Paul Szmal: We're Zooming with Multi-County Cooperative Extension Guy, Ryan Stachok, and with Mark Benjamin from Seneca Meadows for America Recycles Day. Good morning, gentlemen.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Good morning. Good morning to you, Mark. Good morning, Ted.
Paul Szmal: Good to have you both here. We're going to start with you, Ryan. And actually, this is something I hadn't heard of until just recently. It's a state program called Recycle Right. So tell us about what that means and what happens if we don't recycle right.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Yeah. Well, thanks, Ted, and happy America Recycles Day to everybody out there. Recycle Right is a program in New York State that is focused on education and outreach efforts to help people around the state remove the guessing work from recycling. And basically, Recycle Right provides information and resources for everybody to recycle the right way. So if you want to visit their website, it's recycleright.org. They include lots of catchy phrases like, know before you throw.
Paul Szmal: Yeah.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: And things like wish cycling. Have you heard that one, Ted, about wish cycling?
Paul Szmal: Just recently. Again, I've been talking about this for a long time, and I'm still learning.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Yeah. Well, wish cycling is one of those things where you just randomly throw items into your recycling bin, and you hope or wish that they are recyclable. Not a good idea, Ted, because it can cause a lot of issues down the supply chain with recycling. So one of the big parts of this is knowing your local guidelines, and they vary from county to county depending on who the hauler is and who's contracted with. And I think that's one of the things that Seneca County's done very well is the education part. I mean, they're very good at letting people know what the procedures are.
Paul Szmal: Yeah, we try very hard. Cornell Cooperative Extension is the educator in Seneca County. So if anybody's ever interested in a recycling educational program, feel free to reach out to our office. But yeah, you're right. It's really important to know the local guidelines. Your radio station reaches a lot of different communities across the Finger Lakes. We can't possibly know all of the haulers that are out there picking up your recycling. So one of the things is you got to know and reach out to your local hauler and understand their guidelines, because they may pick up something in one community, and then a hauler in another community may not pick up that, or they may, because it all depends on the markets where they can get that recycling to to make something cool out of that recyclable item. And most haulers have written guidelines. We got ours. We have a private hauler that we use. I live in Yates County, and we just have it up on the wall near the garbage can. So when we see, oh, number six, let me check. Is that one good or bad?
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: That's right. Yeah. So there's a different couple. You can go to SenecaRecycles.org. That's the CCE website that's hosted to find the local guideline. We hand them out with a lot of our free bags and freebies that we hand out at programs. You can also go to the Seneca County website to find that, and then you can also find that on Cardinal Disposal's website, who is the local hauler for Seneca County.
Paul Szmal: One of those guidelines that a lot of people might not think about is to purchase products made from recycled material to keep the circle going. It's super important, right?
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: For about six or seven years, we've been really dealing with a... It's a global issue, recycling, right? And so when you think about what can you do to increase the demand for recycling, purchase items that are made from recycled material. If we go to the store and we look on that tag and it says purchased with X amount of post-consumer recycled content, then we're increasing the demand for recycling and we're trying to increase the profitability and the reality that those recycled materials are going to make it back into that loop of using things over and over and over again.
Paul Szmal: And I hadn't really thought about this one that much. One of the problems with not recycling right is the wrong items can actually damage the equipment and can be an injury risk in some cases.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Yes. So for example, plastic bags are a really interesting example. If you just toss those plastic bags or what we might refer to as tanglers, they can get caught up in the recycling conveyor belts and equipment and it causes issues and it drives costs to go up. So it's important to make sure that what you're recycling is recyclable according to your guidelines and keeping those things that are not recyclable out of your recycling bins and disposing of them properly. So again, in Seneca County it's easy to get the guidelines and they've been doing a lot of education for a long time.
Paul Szmal: Ryan, thanks for this update and like I said, how many years have I been talking about this and I learned new things today.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Always lots to learn about recycling, Ted. Thank you.
Paul Szmal: So let's welcome in Mark Benjamin from Seneca Meadows. First off, thanks for your advertising business as always and welcome back. It's been a while since we talked.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Yeah, good morning, Ted. Thank you for having me. It's always fun to be here with you.
Paul Szmal: I want to talk about a new program that you have in partnership with Rotary and I'm a Rotarian myself, but before that, just give us sort of the overall philosophy and the efforts on Seneca Meadows' part for recycling.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: Well, yeah. Thank you, Ted. So we have, as you're aware, we have a recycling drop-off center at our facility that residents can use on a daily basis and that's, you know, that's your, if your blue bin is too full or you missed the blue bin pickup date, you know, you can come into our facility and drop those off and, you know, again, be educated on what goes in those bins and what stays out of them. You know, like Ryan mentioned, because that's super important, we don't want to contaminate the recycling stream. You know, the other thing we have on site is yard waste, debris. We handle that as well as tires. And so that's available at our facility every day for folks to recycle those items.
Paul Szmal: So let's talk. Go ahead. I'm sorry. No, I cut you off. Finish. Go ahead.
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: No, no. So the other thing that, you know, we wanted to talk about today because it's been super challenging is keeping our everyday alkaline batteries out of the landfill. They don't belong there.
Paul Szmal: And this is great because, I was just, sorry for interrupting here, but it's, that's one of the items that, like, nobody knows what to do with. We always get, it's like, I don't think we're supposed to throw these away, but can we recycle them?
Ryan Stachock, Mark Benjamin: So explain this partnership with the Waterloo and Seneca Falls Rotary.
Paul Szmal: Yeah. So thank you, Ted. So we're super excited that, that we started this. We partnered with both the Seneca Falls Rotary Club and the Waterloo Rotary Club. And so they're, they're helping us coordinate this program in the community. And we're, we're super excited. While the Waterloo program is really taking off and that's been going for almost a year now. And, you know, they've collected, so what they, what the Waterloo Rotary Club decided to do was get these, we have these, these battery recycling boxes and what they do, they have them in certain locations in the Waterloo School District where those, you know, the kids and the staff there can recycle batteries that they have at home or the ones that they use at school. And they've collected several hundred throughout the Waterloo School District.
Seneca Falls, we're, you know, I think we're, we're going to be launching soon in the school district, just working through that process, as you know. And the other thing that's super exciting is Waterloo has, is going to expand the program and they just did that maybe a month ago. We were in conversations with the, some folks over at Seneca County and they were looking for help with providing a resource to recycle batteries as well. So Waterloo jumped in and said, hey, we, you know, we're going to drop some boxes over at the, at the Seneca County office complex. And so that's just started as well. So, so it's really a great community resource and, you know, again, trying to keep those items out of the, out of the waste stream and to be properly recycled. And so those boxes are over at the county building as well.
Paul Szmal: Well, this is a great program. I'll have to take this to our Geneva Rotary Club and maybe, maybe we can have you over someday to present a program at our club about what you're doing with those other clubs.
Mark Benjamin, thanks very much. We appreciate it. And Ryan, thank you as always. Appreciate the time and the education. Happy America Recycles Day, everybody!
