Evergreen Nursery & Garden Center recently stepped up, offering Anchorage an option for composting this spring. Evergreen will open its doors this Saturday, May 10th, to the public for drop-off of compostable materials. So gather up your leaves, grass clippings, brush and woody material and head to 760 East 120th Ave., off Old Seward. The site also is accepting horse manure!

Here are some of the details:
Hours: Mon - Sat, 8am - 6pm. Closed Sundays.
Fees: A standard pick-up truck load of green and wood waste will cost $20/load. Larger trucks and containers will be charged $25/cubic yard. And horse manure will cost $30/cubic yard.

Saturday, May 10, from 10am to 3pm -- Recycle your household electronics at Romig Middle School's parking lot. Total Reclaim will be there to accept your scrap computers, TVs, stereos, microwaves, and other electronics. A small fee per items is charged. The Total Reclaim warehouse in Huffman Business Park also will be open during those same hours on Saturday so you'll have two places to drop off this weekend. Call Total Reclaim for details 561-0544

TUESDAY, MAY 6th at 6pm
Assembly Chambers at the Loussac Library

The Assembly will be hearing public testimony about the proposed recycling plan. Come out and let the Assembly know what you want.

Alaska Center for the Environment (ACE) and Alaska Youth for Environmental Action (AYEA) will be rallying at 6pm at the Loussac Assembly Chambers entrance. Wear your school colors, or wear green to support recycling.

Visit www.muni.org/sws/recycling.cfm for information about the proposed recycling plan.

The public hearing scheduled for this Tuesday, April 29th addressing the Municipality's proposed recycling plan has been postponed until the May 6th Assembly meeting. The recycling plan was scheduled at the end of an already very full Assembly agenda so, rather than have supporters show up and wait when there was a good chance that the topic would be bumped from the agenda due to time constraints, the recycling public hearing has been rescheduled for the May 6th Assembly meeting. Please spread the word and come out on May 6th to support the plan either by testifying or by just being there. Your presence sends a strong message to the Assembly.

...so Total Reclaim is now accepting magnetic media for recycling. That means VHS, Beta and cassette tapes, as well as 8-track tapes, if anyone still has these! Total Reclaim is at 12101 Industry Way, Unit C4, in the Huffman Business Park. Hours are Monday-Friday, 8am-5pm. Contact Total Reclaim at 561-0544.

The ubiquitous CROC, which comes in more colors than a rainbow and seems to go with any wardrobe in Alaska, is now RECYCLABLE. Alaska Mill & Feed is Anchorage's official collection point so you can bring in your old and battered Crocs and even buy a new pair while you're there! All the Crocs will be shipped to a Crocs plant where they will be cleaned, shredded and remanufactured into new Crocs. The new recycled Crocs will be sold or given away in underpriveleged areas. Crocs has pledged to donate two million pairs of shoes this year. The program is call Soles United. Alaska Mill & Feed is at 1501 East 1st Ave. Hours are Monday-Friday, 9am-7pm. Contact Alaska Mill & Feed at 276-6016.

Alaska Metal Recycling will be providing free metal
recycling bins at the Anchorage Regional Landfill and the Anchorage Central Transfer Station for the Citywide
Cleanup Free Dump Days May 3, 4 & 10.

To take best advantage of this free service, users need to be responsible recyclers. Please refer to the lists of guidelines on this handout which will apply when recycling metal during the free dump days. Note that Alaska Metal Recycling is in our resource list on the left.

There will be a public hearing on Tuesday, April 29th, at 5pm at the Assembly Chambers in the Loussac Library regarding the recently proposed recycling plan for the Muni. Be sure to contact your Assembly person about the plan and to come to the public hearing to show support. Remember that some of you will have a new Assembly person after tonight's meeting and that person will need to be educated about recycling and the benefits to our community.

Here are just a few things that Anchorage will get:

Expanded Drop-off Sites --Three new and expanded drop-off sites for residents and businesses; at the landfill in Eagle River, in Muldoon, and in the Huffman area. Sites will accept newspaper, cardboard, mixed paper, aluminum, steel, glass, PET plastic bottles, HDPE plastic jugs, and stretchy plastic films.

That's the name of our new forum to answer your specific recycling questions. If you look to the right of this article, you'll see the link to the forum. We hope this new opportunity will inspire creative ideas as well as help to get accurate recycling information out there for everyone to use.

Hi. This is Jeanne. I've been out of town so I haven't had a chance to introduce myself to the blog world yet but I wanted to let everyone know about Total Reclaim's first household electronics recycling event of the season.

The event will be held at Chugach Optional School this Saturday (April 12) from 10am until 3pm. The address is 1205 E Street. Any resident can bring household electronics to the event for recycling. Total Reclaim will charge a small flat fee per item, depending on what it is.

Of course anyone can recycle at Total Reclaim's warehouse in the Huffman Business Park during regular business hours but Total Reclaim is making recycling more convenient for residents by providing Saturday hours and bringing events to your neighborhood.

