Bella Vista Recycling Center donates $92,000 to nonprofits
Forty nonprofit organizations split a total of $92,000 in 2017, thanks to about 160 volunteers and to a program as unique as Bella Vista. The Recycling Center not only helps the environment but also women needing a new start in life, fish looking for a safe place to breed and seniors who need to get to a doctor’s appointment.
Since 1973, the Bella Vista Recycling Center has been donating its profits to area nonprofits, including the Bella Vista Fly Tyers, who provide fish habitat in all the POA lakes; Oasis, a program for women in transition; and the Bella Vista Courtesy Van, a program providing transportation to senior citizens and others who can’t drive.
The nonprofit Recycling Center can make these donations because much of their labor is volunteer. The amount each organization receives is based on the hours worked by volunteers who name them as their recipient, according to board president Paul Poulides.
The center’s most profitable product is usually aluminum cans, coordinator Lou Stirek said, but the center is holding cans right now, waiting for the price to go up.
“Cardboard is our biggest money maker,” he said, explaining that six to seven loads of cardboard leave the center each month. The price for cardboard is now about $100 a ton, but it’s been as high as $235.
Plastics — especially milk jugs — are also money makers for the center.
The item that’s the least valuable is glass, Stirek said. Volunteers at the center usually grind glass bottles so the loads are more dense, but grinding glass is hard work and sometimes dangerous. The center only breaks even on a load of ground glass, even with the free labor, so Stirek found a company that will come and pick up non-ground glass and use it. The center won’t make
any money, but the glass won’t go into a landfill.
According the www.recyclingrevolution.com/recycling-benefits.html, energy saved by recycling one glass bottle is enough to light a light bulb for four hours.
The same website reports that recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours — or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
Also, that one can, when recycled, can be back on the grocery shelf as a new can in 60 days.
Office paper is almost as valuable as aluminum cans, Stirek said and the recycling-revolution website says the average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year.
The center also recycles moving boxes as moving boxes. The staff saves clean boxes that are donated — sometimes fishing them out of bins and trailers. Then they resell them at less than the retail cost. Most boxes are a dollar each, Stirek said, but double-sided dish boxes are $2 and wardrobe boxes are $3.
“We just give the packing materials — packing paper or bubble wrap,” he said. “We always have a lot of packing materials.”