As you might have seen in the Oct. 11 issue of the Chieftain, the county, the Friends of Wallowa County Recycling, (the volunteer group created to work with the county’s recycling program) and all of you are continuing to work together to maintain, expand, improve and better understand the recycling world and how we all can generate less waste, and effectively recycle and dispose of the waste we do generate.

As we all work together to reduce what we consume, reuse more of what we do consume, and stretch ourselves to look for ways to recycle everything else, it is important to remind everyone that our local recycling center, (located in Enterprise at 301 Fish Hatchery Lane), can only accept the following materials:

• The door labeled Tin/Metal accepts tin and metal cans, clean cat food and tuna cans and so forth — and no trash.

• The door labeled Aluminum Only accepts aluminum beverage cans. Anything else that may have aluminum in it must be deposited in the tin/metal area. No trash.

• The door labeled Office Paper accepts only office paper, not in plastic bags. No trash.

• The door labeled Mixed Paper accepts all other paper not in plastic bags, including envelopes, magazines, paperback books. Brown packing paper should be deposited with cardboard. If you put your paper in a bag, put in a paper bag, (no plastic). No trash.

• The door labeled Cardboard accepts all cardboard and brown packing paper. Everything that is not cardboard needs to be taken out of boxes. No trash.

• Plastics accepts clean plastic containers with lids removed. The following are not accepted: Shopping bags, (ask Safeway to start accepting them again), plastic film, feed bags, any type of Styrofoam and any rigid plastic that breaks when folded. No trash.

• The Glass Bin accepts all glass bottles/jars with lids removed.

• The blue bin outside the plastics window accepts only rigid plastic six-pack holders. No other items should be put in this bin.

When items not listed above are deposited or dumped at the recycling center it requires someone else to clean it up, while lessening the price the county receives. This puts additional financial pressure on the entire recycling program. This is something we each have control over, and we ask for your help ensuring that only the items listed above are deposited at Wallowa County’s Recycling Center.

Plastics continue to be the most challenging material to recycle (currently only 3% of plastics are recycled nationally), primarily due to the low value of recyclable plastic due to the petroleum companies producing so much virgin plastic and the complexity in recycling it. With this in mind, let’s all strive to do everything we can to avoid plastic packaging in the things we buy. Mike Grover, who runs the Recycling Center, has done a wonderful job finding a plastics buyer who pays enough to cover the costs of transporting the materials with a little left over for the county. This corrects some inaccurate information regarding costs shared at the recent commissioners meeting.

Even the fractional amount of plastic that is recycled continues to degrade in its performance each time it is handled. A plastic water bottle can at best be recycled two to three times, (and even then, needs to have virgin plastic added to it), before it is unusable and must be disposed of.

Disposed of means burned, buried and often sent to pollute the oceans and other countries, (a great documentary to help better understand this is “The Plastic Problem,” a PBS NewsHour documentary). When that plastic water or Sprite bottle is disposed of it takes more than 450 years to breakdown. Fully 100% of all the plastics ever produced are still in our air, water, land, animals, fish and bodies. Let’s work together to eliminate single-use plastics whenever we can.

Currently in the United States, we are recycling 34% of discarded materials, but only 3% of plastics, which is the biggest challenge. This overall recycling number is up dramatically from only 6 percent in 1960, but the United States still falls far behind other developed countries.

Germany leads the world in recycling municipal solid waste with a whopping 68% recycling rate, and countries like Austria, South Korea, Wales and Switzerland round out the top five. As of 2019, the United States has yet to touch the top 10 recycling countries.

Recycle Across America reports that when U.S. recycling levels reach 75%, it will be the environmental and carbon dioxide equivalent of discarding 55 million vehicles from the roads each year — and it could generate 1.5 million new jobs across the country.

Let’s work together to recycle everything that is acceptable at our Recycling Center, while lessening or eliminating our use of single-use plastics, and continuing to remind our local, state and federal lawmakers to expand and improve the recycling opportunities in our county, state and country.