On this West Virginia Morning, Government Reporter Randy Yohe spoke with Gov. Jim Justice during Wednesday night’s episode of The Legislature Today. We listen to part of that conversation where the governor discussed budget surpluses and tax reductions.
On this West Virginia Morning, Government Reporter Randy Yohe spoke with Gov. Jim Justice during Wednesday night’s episode of The Legislature Today. We listen to part of that conversation where the governor discussed budget surpluses and tax reductions.
Also, in this show, the Allegheny Front, based in Pittsburgh, shares its latest story about recycling plastics.
West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.
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Every semester, Marshall University adds a significant amount of waste to landfills from items left behind by students as they move out from residence halls. Students often leave behind clothing, bed covers, furniture, and appliances.
But in the spring of 2021, the university was able to reduce the waste by having students donate their items to the new Marshall thrift store, run by Marshall’s sustainability department.
“It’s $3 in HerdPoints, which is a Marshall currency. You buy the bag with that and then you fill that bag to capacity,” said Nick Matawa, a student at Marshall University. “Next time you come, and if you still happen to have that bag, it’s $1.”
Waste was reduced by 50 percent, says Logan Pointer – the thrift store manager, who said feedback from students and faculty has been positive. “Everybody’s been really proud of this project,” he said.
Matawa previously worked for Marshall facilities, and has personally witnessed the usual amount of waste. “Traditionally a lot of people leave — you wouldn’t believe how much that they leave. Microwaves, mini-fridges, clothing all get yeeted into a big old Dumpster and dragged off to a landfill,” he said.
Luke Campbell, another Marshall student, said he’s found bargain appliances he can use. “I was thinking about getting a sewing machine or something to try and it was three bucks,” Campbell said. “You’d probably be paying for something of similar quality, like 40 or so bucks from Walmart. So seeing this here for that cheap is a huge help.”
The thrift shop is located at 331 Hal Greer Boulevard across from Marshall University.
Marshall University’s Sustainability Department has set a goal of making the school free of plastic waste by 2026.
Not many high schools can say their students operate an award-winning recycling program for their county, much less small schools in rural communities.
But teens at New Richmond’s Wyoming East High School get to do just that. Since launching their student-and-volunteer-run recycling program in 2017, members of the school’s Friends of the Earth club have salvaged thousands of recyclable items that otherwise would have ended up in local parks and public roadways.
The group has received several grants and honors from local and national organizations alike, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Education, Try This WV and the PepsiCo Recycling Rally.
According to Brittany Bauer, a life sciences teacher sponsoring the club, her students wanted to be “involved in their community and given an opportunity to lead.”
“Ultimately, they became community game-changers, because they had an idea. And they followed through with it. They were creative and determined, and they worked really hard. … And they saw the change.”
Bauer helped revive Friends of the Earth in 2015 with five students from her AP Environmental Science class.
“One of the students was really moved by learning about the tragedy of the commons, and how with these public spaces, we don’t take care of them,” Bauer said. “After that discussion, they started looking around at their environment, and looking at the litter on the side of the road.”
When students first started recycling, Bauer said they started with a 1,000 to 2,000-can goal in mind. They surpassed that within a week. One month later, Friends of the Earth moved onto types No. 1 and No. 2 plastics.
“We were just doing it within the school,” Bauer said. “And then I think some of their parents and their family members, they said, ‘We need this in our entire county, can the school manage that for our entire county?’”
Last school year, Friends of the Earth recycled more than 11,000 pounds of plastic and aluminum, according to data from the school. Factoring in metals and cardboard, the school reports its club recycled more than 17,000 pounds of material.
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Brittany Bauer, a teacher at Wyoming East High School, sorts some of the recyclable items her students collect, as members of the school’s Friends of the Earth club.
This year, Bauer says a total 67 students plan to join Friends of the Earth. The group’s goals are still largely influenced by those classroom discussions Bauer facilitated four years ago — not only does the group accept, sort and transport locally-collected plastics to the Raleigh County Waste Authority, but it holds school-wide recycling contests, and they manage recycling for local events, like the Mullens Dogwood Festival.
“Recycling, and kind of the movement that the students created, is drawing awareness to how we should manage our waste more responsibly,” Bauer said.
High Praises From National, Local Organizations Alike
Bauer, a Houston native, came to West Virginia after working for AmeriCorps. She started at Wyoming East as a Spanish teacher. Today, she teaches AP Biology, Honors Biology and Life Sciences from a science-lab-style classroom in the back of the school.
