RE Sources Dances Between Environmental Education and Advocacy

Margi Polland Fox has written numerous articles and essays for regional and national publications. In her current business, Fox Profiles, she writes bios, booklets, brochures, and annual reports for nonprofits.

Editor’s note: Margi Polland Fox is profiling the region’s environmental organizations for Whatcom Watch, and this month’s article on RE Sources is the second in the series. With the current challenges to environmental protections, we need these committed and innovative groups more than ever. It is in this light we offer their stories.

RE Sources’ name says it all: they save resources and are themselves a resource. Focused on solid waste issues, they’ve branched out as the need has arisen. Everything the organization tackles stems from the same core concern, how we handle waste—in the water and air and on land.

Their outreach extends far beyond the traditional environmental community. Through their diverse programs they impact thousands of schoolchildren and county residents, and hundreds of businesses in the area. “We wear many different hats,” said Crina Hoyer, Environmental Education Coordinator. “And we’re able to follow something through and affect change over the long term.”

During its more than twenty-year history, RE Sources has started curbside recycling in Whatcom County, opened The RE Store to sell used building materials, developed the North Sound Baykeeper program to monitor marine water quality in Whatcom and Skagit Counties, and begun SAFE Bellingham devoted to pipeline safety issues. They’ve given presentations to the majority of Whatcom County’s children and to the general public about recycling and hazardous waste.

The diversity of activities both challenges and strengthens RE Sources. “Most environmental organizations have one clear focus,” said Carl Weimer, executive director. “We’re broader, so it’s much harder to come up with a one liner to describe us.”

Their evolution exemplifies the ecological principal described by John Muir in his famous quote: “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he (or she) finds it attached to the rest of the world.” RE Sources tugged at recycling in Bellingham and ended up, through a chain of linked events, advocating for pipeline safety nationally.

A compelling theme surfaces frequently in RE Sources’ story: The organization has responded to environmental needs in our community, often when no one else has been willing to take on the problem. They began in 1982 with citizens who wanted curbside recycling in Bellingham’s Birchwood neighborhood. The group went to the City Council, who initially turned them down.

So the organization, called Bellingham Community Recycling at the time, started effective pilot projects. The City Council then funded recycling on a larger scale until it went citywide. At that point, the burgeoning organization turned over the recycling program to Sanitary Service Company and focused on education about solid waste. They also trained people from other areas who were starting similar recycling programs.

By the early 1990s, they’d changed their name to Environmental Resource Services. At the time, there was a push nationwide to deal with hazardous waste. As they did on many occasions, the organization stepped in, doing outreach on the issue and including information on their recycling hotline—a service they still maintain now through a contract with the county.

Also during the early 1990s, Whatcom County’s recycling coordinator was interested in other possibilities for reusing materials. Carl Weimer, who served on the Solid Waste Advisory Committee, spent a week unloading trucks at Recomp, the garbage facility. He said, “I was amazed at all the perfectly good stuff people were throwing away—televisions, toys, construction supplies.” Much of it was in good shape, including the building materials that made up 30 percent of the waste.

Weimer worked with building contractors on the idea of starting up a store to sell these used materials. No one wanted to take on the challenge, so RE Sources, under Weimer’s direction, tackled the project. With a $30,000 start-up grant from Whatcom County in 1993, they opened the first RE store. (In 1999, they opened a second store in Seattle.)

RE Sources’ focus on waste naturally turned to water quality when a crisis about emissions in the Nooksack River required a response. It was also a time when water issues were at the forefront nationally, and grant funding was available for related projects.

In 1994, the organization merged with another group, Puget Sounders, and became RE Sources. From there they went on to address marine water quality and set up a public involvement and watchdog program called North Sound Baykeeper.

They’ve also involved the entire community with the Whatcom Watershed Pledge project, designed to help residents and businesses prevent water pollution. In addition, they’ve dealt with groundwater issues, including research into the leukemia cluster in the north county area.

Then in 1999, the pipeline disaster struck. A few days after the explosion, Weimer met with a number of people from the community, and they discussed what to do in response. It made the most sense for RE Sources to take on the issue of pipeline safety, though it was a little different from the problems they’d undertaken to date.

In keeping with their role as community resource, the organization once again stepped into the fray. “Someone had to do it,” Weimer explained. “It made the most sense for us to do it since we could hit the ground running and act quickly.”

The RE Sources board approved $10,000 to jump-start SAFE Bellingham. Their infrastructure was already in place, and they were plugged into local issues, including those dealing with refineries. They wanted to make sure a destructive pipeline accident didn’t happen again in Bellingham—or anywhere else in the country. (Look for a profile of SAFE Bellingham in the next issue.)

Now RE Sources has a budget of $1.5 million and 41 employees (33 in the RE Stores and eight in the office). From their earliest grass-roots beginnings, RE Sources has grown into one of the biggest environmental organizations in Washington. Everything they do is related to the ecology of the same problem—waste. Our national habit of consumption creates the real predicament underlying waste.

