Larry Zirkle of Total Reclaim Inc. of Alaska says his company is now hauling about 160,000 pounds of recyclables a month out of Anchorage. The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, which works with communities up and down the Yukon River in Alaska, hopes this summer to top last year's haul of more than 3 million pounds of solid waste backhaul, said spokeswoman Anna Pratt.

“People are very concerned about managing waste,” said Zirkle, who participated in a panel on solid waste at the Southwest Alaska Economic Summit in Anchorage Jan. 25.

“My job is to get the word out to get the stuff out,” said Zirkle, who works with the watershed council and others to encourage and organize recycling. “We need to look at it as a business with attainable milestones and return on investments.”

A more immediate payoff has been cleaner communities, said Pratt, the solid waste backhaul training coordinator for the watershed council.

“It's been what we've expected and gone beyond,” she said. “Our program is pretty popular. They are cleaning up some of their dumps of lead acid batteries and old vehicles.”

In 2005, the watershed council backhauled about 1.5 million pounds of solid waste. Last year the inter-tribal group backhauled more than 3 million pounds, and this summer they hope for more, possibly including heavy equipment, she said.

The nonprofit organization gets donated backhaul service from companies that do business on the Yukon, including Northern Air Cargo, Everts Air and smaller carriers, including Warbelos, Frontier, Arctic Transportation Services, Grant Aviation, Hageland Aviation, Peninsula Airways and Wright Air Service. More help in backhauling comes from Crowley Marine, Northland Services and Inland Barge Services, she said.

The effort has rid several dozen Yukon River community dumps of everything from junked vehicles and appliances to tire rims, electrical transformers and piles of 55-gallon fuel drums.

The watershed council is also training people to remove Freon from discarded refrigerators and freezers, so they can be shipped out by barge, she said.

Total Reclaim's facilities in Anchorage deal mainly in computers and computer monitors, plus televisions, mainframe computer equipment and switch gears, Zirkle said. The most unusual recycled item has been animal tracking collars for moose and bear, brought to Total Reclaim because they have batteries inside them.

Zirkle, through a contract with Totem Ocean Trailer Express, sends materials to be recycled south to Total Reclaim's main facilities in Seattle. The firm specializes in environmentally sound management and recycling of CFC refrigerant gases and refrigeration units, plus other hard-to-handle materials, including fluorescent light bulbs and lighting ballasts.

“About 160,000 pounds a month is quite a bit,” said Zirkle, who said the company's office in Anchorage has tripled its volume in little more than a year.

The tonnage includes about 700,000 pounds of recyclables collected in just three days last year during a Green Star recycling event in Anchorage.

While Zirkle wants the volume to continue increasing, he also wants to slow his receipt of items that are thrown out because they cannot be locally repaired. He suggested the possibility of training more people in smaller communities in appliance repair, and possibly negotiating with manufacturers to send appliance repair instructors to rural communities in exchange for a larger market share.

Zirkle figures he's visited nearly three dozen communities to date to speak about options for recycling, and said he's willing to go to more, hauling along his own pilot bread, peanut butter and sleeping bag. He sees such travels as an educational experience for himself.

“When I talk to Native elders, they say they didn't have this problem 50 years ago. (Then,) most of the waste was organic,” he said.

Zirkle also uses his visits to educate people on options for recycling and to tell them what is done with recycled materials. He also discusses the potential for monetary return for recycling.

Zirkle, himself the father of three grown children, also wants his visits to be educational and fun for children. He said he likes bringing along small pieces of copper and PVC pipe, and teaching the youngsters how to make their own Native American flutes out of the scraps.

One of those instruments, made from copper pipe, he demonstrated by playing for participants at the SWAMC conference. Saying the instrument plays like an alto saxophone, Zirkle calls it his “Envirosax.”