Anchorage Daily News

PALMER -- Valley Community for Recycling Solutions organizers say a new recycling center being built in the Valley will provide much more than a place where plastic bottles are smashed into giant cubes and shipped to the Lower 48 for recycling.

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Dennis Clark

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The $6.5 million facility -- dubbed a Regional Resource Recovery and Training Park -- is being built to meet the "gold" standard of nationally recognized Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED.

The standards are based on things like preserving or protecting nearby habitat, using recycled materials and optimizing energy use.

Recycling organizers are also working with Alaska Job Corps Center to develop a solar-aquatic wastewater processing system that, along with transforming wastewater into drinking-quality water for discharge, will be a teaching tool for Job Corps students learning how to run wastewater treatment facilities.

And shortly after the building opens next fall, Mat-Su College students will be taking classes there on renewable energy.

Mat-Su College director Dennis Clark said the college has already worked out an agreement with Valley Community to team up.

The recycling group plans to incorporate solar and wind power as energy sources to power the facility.

They also hope to tap into methane from the adjacent Central Mat-Su Borough Landfill.

Clark said those ideas parallel the college's goals. The college is embarking on a new renewable energy course program in the spring, he said.

"We can do a lot of things here -- it can be a lab for our students," he said.

But the center's main focus is on shrinking the amount of garbage going into the borough landfill.

Executive director Mollie Boyer said the group hopes to divert as much as a quarter of the 195 tons of garbage going into the borough landfill each day.

Demand for recycling opportunities in the Valley has increased since Valley Community began collecting trash at quarterly pickups in local parking lots in 1998.

Last year, according to organizers, the group processed more than 1,200 tons of recyclables.

The group currently operates a sorting facility on leased land near North 49th State Street but a lack of space has curtailed expansion and limited the number of big customers, such as schools, the group can accommodate.

The new center will be a 23,600 square-foot building on 11 acres near the Mat-Su Animal Care shelter with room to grow.

The building and land is owned by the Mat-Su Borough, but Valley Community for Recycling Solutions will manage and operate it under a 20-year agreement.

Valley Community organizers and the borough worked to obtain nearly $4 million in grants from the Legislature and federal government, along with donations and grants from businesses, nonprofits and individuals.

A $2.5 million low-interest state loan for the project will be paid back over 20 years with tipping fees from the landfill.

Find Daily News reporter Rindi White online at adn.com/contact/rwhite or call her at 352-6709.

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