In whatever RE Sources does, they target the general community, educating people across a wide socio/economic range. The Watershed Pledge aims at both residents and businesses. The volunteer naturalists from the Beach Naturalists program talk to anyone interested who happens to be on the beach, not just those who make a special effort to show up at a meeting.

The school program is huge. Crina Hoyer, the coordinator, has worked for the organization for five years, and she’s heartened by the growth of children’s knowledge about waste issues. “It’s a measure of our success,” she said, “that students have heard our message.”

Consequently, RE Sources staff members have changed their presentations, from the previous focus on how to recycle (i.e., how to sort the materials into the bins) to a much more sophisticated approach. Currently, they talk with kids about creative ways to reuse things and reduce waste, and they discuss good ways to dispose of and avoid hazardous household products.

They provide everything from programs about air pollution to actual worm bins designed to show the benefits of composting and the life cycle of worms. The focus on education is important because people need to understand the issues for change to occur.

Many nonprofits run businesses such as bingo halls and gift shops to help fund the work of the organization. RE Sources’ stores are unusual because they carry out the mission of the agency in addition to adding a little to funding. As a result, they can sell reused materials that make a profit and items that don’t—such as recycled paint. “Our point is how much stuff we divert (from the waste stream),” Weimer pointed out, “not how much money we make.”

The stores also provide the opportunity for educating the general public, and they put out brochures on a variety of topics. People of all political persuasions and ages shop at the RE Stores because, as Weimer explained, “It makes sense not to waste whether you’re left or right wing, and everybody likes a good deal.”

RE Sources opened the second store because the sheer volume of used materials was great, especially in King County; for instance, they received a call recently from one of the biggest contractors in the state about salvaging the materials from 600 homes about to be demolished. This abundance means similar stores are opening in other parts of Washington. RE Sources has offered them help and information, another aspect of the emphasis on outreach.

Through several programs, most notably the North Sound Baykeeper, RE Sources monitors the agencies responsible for protecting the area’s water sources and marine environment. The new head of the Baykeeper programs, Wendy Steffensen, has a great deal of enthusiasm for her new position. As an educator, she shows others how to check permits for regulatory compliance, and she reviews numerous permits herself.

Steffensen believes the permit review process triggers an important change within the monitoring agencies. “It puts people on notice that someone is watching them,” she claimed. Regulators are more vigilant.

She operates with checklist to see if the waste discharge applications have followed the regulations; and she comments on the gray areas—for instance, those discharges that aren’t exactly illegal by some rules but may still violate the Clean Water Act. She added, “The overarch-ing goal is eliminating toxins in the water.”

When government agencies haven’t upheld their own rules, RE Sources has entered into lawsuits. They don’t start in court, but the agencies know that RE Sources comes with solid information and won’t hesitate to call them on any breaches of enforcement. Some regulators welcome the feedback; it provides a counterbalance when political pressures are pulling them in the opposite direction.

Unfortunately, there is so much to monitor, it’s difficult for Steffensen cover all the permit applications. Volunteers are essential, and she provides training (her email address is waters@re-sources.org.) She pointed out that community support strengthens the advocacy and watchdog programs considerably. “I’m one voice,” she said, “and one voice gets amplified by other voices.”

Besides the small revenue from the RE Stores, RE Sources receives funding from private donations and from a variety of public and private sources, including some of the agencies RE Sources sues or challenges in other ways. This dynamic situation sets up an interesting challenge. They rely on their reputation for having skilled educators and for being an organization that speaks out even if it may mean offending a funder.

There are numerous examples of former and current opponents who give grants to RE Sources for specific projects. For instance, they have a $250,000 contract with the Port of Bellingham, an agency that’s been on the other side of some Bellingham Bay cleanup issues in the past; the port has provided the funding for expansion of the Watershed Pledge program into the county.

Commenting on the line they tread, Weimer wrote, “I’m proudest of the dance we do between pure education and advocacy. On the one hand, we can strongly disagree with an agency’s policies and procedures, and even sue them sometimes.

At the same time, they respect our methods and abilities enough that we can continue to do all this great environmental education work for them. Most reasonable people within various agencies and within our organization understand that education is the great long-term need, and we don’t let short-term disagreements stand in the way of raising the bar for future generations.”

Though RE Source’s focus has been predominantly local, they’ve extended their reach in numerous ways, from the opening of the store in Seattle to the national work on pipeline safety issues. And they get calls from around the world asking for information. The intensity of their commitment to this area’s problems has constantly led RE Sources outward.

Cellist Yo Yo Ma spoke to this conundrum when discussing his involvement with music around the world. He said, “I am constantly finding that the deeper you go into anything local, the more you find the global.”

RE Sources is a great resource for our community and beyond. Like worms in the dirt, without them we’d all be buried in waste. §