Nestled among sand dunes and blackberry bushes in the scenic coastal community of Manzanita, Oregon, a citizen-run dump is thriving. People come to Cart’M Recycling Center to drop off reusable goods, unload trash, make art, and chat.

According to founding member and former director, Lane deMoll, “It has become completely woven into the community. People joke about how you plan to go up there for a 15 minute run and you stay an hour and a half talking politics. There are clusters of people all the time.”

Cart’M was started in 1990 by a committed group of Manzanita citizens who wanted recycling services that their town did not provide. Says Lane, “This community was too small to be required by the state to have services, and it was driving us crazy!” Cart’M primarily serves the small, tourist-dependent communities of Manzanita, Wheeler, Nehalem, and Rockaway.

With a goal of handling the waste generated in their area as responsibly and locally as possible, volunteers built a loading dock out of old signposts and parked 3 semi-trailers on a lot owned by the City of Manzanita. “It was just a basic recycling drop off: newpaper, tin, glass, magazines,” remembers Lane. The recycling center was open just two days a week, 11:00am-1:00pm, and was staffed by volunteers who worked one shift a month. The 60 volunteers included retirees, families and business people.

A hauler in Tillamook would pick up the trailers when they were full. Says Lane, “It was very simple, no budget.” Board member Kathleen Ryan adds, “At this point it was all volunteer, even the trucking. Our deal with the haulers was, you can take it all away, and you can have whatever it’s worth. Every now and again we’d put out a can for donations so we could buy some gloves for the volunteers.” They also sorted redeemable bottles and cans to cover expenses.

The new service caught on. Says Lane, “It took us a whole year to fill up a trailer with newspapers at first, but soon we were sending three or four trucks a year out.” By 1996, Cart’M was outgrowing its site, and citizens were requesting more hours and new services.

In addition, Lane remembers, “The contractors were frustrated because it is very common here for somebody to tear down a beach cottage and then build a big beach house. Some of these were really neat little places with a lot of great stuff. It was frustrating because we thought, gosh if we just had a place we could store these things, we know we could sell them.”

There were other realities forcing change as well. Kathleen remembers, “The markets for recycling had begun to take a dive and our truckers started charging us. It really truly was one of those ‘it’s going to die if we don’t do something major’ situations.”

Lane and Kathleen sat down at Kathleen’s kitchen table and started brainstorming about how Cart’M might expand and thrive. The dream? “A facility where there was expanded recycling, and it would be a community center,” says Lane. Kathleen was serving on the local Solid Waste Advisory Committee at the time. Lane remembers, “I had written out what I felt was a very unprofessional stream-of-consciousness, dream kind of thing, and the next thing I knew, Kathleen had handed it out.”

Kathleen adds, “I thought, ‘Look, this is what we are thinking about doing, we want to know what you think now.’ You don’t want to go down the road with a lot of editorial changes and then find people are going to shoot the messenger anyway. Nobody really said anything, but at least the public works director was aware that this wasn’t just going to be another little operation. So we just pushed ahead.”

Fortunately for them, a representative of Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) happened to be at that meeting. Says Lane, “The guy from DEQ took us out for coffee and said, ‘Are you really serious about this? DEQ grants are coming up and if you applied, there would probably be funding for you.’ So I wrote a grant.”

With an $11,000 planning and education grant in hand, Lane became coordinator and Kathleen board chair of the new non-profit organization, Cart’M. They needed a new site, and they started looking at the local dump, which at that time had little more than a shed, an outhouse, and a place to park the trucks that hauled the trash away. Says Lane, “It was only open one day a week, and the operator was losing money. Plus the owners weren’t from the community, so there were fights when people went up there. People thought the dump was charging too much.” Kathleen adds, “We thought of operating with them, side-by-side. They would do the dump, we’d do the recycling. But it wasn’t very long before they came back at us and said, ‘Why don’t you just do the whole thing?’”

Lane remembers when things really came together, “We expected the county commissioners and the solid waste guy to say, ‘Oh well, too hard.’ But they were waving their arms, saying, ‘We could put the building over here!’” Kathleen adds, “We brought them up to the site and were pleasantly surprised that they were actually thinking this was doable.”

