Award Winners

2002 Carol Simmons of the Harbor Springs Public Schools

Carol Simmons

Harbor Teacher First-Ever Recycling Award Winner

Harbor Springs teacher Carol Simmons was the first-ever winner of the Emmet County Recycling ARecycler of the Year Award.@ The award, presented to Simmons at the Harbor Springs School Board Meeting November 11, 2002 honors an individual or business who has made an outstanding contribution to Emmet County Recycling.

For 12 years Simmons spearheaded school recycling efforts and hauled the collected materials to the Emmet County Recycling Center. Her efforts began as a badge project for a Girl Scout troop she was leading at Shay Elementary, but expanded to the Middle School and Black Bird Elementary. The Harbor Springs program was the most comprehensive school recycling program in the county at the time. Students and staff collect office paper, newspapers, magazines, and catalogs. Kitchen operations recycle plastic bottles, glass, and tin cans. To haul it all, Simmons had to make two trips a week. Emmet County Recycling staff estimate that over the years she made nearly 1,000 trips to the Recycling Center.

This year Simmons shifted from her previous position as a Title I Technician to teaching her own second grade class in 2002. As a result she stepped down as hauler. However in receiving the award she noted that the program continued with volunteers at each school taking up the hauling duties.

In presenting the award, Dept. of Public Works Director Elisa Seltzer noted that the impact of Ms. Simmons= efforts reached far beyond the shear volume of materials recycled: ASchool recycling programs educate children about the recycling process, give those whose families don=t recycle at home a chance to try it, and demonstrate our community=s commitment to recycling.@

The award included an inscribed plaque made from recycled bottles glass, a set of bins for collecting recyclables, and a gift certificate for lunch for two provided by the Pier Restaurant.

2003 Mitchell Graphics

Printer Wins “Recycler of the Year”

Mitchell Graphics—a nationally-recognized printer specializing in promotional printing, mailing, and postcard products—was the 2003 winner of Emmet County’s “Recycler of the Year” Award. At their plant just outside Petoskey, it seems there are materials being “reduced, recycled, and reused” at every turn. But what’s more, their commitment to the environment extends beyond their facilities to taking leadership in spreading pollution prevention concepts.

Even before a client places an order, they’re likely to receive cleverly reused materials from Mitchell Graphics: overruns are saved for creating custom sample packets and the company uses elegantly printed boxes of reclaimed golf balls as a promotional item.

When an order is placed, the items are printed on giant sheets of paper and the company carefully places many different jobs on the same page to maximize use of the paper. The scraps that remain, as well as extras and mistakes, are recycled through Emmet County Recycling.

They use scrap sheets while adjusting their giant presses at the beginning of a run. Film and photographic chemicals used to create the printing plates are recycled. The company uses soy-based inks which reduce use of hazardous petroleum ingredients. Leftovers of custom mixed ink colors are saved for future jobs. Owner Bill Fedus, who enjoys woodworking, even builds fixtures and furniture using wood reclaimed from pallets! And this is not a complete list!

Mitchell Graphics’ staff served on the advisory board for the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s (MDEQ) Great Printers’ Project which promotes implementation of pollution prevention measures and provides technical support to printers. In 1999, Mitchell Graphics was chosen to be the subject of a case study as part of MDEQ series on businesses preventing pollution. And, in the fall of 2003, Mitchell Graphics hosted a pollution prevention forum with Emmet County Recycling.

According to Gary Fedus, General Manager, the family-owned company’s environmental ethic is inspired in large part by employees. He also says these measures make good business sense. “The common perception [among businesses] is that recycling, reuse, and generally being more environmentally conscious is a hassle and costly and that you’re dealing with a lot of regulations. But our experience has been that if you stay ahead of the curve, there are very few regulations, less hassle, and it can save you a substantial amount of money.”

To learn more about Mitchell Graphics, visit www.MitchellGraphics.com

2004 Ann Smith, Recycling Leader

Ann Smith

County Advocate 2004 Recycler of the Year

Our 2004 Recycler of the Year Award winner, Ann Smith, has served more than 20 years on the county Public Works Board, which oversees Emmet County Recycling. But her involvement actually extends back over 30 years to when she was elected an Emmet County Commissioner in 1973: the very first document she was handed was the county’s Solid Waste Plan.

In 1982, Ann was appointed to the DPW Board. She’s stayed ever since (often as chairperson) because, “It’s been interesting to see it grow...and to keep asking what else we can do—like electronics recycling... There have got to be other recoverable things.”

