newsminer.com

Workers at Wal-Mart separate cardboard, plastics, paper and aluminum beverage cans before using a baling machine in the store’s back storage room to compress them into 600-pound cubes.

The cubes will eventually be stacked onto pallets and loaded into semi-trailers bound for a recycling center in Tacoma, Wash. Managers and associates at the retail store say recycling falls in line with corporate efforts to reduce the corporation’s environmental footprint.

For every truck trailer that leaves Wal-Mart full, however, another is sent away empty. So managers are letting the recycling effort creep beyond the store’s blue-and-white walls. Fairbanks residents, they said, may drop off manageable doses of waste paper, plastic bottles, aluminum cans or old newspapers — items many Fairbanks residents have either trashed or stashed in the absence of a comprehensive recycling program.

“We’re all excited to be able to help the community out,” Bradley McGinnity, a co-manager at the store, said. “I think it’s a good thing for the company and the community.”

The store’s decision to accept recyclables — in reasonable quantities, as it will fall to the store’s paid employees to handle them — is sure to be a hit with its regular shoppers, who live in a community that lacks a conventional recycling program. It’s also likely to create an interesting decision for Wal-Mart critics in Fairbanks who either avoid super-retailers in protest of their significant, indirect impact on locally owned businesses and the labor pool or those who believe Wal-Mart is simply hoping recyclers will be inclined to buy more merchandise from a friendlier company.

Suzy Fenner, a community recycling advocate, said Fairbanks residents are currently left with imperfect options — such as burning gasoline to haul paper and plastic to a willing business, which then burns more energy to ship the products out of state. Fenner applauded Wal-Mart’s initiative and suggested it will help nudge public awareness of recycling options closer toward the point of a public program or more private-sector involvement.

“It’s a real encouraging action for people who have been frustrated by prior recycling program initiatives and truly want to see a successful effort,” Fenner said Thursday. “Our location poses some difficulties for creating and implementing a recycling program, and we need to see these challenges as opportunities for some creative thinking, not excuses to maintain the status quo.”

Store officials made it clear: They’re not turning into a recycling center. But they also said they can accept some common, everyday recyclables, such as loose paper or old newspapers, empty plastic soda bottles or milk jugs, and empty aluminum cans — during business hours. Managers said anything larger than a heavy armful should be bundled or bagged to help associates manage. Recyclers should also phone ahead with bigger loads and use the company’s back loading dock. They should also separate plastics — Nos. 1 and 2 — by type, which is identifiable by the number imprinted on the bottom of products.

Fairbanks: An island

Most cities live within striking distance of a recycling processing center. Southcentral Alaska relies largely on a single company to collect recyclable materials and ship them to a plant in Washington state, and Anchorage officials recently approved a limited curbside recycling service.

But the rest of Alaska is somewhat stranded, and Fairbanks sits hundreds of miles from the populous southcentral region.

Public officials in Fairbanks three years ago worked with a consultant on rough plans for a conventional recycling program. They shelved the plan, however, when cost estimates came in higher than anticipated, and a waste-to-energy option — a plan currently being studied — took its place.

Talk of recycling resurfaced, however, when a controversial dumpster-diving measure moved through the public process this fall. Mayor Jim Whitaker formed a recycling task force in November to review options.

At about the same time, work crews at Wal-Mart were also talking. A handful of sales associates and managers hosted a picnic last year for the store’s “personal sustainability projects” team. Sue Storm, a co-captain of the team, said the group was looking for ways to become healthier and to live greener at and away from work — a response to associates and company leaders who, as an April 2007 news release from Wal-Mart put it, challenged workers to “incorporate the principals of sustainability into their daily lives.”

“It’s a beautiful state,” said Storm, who runs the store’s pets department. “Our first impression was that it’s a crime to trash the state as we’re going. That’s where the conversation started.”

Storm said conversation gradually drifted toward encouraging sales associates to recycle. Somewhere along the line, the realization took hold that the 206,000-square-foot store had a means of transporting recyclables — something local officials had yet to firm up — to Washington state already in place, and the recycling seed was planted.

Wal-Mart spokesman Bill Wertz said the company wants to ensure it’s not creating any false expectations that it can supplant any future, community-wide moves to reduce waste in Fairbanks.

“We are a retailer,” he said by phone, “and our expertise doesn’t extend to the public sector.”

But Wertz also said the company regularly looks at the needs of communities that host its stores before developing an appropriate relationship with neighbors — if those needs are unique, the relationship can be as well. He said the Fairbanks store’s outreach falls in line with the larger company’s sustainability-projects initiative, where sales associates often pool individual efforts on projects, such as cleaning up a local stream.

“If this can be developed in a way that makes sense for everybody, I think that would be something we would be willing to pursue,” he said.

McGinnity, the store co-manager, noted while the company might spend a little time and labor managing other people’s recyclable products, it also saves money by trucking less waste to — and paying less in tipping fees at — the public landfill. Another store manager accepted an invitation this month to present his crew’s effort to the borough task force, which has met regularly for five months to discuss options.

“I thought, ‘Every retailer in our community should be doing exactly the same thing,’” said task force chairman and Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly member Mike Musick. “And then we wouldn’t have a landfill full of trash. He’s got the right idea, no doubt in my mind.”

Send it back

Wal-Mart workers have placed blue recycling bins for paper, plastics and aluminum at the front customer entrance for small-scale recycling. Work crews are finishing up an expansion of the store, and McGinnity said similar bins will go up at the new entrance when the work is finished.

Lining the road behind the store on a recent Thursday were around 60 cubes of compressed cardboard, paper, plastic and cans. Each weighed around 600 pounds.

McGinnity said workers would eventually load the cubes into a truck trailer bound for the train station, where they would be taken by rail to Southcentral Alaska and, eventually, put on ships headed to the Harmon Associates-run recycling center in Tacoma, Wash.

The store has always recycled cardboard, McGinnity said. About seven months, ago they added plastic bottles, and aluminum cans came this winter, with sales associates challenging themselves during May to recycle 1,000 plastic bottles — mostly milk jugs and soda bottles — McGinnity said.

The store will also team with a local Kiwanis club to recycle old phone books in October.

Wal-Mart has taken hits from critics who blame huge discount retailers for fueling a consumer culture that buys, uses and throws away more products than other societies, past or present. Al Norman, who maintains the anti-Wal-Mart Web site Sprawl-busters.com, said he’s tracked hundreds of vacant stores, adding up to thousands of acres of developed land, the company has declined to sell or demolish after closing its doors. He said the trend clashes with the concept of encouraging sustainable business practices.

“In the long-run, Fairbanks could be dealing with a much larger recycling problem — that is how to recycle the Wal-Mart in town,” Norman said. “To me, this is not an environmentally friendly company. They’re trying to create a green image to cover the black image of their growth policies.”

Wertz, Wal-Mart’s spokesman, said the trend toward initiatives and projects labeled “sustainable” aims to strike a balance between sensible business and public benefits that any private-sector outfit responsible to shareholders and neighbors would seek.

“This recycling initiative is very consistent with that,” he said.