She keeps a small zoo of class pets by the lab stations, including a bearded dragon named Fuego.
“They get to feed the animals and they get to manage it. So it’s a little bit more hands-on in that way,” Bauer said. “And doesn’t it make it more exciting? I mean, having that little distraction of, ‘Okay, Fuego, what’s he doing today?’ It’s just nice.”
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Students in Brittany Bauer’s classes for biology and life sciences manage and study class pets.
Friends of the Earth itself has garnered much recognition and support for its environmental work. Last school year, Bauer and the club secured a $26,000 grant from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protections for their county board of education, to increase recycling. The club also received a $5,000 grant from the state Department of Education to convert some No. 2 plastics into materials for 3D printing.
A $2,000 grant from Try This WV helped students and volunteers clean litter from more than 30 miles of roadside. Amy Vest, now a tenth grader in Bauer’s Honors Biology class, helped clean with her older sister last year.
“A couple times over the summer, and during school too, we did litter cleanups in Maben,” Vest said. “And people would honk at us as we were going by. So we were doing a good job.”
Vest and her classmates noticed a lot of the items were recyclable.
“We have a lot of people who are on fixed incomes and don’t have a way to transport (recyclables),” Bauer said. “If they don’t have a vehicle, which a lot of our residents don’t have vehicles, how are we expecting them to get rid of this trash? I think that really contributes to a lot of the litter that we have on the side of the road … We can provide a way to reduce some of that. I think recycling, and kind of the movement that the students created, is drawing awareness to how we should manage our waste more responsibly.”
Appreciating The Environment Locally, Respecting It Globally
When Bauer was in the Galapagos Islands, she said a guided tour of the ecosystem there helped her discover plants and animals she wouldn’t have recognized on her own.
Credit Emily Allen / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Brittany Bauer, a teacher at Wyoming East High School, waits for students to arrive to her next class.
“People travel to the Galapagos not for the city, but to see the big giant tortoises — they want to see the animals,” Bauer said. “We have that in southern West Virginia — we have unique species; we have different crayfish that you can’t find anywhere else in the world.”
A few years later, she took her AP Environmental Science students for a hike a Twin Falls, a state park just thirty minutes away from the school.
“They went hiking with a naturalist and they were just blown away, because he was just pointing out ginger, these medicinal foods and how our culture here ties to that,” Bauer said.
As students begin to appreciate the nature surrounding them, Bauer said she hopes they’ll continue to care for it and encourage others to do so, too.
“When you’re proud of your area, you want to take care of it, you want it to be clean, and that really was a stimulus for them to start discussions about what we can do to change our community and take that leadership.”
But in Bauer’s class, the benefits of reducing local waste extend far beyond the flora and fauna of Wyoming County.
“If we’re littering or dumping illegally, and it’s just plastic that ends up getting into the river, we talk about this with the students. Like, where does it go from our river? Well, the Guyandotte connects to where? And they start talking about Huntington and the Ohio River, but the Ohio River goes where? So you can follow how the recyclables, and (the) plastics eventually get into our oceans.
“We take this local lens, and then apply it to a global level, so they can see how what we do here does affect our Earth. If everybody has that same mindset that we can just dump our trash, we all are contributing to what’s happening in our oceans.”
Marshall University’s Sustainability Department is again hosting an Earth Day celebration on Wednesday.
The event promotes sustainable living practices and works to educate Marshall students and the public about local programs and activities.
Included will be opportunities to recycle electronics, paper, plastic and clothing; a 30-foot rock climbing wall; arts and crafts from local artists; and several giveaways.
The event is free and open to everyone. It begins at 10:30 a.m. and runs until 1:30 p.m. at the Memorial Student Center Plaza on Marshall’s Huntington campus.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has awarded nearly two dozen recycling grants to groups in 20 counties.
The DEP said in a news release that funding for the recycling assistance grant program is generated through a $1 assessment fee per ton of solid waste disposed at in-state landfills.
The nearly $1.3 million in grants will be distributed to some towns, nonprofit groups, recycling stations and solid waste authorities.
Those counties include Barbour, Boone, Braxton, Cabell, Calhoun, Greenbrier, Hancock, Jefferson, Kanawha, Lewis, Marion, Mercer, Monongalia, Pleasants, Pocahontas, Preston, Tucker, Upshur, Wetzel, and Wood Counties.
The grants will assist in the purchase of items such as collection bins, forklifts, trailers and other recycling vehicles, facility repairs, and fuel.