Asked about the strengths and weaknesses of Emmet County’s solid waste management system today, she points to the Pay-As-You-Throw provision as a big strength. Before this system was put in place in 1992 everyone paid the same amount to have their garbage collected. “It bugged me that I was putting out one bag a week and my neighbor had about five cans and we were paying the same price. Those who create more waste should pay more.” Paying based on how many bags or cans of garbage you throw out also serves as an incentive to recycle, she noted, “People respond more diligently to things that can save them money.” The combination of Pay-As-You-Throw waste service and free recycling gives citizens both the individual responsibility and the opportunity to control how much they throw away and how much they spend on waste disposal.

Though it may sound odd, Ann has developed a real interest in waste and recycling. She recalls a minister who told her, “You’re the only person I know who ever got lyrical about garbage.” Her genuine curiosity is evident from some of the stops she’s made in her frequent travels: a closed landfill in Grand Rapids, a Minnesota recycling center, the recycling and composting site on Mackinac Island, a landfill in northern California, and a resale shop in Vienna where she snapped up a Geiger boiled wool jacket for “reuse.”

Thanks Ann, for your dedication to resource recovery in Emmet County!

2005 The Staff of the Emmet County Recycling Center/Straits Area Services Crew

Drivers & Workers Behind the Scenes Win 2005 “Recycler of the Year”

2006 Roast and Toast/City Park Grill

Mary Keedy

Outstanding Food and Drink and Outstanding Recycling

Three Wine Spectator awards at the welcome station just inside the City Park Grill announce that the Petoskey restaurant has one of the “most outstanding” wine lists in the world. This fall, they are being joined by our Recycler of the Year Award, honoring the restaurant and its sister café, Roast and Toast, for their outstanding commitment to recycling.

These days, with a curbside recycling truck picking up each week, recycling at the restaurants is, “a no brainer,” according to co-owner Bob Keedy. But it wasn’t always so. Down Lake Street at Roast and Toast, Mary Keedy explains that the café started recycling right away when they opened in 1993. Staff was always great about collecting the materials, but the garbage cans outside where the bottles and jugs were stored were unattractive, and hauling was a hassle.

Every week an employee would haul it all to the Glen’s North Drop Site. Roast and Toast would typically have a 30-gallon can full of glass bottles and six or more big black bags of plastic jugs. The City Park Grill, which opened in 1997, had largely glass—those award-wining wine bottles! Hefting the barrels of glass into a pick-up truck or van was a challenge and loading all of the milk jugs into drop-site bins was tedious.

So when Emmet County Recycling began offering curbside collection in the fall of 2004, the restaurants were among the first to subscribe. Bob and Mary rave about it: the wheeled collection carts are attractive—important when you’re located on Petoskey’s most elegant alleys—and easy to maneuver, the pick-up is convenient and dependable, and the subscription service is cheap!

The restaurants fill a whole fleet of 96-gallon carts each week: four for plastics, two for glass, and two for metal, along with a couple of household-size totes for paper. But that’s not all: Roast and Toast recycles two yards of cardboard a week (working with their waste hauler), offers 25¢ off the price of a large coffee if you bring a reusable cup, and gives away hundreds of burlap bags a year, leftover from their coffee roasting operation. “It’s amazing all the ways people use the bags,” Mary observes, “gardening, decorating, even making purses and Christmas stockings.”

Asked what’s behind their commitment, Mary singles out saving landfill space. “It’s amazing how much we generate with all of the milk jugs.” Bob, on the other hand, says he just doesn’t like to waste anything: “...energy, trees, or landfill space.” That’s the spirit! And so, a toast to Roast and Toast and the City Park Grill: thank you for recycling.

2007 Sally Bell, Mackinaw City 4th Grade Teacher

Sally Bell

Mackinaw City Teacher Wins Recycler of the Year

Sally Bell, Emmet County’s 2007 Recycler of the Year says she has not been a model recycler. But Emmet County Recycling is holding up Bell’s efforts at the Mackinaw City Schools as a model school recycling program.

For four years now Mrs. Bell, who teaches the fourth grade, and her students have been collecting paper from the school—which includes the middle and high schools as well—for recycling. After learning about the recycling system, Bell’s students visit each of the other elementary school classes to educate the students about what kinds of paper are recyclable, and which aren’t.

According to Emmet County Recycling Education Coordinator Kate Melby, school recycling programs support recycling in numerous ways: they collect large amounts of recyclables, and at the same time they let kids whose families don’t recycle try recycling and show kids that recycling is simply the way used paper is handled.

Having her fourth graders teaching the other classes about recycling makes Bell’s program exceptional, Melby says. Mrs. Bell notes that from a teaching perspective, “When the kids teach something, they learn it twice.” Melby concurs, “It clearly works! These kids really know their stuff. Mrs. Bell’s class comes out and tours the Recycling Center each fall, and when we talk about what’s recyclable, they’re very knowledgeable.”

