Keep Alliance Beautiful’s most prominent mission for quite some time has been to offer recycling opportunities for area residents and anybody who wants to haul a load of bottles, cans or a number of other materials to our trailers or the open door at 107 ½ Cheyenne Ave. Though KAB serves as a hub in the largest “city” in the northern Nebraska Panhandle, we are part of a cooperative movement in the state to spur rural recycling.
This past spring Patrick Leahy, CEO of Omaha-based First Star Recycling, announced that NET had awarded the company a $200,000 grant “to start recycling in rural communities”. He emphasized that the same amount would be provided the next two years. “Part of the grant is going to us for communities to build something out of it. Some (funding) is for transportation. A significant amount is for what gets you over this obstacle,” and able to restart recycling whether it is a baler, trailer or other pivotal equipment.
Patrick touted the investment when speaking to a room full of Keep Nebraska Beautiful affiliates – who all have an interest in seeing rural recycling succeed. However, the announcement did not appear on their website or facebook page when I checked while writing this column. My tech savvy is not stellar, so I could have missed an article or past post. The entities with skin in the game know First Star is banking on a green future for the Cornhusker state. No doubt as grants bring equipment and less travel time to recycle even the basics (plastic/cardboard/aluminum/paper) the public at large will hear about it – even in Lancaster, Douglas and Sarpy Counties I suspect.
Alliance, a city primarily in the legal sense according to the State of Nebraska (Hemingford really is a village in the same sense), is not restarting or initiating a program. Crawford or Hay Springs are among our neighbors that may benefit from a grant that would allow them to feed directly into KAB’s facility or partner with Chadron as a hub, for example. There is potential, though, to seek support from First Star where our pliable plastic (Hefty Energy), paper, No. 1-7 plastic and cardboard typically end up through Western Resources Group in Ogallala. Patrick noted that funds, “can be a new product to add to current recycling”.
The greater the flow of materials to the company’s Omaha Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) the greater the number of semi-truck loads leaving for end markets to “close the loop” instead of filling garbage trucks bound for our landfills.
Over the past three months I have not had occasion to confer with others present at Patrick’s presentation, which also held an informative update on the recycling industry and developments of interest at First Star. Importantly, he was open to advice in whatever form it has taken throughout the summer.
“You tell me what will help. . . . We are trying to get this flywheel going where it picks up steam . . . I’ll depend on you to tell us where to go,” Patrick said. “(Cities, etc.) don’t need to come to the meeting with marketing dollars. We’re doing the matching.”