library (LITLL) here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DWCPDHG

The cost of recycling printers has skyrocketed to roughly $16 a printer, without any guarantee that full recycling of the printer is actually taking place. Rather than pay high fees for a product likely to end up in the landfill, old printers will no longer be accepted as recycling at LSWDD. Printers are unfortunately a “non-program” item that the state’s E-Waste subsidies do not cover. LSWDD is encouraging customers with printers to recycle these by sending them back to the manufacturer or by taking advantage of printer and ink recycling programs at box stores near the I-5 corridor. Customers are encouraged to check out Staples, Office Depot, and Best Buy. Hewlett Packard (HP) takes back nearly all of their products back for free as a part of their consumer buyback and recycle programs. LSWDD tested out HP’s system and found its directions clear and easy. Placing your machine in a box and shipping it off is the best way to recycle your printer for free To Recycle Printers through HP’s “Consumer Buyback and Planet Partners Recycling Program” go to https://hphho.tradeups.com/Customers/51/GetQuote.aspx. Enter your product name and number and a quote will be generated for you. Create a customer profile. In 24 hours, you will be sent a confirmation and a shipping label for to you print to return your HP Product free of charge. On Lopez, you may call FED Ex for a free home pick up: 1.800.463.3339 or https://smallbusiness.fedex.com/manage-pickup.html. Simply put your printer in a shipping box, (available at the Dump!), affix the label and leave it for FED Ex pick up. Once your printer has been received, you will receive a confirmation email. Staples box stores also participate in printer recycling programs and will accept other brands of printers besides HP. The closest Staples is located at 105 Mall Way, Marysville, WA 98270. Currently, Office Depot stores will give you $2 for each printer cartridge you return to their stores up to $20 in store credit. Although this takes a little more effort, recycling this way puts more responsibility on the manufacturers and saves you money.