At the beginning of the school year Mrs. Bell puts all of her students’ names on slips of paper in a hat. In the order their names are drawn, they choose a classroom to serve for the year. Bell explained that students often choose a sister, brother, or friend’s class. Once they’ve collected all of the paper for the week, they sort out any non-recyclables (which results in more “education” for the class that made the error). “One week we found a stapler in the paper. Of course it had just fallen in, but the kids still got a kick out of it,” reports Bell. "We also pull out a lot of candy wrappers around Halloween."

When Mrs. Bell began the project, her husband, Patrick, was working in the Petoskey area and would often take the paper to the Toski-Sands drop site on his way. When he took a job closer to home, she took over more of the hauling duties. The new recycling drop site in Mackinaw City—located behind the schools complex—will make this part of the process much easier. With the drop site located so close to the school, Mrs. Bell plans to have the class take the materials right over. As part of her Recycler of the Year Award prize, Emmet County Recycling has provided the class with a garden wagon and a firewood sled for hauling to the drop site.

Bell will also receive a recycled-glass plaque announcing her award. It will be presented at an Open House which Emmet County Recycling is holding at the new drop site on Saturday, November 10. The Open House is from 10:00-2:00. The award will be presented at 11:00.

The new drop site will also allow Sally Bell to feel like more of a “model recycler.” “I haven’t done as much as I could, recycling from home,” she says. “My thinking was if recycling everything [which Emmet County Recycling accepts] is too much, recycle what you can! But with the new drop site it will be easy to recycle more from home. I’ve already started saving plastics in addition to paper. I can just toss it all in the car when I come to work.”

2009 Northern Michigan Regional Hospital

Hospital Wins Emmet County Recycling Award

“Going green” is all the rage, so it is wise to take green claims with a grain of salt. However, when Northern Michigan Regional Hospital’s summer 2007 Community Connection newsletter said, “While the health of their patients is number one, the health of their environment is a close second for the employees of Northern Michigan Regional Hospital,” they weren’t blowing smoke. Now, their extensive recycling efforts have earned them Emmet County Recycling’s 2009 Recycler of the Year Award. Emmet County Recycling Director Elisa Seltzer presented the award to the Hospital on Tuesday, December 8.

“I always knew there was a lot of interest in recycling among the hospital’s staff,” said Emmet County Recycling (ECR) Communications Coordinator Kate Melby. “We’d periodically receive calls from hospital ‘colleagues’―as they call them―asking for input on setting up recycling. And if I was at the hospital with my family, whenever my line of work came up in conversation the colleagues would invariably have questions about recycling materials from their department. Now we’ve really seen that commitment come to fruition as they’ve made dozens of changes to reduce, recycle, and reuse.”

Linda Ward, Senior Director of Hospitality Services, gets much of the credit for the Hospital’s recycling accomplishments, according to Lindsey Walker who sets up commercial accounts for Emmet County Recycling. “Linda is a go-getter. She coordinates recycling and really brought it all together.”

In 2008, Northern Michigan Regional Hospital recycled over 50% of the 786.5 tons of waste generated by their operations. Recycling included: 39 tons of cardboard, 1.8 tons of #1 and #2 plastics, 3 tons of aluminum cans, 1.36 tons of batteries, and roughly ¾ ton each of steel cans and fluorescent light bulbs. Paper didn’t go to waste either: 179 tons were recycled with medical documents pre-shredded by a professional document destruction company. In addition, 92.5 tons of stone, rubber and concrete were recycled when the main building’s roof was replaced with a better insulating material.

The Hospital reduced waste by switching from bottled water to washable cups for patient meals, meetings, and events and by encouraging employees to tag their e-mails with a tree logo and the line, “Please consider the environment before printing this email.”

A new needle disposal system prevented 24.58 tons of waste by simply replacing disposable sharps containers with a service which provides ones which are sterilized, inspected and reused. “We go through roughly 200 sharps containers a week,” explained Ward.

In all, through recycling and reuse the hospital prevented 392.3 tons of waste in 2008. That’s not the end of the story, though. “They’re always looking for that next thing to recycle,” said Walker. Most recently the Hospital asked her about recycling #5 plastic tray covers. “We’re looking into it,” Walker continued, “They’re an ideal partner for us to try out new things.”

The colleagues’ commitment to recycling extends even beyond the Hospital’s offerings, Walker shared, “Lillian Hart-Baker organized a shoe drive which collected 1,000 pairs of shoes for reuse through Soles for Souls.”

“We salute Northern Michigan Regional Hospital for their exceptional recycling efforts,” said Elisa Seltzer, Director of Emmet County Recycling. “Changes in housekeeping systems are particularly difficult for medical facilities due to the numerous standards with which they must comply. Despite these very real challenges, recycling has taken off at the Hospital in the last four years and both the volumes they’re achieving and their attitude are outstanding.”