The Jewel of
Junk & Stuff
Julie Daniel
of BRING
talks about
grassroots
growing up.
Story by Bobbie Willis
These first true days of spring, the sun glints and shimmers through
BRING Recycling Center so that every window pane and piece of broken
glass sparkles like gemstone; so that every mishmash piece of sheet metal
or metal tubing or metal frame, pipe or wire catches and throws back a lit-
tle shine; so that every discarded ceramic sink and bathtub and toilet
gleams softly, but so compellingly that something in you believes, no in-
sists, it can all be resuscitated, brought back to life — that it can all be
used again.
Julie Daniel, general manager and co-director of BRING tells me that
this spark, this belief in resuscitation — or more specifically in the reuse
part of reduce-reuse-recycle — is where the future is at for a grassroots,
nonprofit recycling center such as BRING. “The world of recycling is
changing,” she says. “And in a way, BRING is almost a victim of its own
success.”
F
or more than 30 years, BRING has
worked to make recycling a com-
munity value here in Lane County.
“And it is a core community
value,” says Daniel. “Recycling is
one of the things that defines us. We have in-
credible participation here and people are
very loyal to the process.”
She explains, “When BRING started in
1971, we made recycling happen in the com-
munity. We introduced the concept and really
built a market for a system that has now be-
come part of the mainstream — what was
started by activists and visionaries and envi-
ronmentalists has become mainstream.”
And within the mainstream, recycling has
grown up, become an industry. “So now,”
says Daniel, “your garbage haulers — not a
nonprofit — are who pick up your recy-
cleables. Materials are sorted in big facilities
that handle enormous streams of material.”
Don’t get Daniel wrong. “I don’t see that
as being a bad thing, it’s just a fact. Garbage
and waste commodities are big industry, big
companies. It’s very capital intensive. You
10 MAY 29, 2003
need very expensive equipment — and a lot
of it — and big facilities and all kinds of cap-
ital investments that very few nonprofits can
muster. And why would we?” she asks mat-
ter-of-factly. “Why would we do something
that the for-profit sector can do far cheaper
and more efficiently than we can?”
But this brings into question the role of a
local, grassroots recycling center such as
BRING. The organization is an anomaly,
Daniel explains. “Recycling was started by
nonprofits, and by and large those nonprofits
have gone out of business. There are only a
handful — BRING among them — left in the
country today.” To maintain its survival,
BRING will make some major organizational
shifts, including even more emphasis on edu-
cation, and relocating the center to a signifi-
cantly larger site in Glenwood.
Roots to Reinvention
About five years ago, when Daniel moved
from an office position with BRING to take
on the role of co-director with Business
Manager David Wollner, the facility was
starting to feel the for-profit squeeze-out in
recycling. She says, “I think that when David
and I put our heads together and started look-
ing at the organization, we realized that recy-
cling would not be in our future forever. We
can’t really compete as processors or collec-
tors of materials. We just don’t have the ca-
pacity, and there really isn’t the volume of
materials in this town.”
This organizational examination led the
directors right back to BRING’s mission
statement: to promote “a healthy, sustainable
environment through education, innovative
waste reduction, reuse and recycling pro-
grams and by involving the community in re-
source conservation.”
And it suddenly became clear that there
was a direction in which a nonprofit recycler
could grow. Says Daniel, “BRING from the
very beginning was a little different from
other nonprofit recyclers in that we did more
than just recycle. We’ve always had an edu-
cational component. Back in 1974, before en-
vironmental education was even a twinkle in
the eye of government, BRING had an envi-
ronmental educator.”
And so BRING has decided to focus more
intently upon education. If grassroots could
make recycling mainstream, could education
make reuse and reduction mainstream, as well?
More Radical Change
While BRING heartily endorses recycling
as not only a core community value, but also
as a true step toward conserving resources,
Daniel still admits: “It’s not enough.”
Daniel and Wollner had taken a hard look
at the statistical information on recycling pro-
vided by the Department of Environmental
Quality (DEQ). “They keep very detailed sta-
tistics,” Daniel explains. “And that’s where
you come up with a thing called the recovery
rate,” or the percentage of materials recov-
ered and recycled.
“What we noticed,” Daniel says with
some shock, “was that the recovery rate was
climbing higher and higher and higher. We
went from 20, 30, 40, into the low 50s — an