It”s deja vu all over again – Mercer Island Recycling Center celebrates its 30th
Published 6:50 pm Monday, November 24, 2008
By Lynn Porter
It now seems so matter of fact, so “of course,” so “duh.”
But when a group of Mercer Island students in 1970 started recycling tin and aluminum cans, newspapers, glass, and refillable beer bottles they collected from residents at what is now Mercerdale Park, the young people were considered, if not radical, at least a little out there.
Now decades later it’s easy to smile at that image of the youngsters.
But back then when some of those students formed a club called the Committee to Save the Earth on Earth Day, April 22, 1970, and in 1975 when that club got the Mercer Island Recycling Center built, the youngsters were thought of as cutting edge.
Just consider the times.
In 1970, Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” which spurred people to environmentalism with its warning about the dangers of pesticides, had been in circulation less than a decade.
People were just becoming aware that America didn’t have unlimited space in which to put its garbage
And the Keep America Beautiful campaign, designed to encourage Americans to stop using highways, waterways or other public places as litter dumps, only began airing in 1970 that now-famous television ad showing a native American crying over the desecration of a once-pristine land.
Only by walking a bit in the youngsters’ platform shoes and Converse High Tops could you have understood how far-out their thinking was.
In fact, the high school students in the Committee to Save the Earth initially refused to keep the cash garnered from the recycled garbage. So the approximately $1,000 a month went to a Bellevue church that helped people down on their luck.
“The high school kids didn’t want anything to do with money because `money is dirty,”’ said Harry Leavitt, explaining their thinking.
But Leavitt, 57, and now an adviser to the committee, said the club relented after a few years when members realized they’d need the cash to build the recycling center
They took it, money they convinced the community to give, donated building materials, their own sweat and that of others and used it to construct the center.
The facility has been a success. In 2004, residents dropped off about 1.5 million pounds of recyclables there, from glass to plastic to newspapers.
Which is not to say the advent of curbside recycling on the Island in 1989 hasn’t affected its bottom line. In that year 1,300 tons of recyclables were brought in to the center; in 2004, 689 tons were, said Leavitt.
In the the best of times — the 1994-95 school year — more than two million pounds of trash was donated, garnering $87,000 before expenses. In 2004 the recyclables brought in about $30,000, of which 75 percent went toward expenses, said Leavitt.
In general, recent times have not been great for the facility. The volume of trash donated has fallen 5 percent to 7 percent each of the last five years, said Leavitt who works part time at the center. Additionally, the price offered for recyclables has dropped. Now, aluminum cans, cardboard and newspapers provide the most profit.
Those factors, and previous committments to fund scholarships and grants for two local organizations, have meant that in recent times not much money has been available to buy things that benefit the overall Mercer Island High School student body, as the committee originally intended, said Leavitt.
But over the years the dollars garnered through selling the trash have been used to buy, among other things, vans to carry the high school’s students to extracurricular activities, benches for a courtyard at the school and supplies for a program for special needs students there. Students in that program also work at the center, learning job skills.
The fact that the high school is the beneficiary is what makes Island resident Mary Ann Haney drive a mile to the center about every two weeks to drop off trash, including newspapers, cardboard, glass and plastic.
“It’s probably the main reason I come here,” said the 54-year-old Haney.
Ironically, the center that student environmentalists got built is now in its own small way feeding the expansion of a country that has bought into the idea of turning trash into, if not treasure, at least new products. A developing China has invested heavily in plants to do so, creating more of a market for the garbage donated by Island residents.
But back in the early 1970s the students from the Committee to Save the Earth and the budding environmentalists in Leavitt’s North Mercer Junior High science class, who collected recyclables in Mercerdale Park, were thinking more along the lines of, well, how to save the Earth.
“We knew we were poisoning the planet ….,” said Bill Hochberg, 47, an Island resident who was a student of Leavitt’s and later on the Committee to Save the Earth.
By doing what now seems so elemental, by helping to get constructed a place where residents could recycle their garbage, the students were thought to be “on the edge of the envelope,” said Hochberg.
“It just seemed like the right thing to do,” he said.
