Team effort underway to keep Styrofoam out of the landfill

Volunteers sort through nearly 400 pounds of foam to recycle and redirect it away from the county landfill. (Times photos by Laura Denon)

Paul Allen, owner of Feed Me Foam LLC, teaches Birdie Rock, a 7-year-old volunteer from Brevard, how to properly feed packaging foam into his densifying machine, "Audrey III."

The seemingly unlikely collaboration between an interdenominational religious fellowship, a private entrepreneur and the county's landfill has accomplished a feat previously not done in Transylvania County: diverting Styrofoam out of the landfill to recycle it.

On Oct. 15, 381.4 pounds of expanded polystyrene, the chemical name for the trademark brand Styrofoam, was recycled at a three-hour volunteer-run event.

To put it in perspective, Paul Allen, owner of Feed Me Foam LLC, said, "If you get your 70-inch television, that might be a half a pound of foam."

In the one month leading up the event, the Pisgah Forest Collection Center collected hard-packing foam that filled up two 40-cubic-foot containers on-site. Volunteers fed Allen's densifying machine, "Audrey III," that foam, which compacted it by a ratio of 75:1 into 50-pound blocks. Allen will sell and drive these blocks to a South Carolina commodity broker and they will be recycled into various items like insulation, picture frames, faux trim boards and benches, food service packaging and alternative fuels.

The Transylvania Creation Care Fellowship paid for Audrey III's visit to the county with the help of a financial grant from First United Methodist Church.

"The Fellowship," is what member Mary Arnaudin calls a "very loose group."

"We’re not chartered, organized or anything like that. We’re not really established as an entity," she said.

Rather, they are a group of concerned citizens from five different county churches and anyone else who wants to join whose wish is to help the environment and have come together to create the greatest impact.

It started last fall. Arnaudin said First United Methodist Church had just created a Creation Care Ministry as part of the larger movement occurring across the nation and globe and their first project was to treat large Hemlock trees on their property from infestation.

"There's a growing support to try to be good stewards and realize that how we are using resources — it's not only effecting the ecosystem — but it's effecting people," she said. "It's also a concern for justice —when people are effected by living where they do — in poor areas where waste is dumped.

"So we haven't actually tackled anything like that directly, but it's just an awareness that we have: Trying to make things healthier for everyone."

Once her church started working on their property's trees, Arnaudin noticed other churches were also doing impactful environmental projects.

"Like, the Episcopalians, they were making a meditation trail in the woods up from their garden," she said. "Then, the Brevard-Davidson River Presbyterians, they had put in solar panels. And we just started realizing that other churches had also had some kind of Creation Care movement going on. The Lutherans had been trying to eliminate Styrofoam coffee cups at their coffee hour. The Unitarians were getting rid of the plantings on Caldwell Street and trying to replace with native plants."

Over the last year, the five denominations have come together to host large educational public programs, including an electric vehicle show, a collection of pesticides and herbicides with a presentation on handling and avoiding household hazardous waste, a solar workshop and a backyard composting workshop.

Foam, Arnaudin said, is a "household hazardous waste because if it's left out in the environment and breaks down, there are health concerns and it really doesn't completely break down … It also is being dumped into the landfill and taking up space when our space is very limited now and so (we’re) trying to extend the life of the landfill so we don't have to keep making more landfills."

The nonprofit organization Asheville Greenworks connected the Fellowship with Allen who, since May, has been trucking around his portable foam densifier, as a for-profit business.

Foam recycling, he said, "was logistically challenging so it got me thinking about how to make foam recycling easier. So I said, ‘well why don't I just start doing it myself?’ So I did."

Allen crisscrosses western North Carolina diverting foam charging around $100 per hour for his services which include his overhead costs like fuel, transit time and then delivering the foam blocks to recycling centers.

He said the current research estimates it takes 500 years for foam to disintegrate, but no one really knows.

"It just does not go away," he said. "It's in our oceans, it's in the top layer, in the middle layer and the lower layer of our oceans in all forms. At a local collection center, which happened to be up in Madison County, I’ve seen the collections in three months double with no advertising.

"The same advertising Transylvania did, with just a sign."

Allen focuses on hard packaging foam not soft foam wrap or packaging peanuts. Foam brokers buy clean foam, so he said it's important to clean foam the same way people clean out jars and cans before recycling them.

Publix grocery store, he said, is where people should take their food-packing foam, like take-out boxes, cups, bowls and meat trays, which has a robust recycling program for that particular type.

"I would say the business is growing which means that people are diverting Styrofoam or EPS (expanded polystyrene), they’re diverting it from our landfills, which is what we want," he said.

Transylvania County Solid Waste Director Kenn Webb, who has worked for more than 30 years in the hazardous waste and environmental science field, thought the event was an absolute success.

"Now that we’ve seen people really will do this, will bring it in and separate it," he said. "I’ll try to roll it into future budgets for solid waste."

Webb, encouraged by the community's interest and initiative to continue, said he and his staff from now on will direct foam to holding containers and will continue to recycle it with the help of "Audrey III."

Additionally, he will direct his staff to also collect foam at the landfill site.

For those who do not live within city limits, one bag of garbage costs $3 to dump.

Recycling is free, so it is economical for residents to sort their glass, plastic, aluminum and now foam.

"It is bulky, and if you’re putting it in bags and putting bag tags on it then, yes, it is taking up a lot of bags of garbage," he said.

Arnaudin said Webb "has been great and I think it's helped him with the Fellowship, because a lot of the things he hears are complaints and we’re trying to work with him which he says is inspiring him to do more, in his servant role in the county."

The Pisgah Forest Collection Center is open from 8 a.m. until 5:30 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

The landfill site is open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Saturday.

For more information on recycling, visit the county's website at www.transylvaniacounty.org/departments/solid-waste.

Volunteers sort through nearly 400 pounds of foam to recycle and redirect it away from the county landfill. (Times photos by Laura Denon)

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