In two and a half years, Cart’M raised $350,000 in private, public and in-kind contributions for their new center. Kathleen remembers that the new project brought a shift in the volunteer pool. “It was very different. It wasn’t just helping little old ladies up the steps with their newspapers. It was a harder thing, but other people came in who were excited by what it was.” Volunteers on the project included professionals with legal, building, planning, surveying, and solid waste expertise.

The new center opened its new 5,000 square foot building at the dump in December 1998. A resale shop is a central component of the new facility; there had been no thrift stores within 25 miles up or down the coast before Cart’M opened its store. Says Kathleen, “What made it economically feasible is that we could have these three prongs: running the transfer station, selling the recycled materials, and the resale.” Of the current $250,000 budget, $75,000 is revenue from the resale store. Says Lane, “The resale store is wildly successful, but it also hugely labor intensive, so it kind of breaks even.”

The corrugated metal store building is breezy, with large doors open on two sides. Inside you’ll find a good assortment of sports equipment, kitchenware, books, and knicknacks. There is also a community bulletin board where people post items they are hoping to find. Outside there is a large array of salvaged building supplies, in semiorderly piles out on the pavement. The self-service recycling center is neatly arrayed along one wall.

The recycling is the least lucrative part of the operation. Says Lane, “Just about the time we opened, the prices for recyclables really tanked. So we have never been able to make any money on the recycling.” They don’t charge for the service, and they never change what they accept, even when markets shift. Explains Lane, “It’s too hard to change the public’s idea of what we are taking. We just keep adding things; we even recycle fishing line.

The transfer station subsidizes the recycling service, bringing in another $95,000 a year. And according to Lane, “It costs very little to run. That’s the irony – if everybody was just throwing stuff away, we’d be making great money.”

Cart’M is now open four to five days a week, depending on the season. Says Kathleen, “The beautiful thing about this is that people who come here represent the whole socio-economic scale. We’ve got some of our wealthiest members of this community and some of the abject poorest, and they intermingle there.” Cart’M also has sponsored free workshops on waste management and recycling for builders, restaurants and food stores, rental agencies and motels.

According to Lane, the hope that the dump could act as a community center got a big boost when she and Kathleen thought of reusing refuse even more creatively. “The magic moment was when we had the idea of the trash art. The Oregon Arts Commission has a wonderful program called ‘Arts Build Communities,’ and we got a grant to do art, do some workshops, and have a show. And the rest is history.”

The first Trash Bash was less than six months after Cart’M opened, and it is now an annual event that features live music and trash art. Says Lane, “It is really a community thing. By the second year we had 1,000 people there.” Periodic workshops provide aspiring junk artists with inspiration and assistance with welding and other skills. Says Lane, “All ages come, and quite a few people now show their work in other places who started doing it at Cart’M.”

Instead of advertising, they rely on the local press to spread the word about Cart’M. Says Lane, “We really have paid attention to getting press releases out. That’s the other thing the art did. Recycling is kind of ho hum, but trash art? That gets great coverage.”

Cart’M has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Says Lane, “People ask what there is to do in town: ‘You can go up to Seaside to the mall, or you can go over to Cart’M!’” But it is really the commitment of the local community that has made it happen. Says Kathleen, “It couldn’t have happened without volunteers. There is an energy in the community that is priceless.”

Lane and Kathleen and the others involved with Cart’M haven’t stopped dreaming. They are now planning to build a second building on the site to provide more space for trash art workshops and to incubate new recycling businesses – scrap wood furniture, rebuilt bikes, green glass art, crushed dry wall soil amendment – the possibilities seem limitless. Lane recently turned the reins of Cart’M over to Rich Felley, a self-described “gizmo guy and tinker bug.”

There is a different sense of ownership when a community’s waste is the responsibility of a citizen group rather than bureaucrats. Lane laughs “I’ve heard tell that Cart’M is becoming a verb around here – ‘I’ll just go Cart’M it.’

Contact
Cart’M Recycling
Rick Felley, Director
P.O. Box 122
Manzanita, OR 97130
503.368.7764