Walk into the Keep Alliance Beautiful recycling center, where we now have two operational bays (a huge thanks to Mike Essay, our landlord, for fixing/upgrading the east door), and ask for an item to take home. If a patron sees something destined to be processed or headed for the Dumpster they’d like to give a new home chances are they can have it. KAB promotes the “reuse” side of the triangle. Hundreds of lick tubs presently (as of this writing) on the northeast side of the building illustrate the practice to a tea.
Mostly the baby blue variety from Vitalix, ranchers and other livestock owners drop off scores of the supplement holders every spring. Greg Olson, opened the first Vitalix plant near the Alliance Airport in 1989, which was relocated to Sidney in 2018 following a fire. He was not immediately available for comment regarding whether the company utilizes used tubs in the production of new ones.
I invite anyone who ever has had so much as an inkling of reusing a lick tub to stop by and take as many as you want. And, actually, we would part with every intact tub free of charge – no need to sing, though we always accept donations.
All the tubs I have ever seen come KAB’s way have been made of durable No. 2 High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), the same type of plastic as a laundry detergent bottle. However, unlike the containers we gather, anything labeled No. 1-7, Western Resources Group (WRG) in Ogallala does not accept bales consisting of lick tubs or mixed in our typical plastic bales. The containers are recyclable at WRG yet typically require a forklift to load a trailer and send down Highways 385/26. We would rather see the lick tubs reused by our recyclers and any other interested people and save our time,effort and equipment or money to pay our hauler to take a few non-typical loads.
The handful of lick tubs in our backyard are handy to move dirt in the spring and ripe apples in the autumn. I think a couple still store toys and athletic equipment in the garage. At work I keep a set to bring to Chadron’s community recycling event to fill with glass. We sent a few dozen to Keep Chadron Beautiful last summer. Their creative minds found a way to craft the lick tubs into benches for Fur Trade Days.
People who ask if they can take a few don’t care if there is a chunk of molasses at the bottom and most often turn the tubs into planters. For anyone who has never had occasion to see a Vitalix lick tub up close I had my son take some measurements and help with the math (quite a favor finding volume on a non-school assignment with less than a week left of school). We used the formula for a truncated cone, which in this case is a little more than 18 inches tall with a diameter of 22 inches inside the rim and 19 inches at the base for a volume of about 6,014 cubic inches or almost three bushels. Empty eight Vitalix tubs and you have a little more than a cubic yard. Our scale put the container’s weight at 3.3 pounds. Other brands of lick tubs find their way to KAB of course in colors ranging from light tan to black to orange if color is an issue though they are slightly smaller.
Take a tub and keep it or use it for a seasonal project and return it. Either way this resource reduces the number of new containers purchased as the same lick tub can be reused for years before being recycled after its worn out. Kind of like king-sized Tupperware without the cost, and there are no lids to lose.