The scourge of the avid recycler is the "hard to recycle" materials. And it's a conundrum for all those involved in collecting and finding markets for materials. Molded styrofoam (not packing peanuts but the kind that surrounds your new stereo system when you bring it home) is one of those hard to recycle items that can't be recycled in Alaska. Several cities/recyclers in the lower 48 have purchased equipment to grind the material into pellets that can be melted down but it's a costly operation.

Here's a "reuse" idea from a local gardener: Use the material in the bottom of your big garden pots. You won't need to use as much soil and the pots are easier to move!

Night scene: Lighting experts toured the site where new lights are installed to test their acceptability. The city says the new whiter lights will save money because they last longer.

Take the video tour here.

Hi all, Mary Fisher here. What better reason to post my first blog than to relay a huge thanks to Kevin Harun for the great work he has done in the past few years to help the Muni move forward with a new recycling plan. And not just a plan but many successful initiatives and public awareness efforts that has helped usher in a brand new day for recycling in Anchorage. It's not always easy to initiate change and Kevin has pushed ahead with enthusiasm, inclusiveness and so importantly, a reasoned approach.
Kudo's Kevin and all best!
cans

I forgot to tell you that starting tomorrow the Recycling and Renewables Rap blog will be taken over by three incredible individuals: Mary Fisher, longtime director of Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling (ALPAR); Jeanne Carlson, longtime Green Star recycling guru and now half-time recycling coordinator at Solid Waste Services; and Adele Stickman, intern at the Mayor's Office.

What a great new crew!

Hi Everyone,

I just wanted to let you know that Tuesday will be my last day as renewable resources manager for the city. Back in January, I decided I wanted to work on an electoral campaign to help move our state forward. Sorry, it would not be appropriate for me to discuss any specifics on this blog because I'm on the job right now. But I want you all to know how much I sincerely appreciate all your moral support, hard work, questions and promptings to make Anchorage a model for sustainability.

Mayor Begich’s vision, along with your volunteer help, has made all of our accomplishments reality (see some of them below). This good work will continue. The Mayor has hired Jeanne Carlson and Donna Mears, two of Alaska’s most knowledgeable recyclers, to work at Solid Waste Services. I am also proud to announce that the new renewable resources manager will be longtime Alaska Center for the Environment director Randy Virgin. Randy is amazing and he will begin work at the end of April.

Iceberg
Hi, my name is Adele Stickman. You can find my bio in the box at right, below the recycle logo.

I have recently become the new renewable resource intern working under Kevin Harun. Something that I would like to share is the Mayor's Sustainable Building Initiative. It was a meeting that I went to yesterday, led by Michelle Anderson.

Michelle is an interior designer working for Dirtt Environmental Solutions. She has created a spread sheet known as "Iceberg." I thought the meeting was interesting because she talked about ways to build, but also to eliminate construction waste and future renovation waste.

Hi, I'm Kevin Harun, renewable resources manager for the city and a blogger here. I'll be checking this blog Saturday, March 22, for your curbside recycling questions. If you'd like to pose one, just click on the "add a comment" link below, and type your question in the box that pops up. If you need to read about the plan first, you'll find a 69-page "PDF:Recycling Recommendations" here, or a shorter 19-page presentation of it here. Check back later for answers. Thanks for your interest, I look forward to answering your questions.

Long at last, our proposed Comprehensive Recycling Plan will be presented to the Anchorage Assembly tomorrow,Friday, March 21, from 2 to 3:30 PM at the Mayor’s Conference Room at City Hall.

This meeting is open to the public to observe but it is not a public hearing.

Public testimony will come later over the coming weeks as we introduce ordinances to implement the plan (no date has yet been set for this).

Kevin: Remember when I alerted you to the issue of what consumers will do without high definition signal and what will happen to those old TVs? Well, we'll have to get those conversion boxes. Supposedly the feds are underwriting those costs for each household. I have yet to have anyone contact me. I keep seeing commercials, but locally I haven't found the devices for sale.

But the real story was the public spectrum that was cleared by the federal decision to auction off the portions of the public airwaves (once for TV signals) for use by cellular devices fetched $19 billion at auction. When you think about the price versus the value, an analyst would conclude that the wireless companies got a fire sale price for the public spectrum. See you.

March 14, 2008 Contact: Julie Hasquet, 343-7103 Kevin Harun, 343-4174

Mayor Mark Begich is hosting more than 70 representatives from cities, utilities and lighting specialists from across the country, at a lighting conference scheduled March 18-19 at the Hotel Captain Cook. The conference coincides with the city’s own testing of new energy efficient street lights as a way to save taxpayers millions of dollars a year.

To test which technology would serve the public best, the Municipality of Anchorage has installed energy efficient lights at three test sites in an Anchorage neighborhood. On March 17, 40 resident volunteers will join in the Green Lighting Bus Tour of the sites under the guidance of national light consultants, Clanton and Associates. The tour will be used to gauge residents’ feedback on different kinds of energy efficient lighting.