Talking trash: Volunteer spirit drives Moab's recycling efforts

MOAB — From the parking lot of the Canyonlands Community Recycling Center, you can look out across a pile of broken pallets to a wire fence. Beyond that the scenery gets prettier. Beyond that are a valley, a town, then the red cliffs of the Moab Rim.

At last count, Moab had 4,800 residents and more than 1 million visitors per year. Those visitors come because of the red rocks, and they make the economy zing. But they also leave behind a certain amount of garbage for the Moabites to handle.

Hence a lot of local efforts, of which the Community Recycling Center is only one. There are also Friends of the Parkway cleanups, the Volunteer Vacations, the group cleanups and on and on.

If you'd happened upon the Earth Day party, held at the recycling center earlier this spring, you would have heard Moabites talking about their successes and challenges.

Inside the cavernous recycling center, Penny Jones had decorated a table for food and hung balloons. The disco effect was enhanced by the shiny walls (insulation backed in foil) and the industrial-looking bailing machine.

Jones, who helped start the recycling center in 1990, took it back as a nonprofit when Grand County's solid waste managers grew frustrated because the center was costing more to operate than it was bringing in. (Even today, according to the recycling center's site manager, Mike Horrocks, the center brings in only about 80 percent of its $65,000 a year operating budget and depends on donations and grants to make up the difference.)

Sara Melnicoff was at the party, too, and brought her sister, Dorthea Melnicoff, who was visiting from Philadelphia. Sara Melnicoff oversees more than a dozen local cleanup and restoration projects under the title the Solutions of Moab.

Solutions is mostly a volunteer effort. (An example of the mission: Sara describes spending 11 days in a row over Easter picking up garbage, including 300 pounds of recyclables, from one illegal campground after one party.)

The two Melnicoff sisters had been on the radio the night before Earth Day. They took calls and talked about saving the Earth.

Dorthea Melnicoff had been quiet on the radio, but the next day, during the party, she told a reporter that the entire time she was listening to callers talk about American Indian spirituality, she was thinking about her own Christian faith.

Dorthea said she believes we were made to live in the Garden of Eden, made to protect the paradise we see around us. Even when we are tourists. "On Earth as it is in heaven," she said.