The 8th annual Bainbridge Island Beach Cleanup will take place on Saturday, September 30, while the tide is low between 10am-1pm. If you need to borrow a grabber or bucket, come to the Miller Road gravel lot just south of Congregation Kol Shalom starting at 9:30am that day.

The BIBC committee would like to get a general idea of how many people participate, so please go here to pick a beach or road end. For complete details on the event, vist our BIBC page on the Sustainable Bainbridge website.

Scrap Metal

Zero Waste hosts a booth once a month April through September at the farmers market in order to promote certain themes and to connect with you face to face for discussion or to answer any reduce-reuse-recycle questions. Our booth is also a chance to drop off small scrap metal to save you a special trip to the Bainbridge Disposal Transfer Station.

Barbara Ochota of the ZW steering committee initiated and has run this scrap metal collection project for the past two years. The amount accumulated this season was 42.5 pounds of clean jelly jar and pet food lids, beer caps, miscellaneous hardware and more, as shown in the picture above.

Metal is infinitely recyclable, and we think it is important to continue helping people to divert this material from the landfill. Since our appearance at the market is on hiatus till next April, Zero Waste has begun partnering with the BI Senior Center to set up a year-round collection of these small pieces of metal that are not allowed in curbside or transfer station mixed recycling. The Senior Center is open Monday-Friday, 9am-4pm.

Just look for this display at the Senior Center and drop in any small metal (please make sure lids are clean). Do not include food or drink cans, as these go with regular recycling.

Shredded Paper

Shredded plain copy paper free of tape and staples can go in your yard waste bin but not the recycling bin, because those small strips end up in the garbage at the sorting facility. However, turning discarded paper back into new paper is preferable, and shred events make that possible.

Shredding companies are advantageous because they transport the paper directly to a paper mill, hence no loss of material occurs on a sorting line. And you can include shiny or stapled paper, unlike when composting.

LeMay's Shredding is partnering with Kitsap Bank in an upcoming shred event held at Kitsap Bank on High School Road on Saturday, September 30, 9am-noon. Monetary donations are required, with all proceeds going to Helpline House. There is a maximum 75 pounds of shred per vehicle.

Propane Containers

Newly added to the Zero Waste "Guide to Reusing and/or Recycing Locally" are propane tanks and camping cylinders. Before dropping off for recycling in the scrap metal dumpster at the Bainbridge Disposal Transfer Station, the containers must be empty to prevent explosions. For propane tanks , that means removing the valve. (Search for youtube instructional videos that explain how.)

Recycling Right

It's important to recycle, and even more important to recycle right. This eye-opening ten-minute video from the Association of Mission-Based Recyclers takes us into a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF, pronounced "murf"), much like ours in Tacoma, where we get a look at the many plastic contaminants that come from our curbside bins.

Recycling incorrectly is in large part due to the recycling symbol that the plastics industry puts on nonrecyclable packaging. As your definitive source for recycling right, follow the guidelines on the Bainbridge Disposal recycling poster.

Other kinds of plastic can be recycled, but they have to go in their own dedicated "stream". For example, grocery stores have a bin exclusively for stretchy plastic film. (See kinds that qualify here.) Ridwell, a doorstep recycling service used by close to 900 households on Bainbridge, takes many types of plastic packaging, including Styrofoam, clamshells and multi-layer plastic, each type confined to its own bag. And Zero Waste collects certain categories of plastics at the Marge Williams Center to send off to their respective destinations.

Paper Bags

If you find yourself with a collection of paper grocery bags with the handles still intact, these three establishments welcome them for their customers' reuse:

• Senior Center Thrift Store
• Helpline House
• Zutto Vintage & Antiques

If the handles are detached or missing, Persephone Farm, a Bainbridge Island farmers' market mainstay, can use them. Please prepare by folding them neatly.

Join Zero Waste and ReFashion Bainbridge for a fascinating conversation about what would happen if we just consumed less. On Wednesday, October 11, 7:30pm, in the Bainbridge High School auditorium, author J.B. MacKinnon sits with Buy Nothing's co-creator Rebecca Rockefeller for a one-hour discussion and Q&A on the potential environmental and social impacts of cutting consumption by 25%.

The event is free, but please reserve your tickets here. MacKinnon will sign copies of his book, available that evening and at Eagle Harbor Books. The library also has copies.

Find out how Zero Waste Washington is working on waste reduction, reuse and recycling through policy change and special projects in its third-quarter newsletter.