In the year 2017, recycling programs exist in several communities in West Virginia, but these programs have not significantly changed the state’s habit of burying trash in the hills. West Virginians are sending about the same amount of trash to the state’s 18 landfills as they have for decades.
In 1989, West Virginia lawmakers passed a bill that’s goal was to reduce residential waste going to landfills by 50 percent by 2010. The bill was necessary to meet federal requirements. According to data collected by the state over the years – West Virginia hasn’t yet made any progress toward that goal.
Scrappy Pappy’s Recycling: Pipe Dream or Inevitability?
Scott Ludolph owns and operates Scrappy Pappy’s Recycling in the city he grew up in — Wheeling, West Virginia. He accepts a long list of items at his single-stream facility.
“We get rid of probably 30,000 pounds of cardboard and plastics,” Ludolph said as he separated a bag of recyclables recently dropped off. “All your other stuff is glass, metals, other materials — but that equals about 50,000 pounds a week we do.”
Wheeling residents send about 1000 tons of waste to landfills every month (and have for more than a decade). Recycling hasn’t really picked up as a social norm in the city of 28,000 people. Ludolph wants to change the status quo.
“This is great to teach our children that not everything needs to be thrown away. We can recycle probably safely 80 to 85 percent of what get thrown in the landfill. So we want to challenge ourselves and make the future better, and make it brighter,” Ludolph said.
He and a small crew hand separate, bail and sell the various materials to local companies interested in reusing them. But it’s hard for a small business to play the commodities game and make money because prices fluctuate based on global trends.
Credit Chuck Kleine / West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Scott Ludolph atop bales of cardboard in Wheeling, West Virginia.
Ludolph is also competing with the 2nd largest waste management company in the U.S.: Republic Services. Republic does not offer recycling in Wheeling, and did not return any phone calls for this story. Big companies have few, if any, financial incentives to divest from the much simpler business of landfilling.
Ludolph started his recycling business five years ago and says with more community buy-in, he could build a facility that employs dozens. His ultimate dream is to go a step further and manufacture products from the recycled materials he collects.
It might sound like a pipe dream, but communities in the Eastern Panhandle have already accomplished something similar.
Berkeley County: Realizing the Recycling Dream
Clint Hogbin is chairman of the Berkeley County Solid Waste Authority which has created and overseen a recycling program that started in 1995. It’s grown appreciably since then.
Berkeley County recycles a wide spectrum of commodities from glass and electronics, to paper, plastic and metals, to yard and food waste.
“We have almost an individual market for each one of those items,” Hogbin said. “So you can’t name one company or even two or three companies that gets it all.”
Berkeley County’s Solid Waste Authority also partners with a local residential waste hauler – Apple Valley Waste. That allows for curbside services for the public.
“Generally, [recycling] is not an extremely profitable venture,” said John Decker, the managing partner of Apple Valley. “But there is a cost avoidance when it comes to landfills.”
“Landfills will likely be an integral part of the solid waste circle for a long time,” he continued. “But what we want to try to do is move it to the back of the line. So instead of the material finding the landfill first, after being processed recycled, it finds the landfill last. That’s our goal.”
And like Scott Ludolph’s dreams of taking recycling a step further – toward repurposing – folks in Berkeley County are achieving the goal by investing in a company called ENTSORGA.
Decker explains that leftover waste not recycled on the curb by residents usually only can be landfilled or incinerated. Entsorga processes that waste, reducing the volume even more before it ends up in the landfill.
“It’s a very simple, very environmentally friendly friendly process.” Decker said. “We basically just dry the waste with just forced air — no heat, no combustion.” He explained that the waste heats itself just like a compost pile does. Once it’s dry, it’s sorted again, pulling any remaining metals.
“The remaining material is a very dry almost confetti like material that happens to be a great product to use either in concert or as a substitute for coal.”
It gets used at a nearby cement kiln.
“Through all of that we will again reduce the amount of material that’s being landfilled down to probably 20 percent. So we will have hopefully an 80 percent diversion rate here in the panhandle in the very near future.”
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
“Managing your waste stream through recycling generally create six times more jobs than if you just landfill the material,” said Berkeley County’s Solid Waste Authority chairman Clint Hogbin. “In some cases, more than six times.”
Hogbin says it costs communities about the same to recycle as it does to landfill.
“We’re competitive in the short term, and it’s the right thing to do, and we’re very competitive in the long term when you look at the end of the environmental costs remediation that you don’t have with when you recycle something.”
Hogbin says it took a lot of local political support in the face of continuous legal battles with landfill companies to get to where the county is today.
He says ultimately, it’s the will of community that makes recycling possible.
