Congress vrs Rocky Ford, Colorado

Rocky Ford, Colorado----She did not set out to get recognized by Congress, my high school friend and Kansas State roommate Deanna only set out to make a difference at her job by volunteering to organize a recycling program a couple of years ago for the facility where she is a nurse.

 

But one thing lead to another and gathering a small group of volunteers, she has led the effort to unite four communities’ and start “Clean Valley Recycling” an effort to keep things out of an already overburdened landfill. Two more cities are planned to be included soon.

On a farm, outside the tiny community of Rocky Ford, in an area of the flatlands of Southeast Colorado near Pueblo, suffering from the worst draught since the early 1900’s, Deanna started out small and with absolutely no prior knowledge of what and how be a facility that recycles, she learned it by researching. It was all self-taught. There wasn’t an option, there was a job to do.

Today, they lease a huge warehouse and bundle tons of water bottles or plastic jugs or plastic bags or cardboard. They currently started recycling electronics and want to soon add paint, chemicals and more.

She confesses that she would leave nursing and do this as a full time job if it paid. But as a non-profit fighting for just a little financial help from the county government who consistently rejects them, she explained that even with a newly hired full time employee/executive director, because of the amount of work and lack of funds she has to continue to stay heavily involved in the operation. Any financial statement would show that no one is making big money.

Luckily there are a few more like Deanna. Volunteers put out and pick up the recycle bins driving and unloading their stash to the warehouse where another volunteer fills a compactor called the "Cram-a-lot" (no kidding and I love that) and uses a small lifter to neatly stack the organized bundles into amounts that will fill a semi. At this point it can be sold and it is with this income and the drop off fees that they can continue to operate.

I never thought about it because I live in a city that you put your recycling in green plastic bins and it magically disappears once a week. I pay a fee for my garbage pickup but I never thought about this fee being a part of the cost to recycle. I always felt like I was “giving them” something that can be used. Now I feel dumb. Basic math: cost of goods sold must be equal or greater than cost of operation. And now looking at Deanna’s challenge, they not only have to encourage people to recycle but people have to pay to have it recycled verses taking the easy way out and just sticking it in the trash. People can pay $3.00 for a bag that holds up to 40 plastic gallon jugs and then drop it off.

“Cardboard is the single largest component of waste from businesses going to our landfill," their flier reads. 

 

 
 

 

And as I looked closely at a bundle I realized it was tightly bundled plastic grocery bags, I have a new hate for these bags that has been born only on this cross country road trip.  From interstate highways to small country roads I have noticed these plastic bags caught in the fences and the sage plants, the cactus and the tumbleweeds in every state, everywhere. It’s an outrage. Totally gone is my lazy attitude of not bringing in my own cloth bags and every chance I have to refuse a bag, I do.  Without this trip it would have never resonated so greatly.

I walked the length of what seemed more than a football field through the recycling warehouse and thought about what one person could do with just the willingness to learn and the desire to make a difference…even if it was only in a small farming community.

I had no idea she was involved in this until this trip. Her efforts reached the ears of her congressman and I looked over a shelf in her homespun farmhouse where the plaque of “Congressional Recognition” sat and pretty much freaked out over what she had done. She laughed her signature laugh of a burst of loud laughs that climbed in tone and felt like she had been holding it in for far too long and said, “that doesn’t mean as much to me as this,” and showed me a small simple plaque naming her Rocky Ford Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year.

“But this is THE CONGRESS,” I pleaded.

“Ah, they don’t know me,” she said, “but this, this means a lot because these people know me,” she said about the small chamber award.

And I think that is how making a difference works.