SEQUIM — Mark Ozias is being audited so thoroughly that he has to go through his garbage — and he’s downright happy about it.
Ozias, manager of the Sequim Open Aire Market held each Saturday at Second Avenue and Cedar Street, is conducting a waste audit, a kind of wake-up call as to how much trash is going from the market into the landfill.
On June 6, Ozias embarked with market assistant Joe Irvin and two expert volunteers: Port Angeles city waste reduction specialist Helen Freilich and her husband, Jerry Freilich — who, when not volunteering to weigh and categorize trash, is the research coordinator at Olympic National Park.
The waste audit, thanks to a $1,000 grant from the North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation & Development Council, based in Port Angeles, will include the addition of recycling bins – something the market has never had before — an educational display at the market and a workshop for vendors on the benefits, financial and ecological, of cutting down trash.
Most people know all about recycling, but Ozias hopes composting, a heavyweight when it comes to reducing the landfill load, will be the next big thing.
He and his audit crew found plenty of compostable food scraps and paper products as they went through the market’s garbage after closing time on June 6.
Ozias hopes to find a farmer or other business to take and use the compostables so they don’t have to be added to the trash trucked to landfills across the Northwest. He can be reached at 360-460-2668 or via www.SequimMarket.com.
Even if something is labeled compostable — such as the cups from Strait Soup, one of the Open Aire Market’s new vendors — it won’t break down at the dump, Ozias said; the stuff has to go into a compost pile.
He learned that from Helen Freilich, who has conducted waste audits of the Bushwhacker restaurant in Port Angeles, the Clallam County Courthouse and Port Angeles City Hall.
She won’t reveal their trash numbers, preferring to emphasize that audits include recommendations on how to cut down on garbage and save real money doing so.
Disposing of waste, Freilich said, is going to get more expensive as landfills bulge around the region, nation and world.
She’d like to start a “green business” program with window stickers and other signs that a firm is making an effort to “do the right thing,” by lightening its trash footprints, but Freilich is the lone waste specialist in Clallam County.
Reducing waste by reusing utensils and other supplies will make a big difference at the local level, Freilich believes.
Paper, plastic and Styrofoam cups, for example, pile up at farmers markets and festivals; during the June 6 Open Aire Market, she and Ozias collected 93 non-compostable cups.
Reducing such waste, she said, is as simple as carrying a reusable “commuter cup,” choosing fabric tablecloths instead of throwaway plastic and using dishes instead of waxy paper plates.
Ozias, meanwhile, hopes to inspire a fresh mind set not only in his 60 vendors but also the shoppers — 500 to 1,200 per Saturday, depending on the weather — who come to the Open Aire Market.
Business is better than ever this year, he said, with farm vendors’ sales up 25 percent over last year and fresh food sellers’ volume up 10 percent.
Now he’s thinking about another bottom line: reduced stress on the environment.
Port Angeles Farmers Market manager Michele D’hemecourt said she too wants to have recycling bins and raise consciousness about reducing trash. “It’s a work in progress,” she said last week. The Forks Open Aire Market has yet to set out bins, added organizer Laurel Burtness.
PT recycling
Then there’s the Port Townsend Farmers Market, whose vendors and customers have been recycling for the past 10 years.
“We encourage vendors to use recycled and/or biodegradable packaging, which a number of them do,” said market director Will O’Donnell.
“We have not done an audit, but it is a good idea.”
Sequim’s waste audit will end with a weighing of trash, compostables and recyclables in October, when the outdoor market closes for the season. Ozias and his crew will compare the data with that gathered in June, to see whether there was any reduction.
The first weigh-in, according to Jerry Freilich’s calculations, included 3 pounds, 7 ounces of compostable paper; 4 pounds, 5 ounces of compostable food waste and 13.5 pounds of trash.
That may not sound like much, but it adds up.
In midsummers past, when the Open Aire Market reached its peak, its four garbage cans needed emptying halfway through the day.
One category came in light when the crew went through the market’s trash June 6: A mere 9 ounces of plastic bottles were left behind. That’s a good sign, Ozias said, that people are more likely to toss bottles into recycling bins instead of the garbage.
Now his eye is on another tipping point — lighter trash loads and a composting consciousness.
“We want to serve as an example,” Ozias said, of an organization striving for local sustainability. Cutting down on the waste trucked to landfills “is vital to our success.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
