Scott Beaton
Scott Beaton has spent most of his adult life sorting, crushing, shoveling, lifting, baling and trucking what used to be called garbage. Now, 21 years after starting a small nonprofit recycling project in Chelan, he’s being inducted May 5 into the Washington State Recycling Association Hall of Fame.
While this is his first statewide honor, Beaton is well known locally. For seven years he was a weekly guest on KOZI radio, talking trash — or what shouldn’t go in the trash. He’s an original member of the nonprofit Community Services Work Group, which hosts an annual Earth Day Fair and started the North Chelan County Recycling Project.
The recycling center is the oldest and most extensive recycling operation in Chelan County. Located across the highway from the Chelan Wal-Mart, it doesn’t look like much — just a boxy shell of a building holding rows and rows of old wooden apple bins overflowing with old pickle jars and vodka bottles, crushed milk jugs, discarded cereal boxes and school math tests. It doesn’t smell too great either – a mixture of day-old garbage, stale beer and applesauce (possibly owing to the apple bins).
Sorted glass awaits the crusher at the North Chelan County Recycling Project.
“It’s never been an easy job,” Beaton said. “There’s a lot of cleanup. It’s physical work. You get a real workout.”
Beaton runs the center with help from two full-time and two part-time staff. When the recycling project began, Beaton was a volunteer working with others from the Community Services group. A state Department of Ecology grant in 1989 provided the money to build a full-fledged center. When the grant ran out, the city of Chelan took over.
“The idea behind the program was to get a hunk out of the waste stream,” Beaton said. “And because we got help from the city and county, we’ve been able to do it in a dependable, consistent way.”
The center is open Tuesday through Saturday and accepts newspapers, magazines, glass, aluminum, copper, brass, tin cans, #1 and #2 plastics, milk and juice cartons, some plastic bags and shrink wrap. Drop boxes are available 24 hours a day in Chelan, Manson and Entiat. Curbside recycling is offered to businesses and schools.
The center accepts wood debris from orchards and construction sites which is chipped, then offered to the public for free. And it’s an E-Cycle Washington site, accepting computers, laptops, monitors and TVs.
The center processed 1,170 tons of recyclables in 2008. Beaton expects volume to dip by about 15 percent this year as consumers buy less—and throw away less. Industry demand for recyclables – plastics that are made into new carpets, metals that go into new cars and cans – is down. “Prices have dropped 60 to 70 percent,” Beaton said, adding that he’s bracing for a “rough year.”
State and county grants continue to fund the program, and the city remains the sponsoring agency. Revenues from the sale of recyclables pay for about 70 percent of operational costs.
The recycling center and the Community Services Work Group bring information about recycling and conservation to the schools, sponsor an annual litter cleanup and metals drive, and host the Earth Day Fair which this year is on Saturday, April 18, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Riverwalk Park.
“I always felt like it had my name on it,” Beaton says of his commitment to reduce-reuse-recycle in Chelan. “I wanted to try to do the best job possible.”
Recycling questions? Call Scott Beaton at (509) 682-4663. Want to help at the Earth Day Fair? (509) 682-5756. Lend a hand with litter cleanup? (509) 682-5320
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