Touring the CRF
Friday November 15th was a fun day for Green Star and Fairbanks North Star Borough (FNSB) as staff from both organizations led 7 tours of the Central Recycling Facility for roughly 30 community members. Green Star and FNSB run tours by request throughout the year but National Recycling Day is a special day where tours run all day. We were happy to see mostly new faces this year.
When asked about how they found out about the National Recycling Day CRF tours , most had learned about the tours from television, radio, social media and friends; but all stated that curiosity about how FNSB recycles and how it actually gets recycled were the main reasons they decided to take the time to have a closer look.
Community Member Han Harp stated “Everyone was so knowledgeable and made it easy to digest and not overwhelming to recycle!”
Where does all this stuff go?
Being at the end of the road, it takes a lot of coordination to ensure our recyclable materials wind up actually recycled. We are both captive to our location and our population, which means we have to accept limitations about which materials will be accepted. This is why you may find “gaps” in what we accept at the CRF. Often, to justify the cost of transportation to manufacturing plants. The FNSB currently sends regular recycling material to Westrock for recycling. Westrock has integrated post-consumer paper and cardboard into their packaging manufacturing operations, so the pure-loads (nothing but one commodity in a full container) ship directly from the CRF to the manufacturing plant to become new products. They also handle the bundling of our plastic and aluminum into pure loads from their facility in Anchorage from where those materials are sent to the lower 48 to be recycled.
Batteries and electronics are sent to Green Star’s Electronics Recycling Facility here in Fairbanks. Electronics that are still usable are refurbished for sale in the ReUse IT store or our Reboot IT Technology Grants. Everything else is broken into components and sent various places for recycling based on each material. For more details about the challenges and complexity of recycling electronics, you are welcome to tour our Texaco Ave. Electronics Recycling warehouse.
CRF Recycling and Tour info
The FNSB CRF accepts aluminum beverage cans, #1 and #2 plastic bottles and jugs, cardboard, mixed paper, office paper, household batteries, and electronics. For more info on what you can recycle at the CRF visit our Don’t Bury Me page or FNSB 2024 Recycling Guide.
Interested in touring the FNSB CRF, FNSB Sanitary Landfill or Green Star’s Electronics Recycling Facility? FNSB and Green Star offer tours whenever the CRF is open Tuesday-Friday 10am-5:30pm and Saturdays 9am-5pm. All you need to do is fill out our tour request form for yourself, class, organization, business or group.
Start a recycling program at your school, church or office!
Admittedly, the “do it yourself” nature of taking your recycling to the CRF can be tedious. That’s why Green Star wants to help make starting workplace, school, church or group based collection more approachable. We think that less trips to the CRF, each with more material just makes sense. Can you help? Start off with some of our recycling bins, and see where it goes! We have lots of ideas, mostly plagiarized from the creative minds of other Fairbanks residents joining in the campaign to keep things which can be recycled out of our landfill. Email or call (907) 452-4152 if you have questions, ideas or suggestions.