The Kenai Peninsula Borough is expanding its reuse program at the Homer Transfer Facility. The goal is to pull items like lumber and metal out of the construction and demolition cell before they're buried for good. Kenai Peninsula Borough Mayor Peter Micciche said the effort comes down to keeping functional materials out of the landfill.
"There's nothing that bothers me more than seeing perfectly good materials being put in the ground that I could use, let alone thousands of other peninsula residents. Lumber, metals, materials, wheels, things that people can and will use," Micciche said.
Micciche said the borough formed a recycling working group with staff, volunteers and community members to look for ways to expand reuse. Volunteers with Homer Drawdown proposed helping salvage usable material at the Homer facility. Aaron Ford is a community organizer with Cook InletKeeper, which supports Homer Drawdown. He said volunteers are already diverting a steady stream of usable items before they reach the facility's only active landfill cell.
"We're diverting everything from plywood, two-by-four, all manner of usable wood products. We have diverted several stainless steel kitchen [fixtures]. There was a beautiful cast iron sink, things like that, that just don't need to be buried," Ford said.
The Homer project is part of a broader push to update solid waste management across the peninsula. The borough says the construction and demolition cell at the Homer facility takes in about nine thousand cubic yards of material every year. Ford and Micciche say keeping that much waste out of the ground reduces carbon emissions and protects the local environment. Micciche said the borough recently restarted mixed paper and cardboard recycling after installing a new baler at the Central Peninsula Landfill. The borough is also launching a tire shredding program and working with an in-state processor to recycle plastics locally.
Ford said the idea behind the Homer project isn't new. He says residents used to be able to salvage materials directly from the landfill, and that community appetite never really went away.
"Like they were in the old days, you could just go right up there and pull whatever you wanted out of the pile. There's a lot of community energy behind this. A lot of folks wanted to get back to those days," Ford said.
Volunteers are at the Homer Transfer Facility on Saturdays to help residents sort their items and share information about the impacts of landfill waste. Volunteers hope to expand how much material they can intercept before it reaches the cell
More on the Homer Transfer Facility is at kpb.us. More on Homer Drawdown's No Scrap Wasted project is at inletkeeper.org.
