Stop Talking Trash: How one man, one dog, and a truck are transforming waste into recoverable resources
Resource Recovery Project founder, Ed Ehlers, never talks trash. Instead, he collects recoverable resources (a.k.a. recyclable materials) from his project members in Clifton, VA, and makes sure that they get to a facility where they can be used again.
Several years ago, Ehlers was walking his dogs and would habitually pick up trash wherever he found it. He noticed that many littered items could have been recycled, but instead they were treated as waste. He looked more closely at the recycling system and found it to be broken in many ways. It’s complicated, messy, and hard for the average person to understand. Traditional commingled curbside recycling is not very successful, through the lens of resource recovery. Many municipal recycling centers have contamination rates of 25-40%, meaning that at least one out of every four items we throw in our blue bins, while technically recyclable, ends up as trash because it is dirty, contaminated, damaged, or can’t easily be separated. And once our recycling has been sorted, not every stream even has a market for the facility to sell it to. So where do those things go? You guessed it: in the trash pile. Incredibly, according to the Recycling Partnership, only one in ten recyclable items flowing through the municipal recycling system will actually be recycled.
Enter: the Resource Recovery Project.
Disrupting the Status Quo
Ehlers set out to change this process. In April 2021, with a grant from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, he recruited a few dozen of his neighbors in Clifton, VA as pilot project participants. He distributed “Big Green Bags” for people to put their recyclables in and drove around once a week to collect them in his pickup truck. His conditions: he would take anything clean and dry that was “not yucky”– and no medical, hazardous, or food waste. Once back at his sorting center, he would manually separate everything into bins, bags, and boxes. Over time, he researched take-back, recovery, and recycling programs for 31 different streams – from traditional things like cardboard and aluminum, to trickier items such as beauty care packaging and holiday lights. “Solutions are as variable as the resources in the world. There is no magic bullet,” he says.
Since the project’s inception in 2021, Ehlers (and one part-time helper) have processed 76,500 pounds of resources by hand, with an astounding 96% recovery rate. Where does it all go? He personally delivers or sends items to the proper destination, including municipal recycling facilities, donation centers, and business-based collection centers. One day you may see Ed delivering a truckload full of bicycles to the bicycle donation drop-off at Fairfax County’s I-66 Transfer Station. Another day he may drop off a box full of health and beauty aid containers at Nordstrom Rack’s Beauty Cycle collection point. Wherever he goes, Ed carefully weighs, tallies, and tracks everything he handles. Good data helps him understand his business and its impacts, which he proudly shares several times a year on the Resource Recovery Project website and social media accounts. The metrics show that this project is possible, that it is efficient, and that it is making a difference.
Greater Goals
Ed’s aim is to demonstrate that single stream curbside recycling, if done well, can be effective at diverting unwanted items for reuse, repurposing, recovery, or recycling. It may not be glamorous work, but it is certainly innovative and important as our society faces ever-increasing pressure from waste and pollution. The Resource Recovery Project offers proof that one person, a dog, and a pickup truck are all that’s necessary to begin finding a new and better way of doing things. Let’s all #StopTalkingTrash!
And bonus for us at Clean Fairfax: Ed Ehlers not only serves as our Board Secretary, but he also features as a member of our Speakers Bureau. Want to learn more about recovering resources, improving recycling success, or how to deal with hard-to-recycle items? Head over to our Speakers Bureau page and request a speaking appearance by Ed at your group’s next gathering.
#StopTalkingTrash!
