PORT ANGELES — Her job boils down to one task.
Talking us out of trashing this place.
And after working in several stupendous locations around the country — Great Smoky Mountains and Grand Teton national parks, to name two — Helen Freilich has found her spot in a tiny office on the outskirts of Port Angeles.
She’s the city’s waste reduction specialist — in essence, a teacher with a crucial curriculum.
Reducing garbage output in a rural community: not the most glamorous endeavor.
Yet “this job is a dream come true,” Freilich said on a recent Friday afternoon.
And in a position Freilich has been preparing for ever since she was a teenager, she teaches the people of Port Angeles and Clallam County how to care for their planet via recycling, reducing their carbon footprint and composting.
Garden Glory
The job includes ample travel across the region, for various reasons. As the city’s compost sampler and seller, she promotes something called Garden Glory: rich, nourishing stuff made of yard waste from residents and biosolids from the wastewater treatment plant.
Before it’s sold, the compost must be tested for salmonella. So Freilich climbs the enormous pile every other month, takes a sample and then escorts it, via car and ferry, to a laboratory in Burlington.
Then it’s Freilich’s job to promote the product, which goes for $20 a truckload to landscapers and other gardeners. Peninsula College has used the Glory to enrich the soil on its main campus, while the Washington Department of Transportation spreads it beside highways to prevent erosion.
Then there’s another popular form of recycling, done via the Internet: a free exchange at www.2good2toss.com. Since Freilich activated it in 2004, it’s become quite the hit site.
Giveaway prices
Much like the Peninsula Daily News’ Bargain Box of free classified advertising items for $200 or less, 2good2toss.com is an avenue for selling or giving away items priced at $99 or less — or offered for free to the first taker — and diverting them from the trash heap.
The site is like a yard sale online. Couches, coffee pots, coveralls, free sets of dishes — just about anything goes, except live animals, weapons, hazardous materials or sexually explicit materials.
Though 2good2toss is no craigslist, “we have 2,700 people posting items,” Freilich reports. In 2011, the site saw 1,035 successful listings: stuff that found good homes instead of becoming more garbage.
“I just gave something away,” Freilich added.
It was an old office chair; she posted it on 2good2toss.com on a Sunday afternoon, and someone had snatched it up by noon the next day. She didn’t even have to deliver it or make small talk with the new owner. Freilich felt like a quiet Sunday at home, so she put the chair out on the street and the new owner whisked it away.
Besides its listings in about 60 categories, from computers and tools to kids’ and kitchen stuff, the 2good2toss site has a guide to local stores where used goods are bought and sold.
Also on the left side of the site’s home page is the Recyclopedia, a guide to what to do with various recyclables, from eyeglasses to electronics. The former can be donated to the Lions Club’s international effort to provide glasses for those who can’t afford them (www.LionsClubs.org), while electronics — and other waste such as Styrofoam — can be recycled at eCycle Northwest, the yard on U.S. Highway 101 east of Sequim (www.eCycleNW.com).
30 tons of ‘trash’
In the past year, all of that 2good2toss activity kept 59,746 pounds of stuff — about 30 tons — from going to the garbage dump.
“I do feel like I’m making a difference,” Freilich said.
She also knows she has a long, wide road to travel. On average, each U.S. resident generates 4.6 pounds of garbage per day — and far too much of it is piled onto landfills.
Freilich, who has a master’s in science and environmental education from Cornell University, calls herself a product of the environmental movement. Her high school biology teacher, Pauline Riley, had her students read The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich; she also encouraged her students to participate in things like the first Earth Day march in 1970.
Natural direction
Freilich was a sophomore that year in Lake Placid, N.Y., a rural place where she fell head over heels for the natural world. She loved to hike and camp and follow birds through the woods. So when she went off to college, she chose a major that would enable her to plan and direct nature centers.
One of her jobs in this field was as a counselor and teacher at an outdoor education center in the Adirondack Mountains. There, in 1977, she met Jerry Freilich, a young man from Philadelphia who would become her husband. In their 26 years of marriage so far, they’ve traveled the length of the lower 48 states, working in North Carolina and Tennessee and Wyoming and California. In that Golden State, Freilich worked in the San Bernardino National Forest, which provides a recreational haven for some 20 million Southern Californians.
Then, seven years ago, Jerry was hired to be Olympic National Park’s coordinator of research. The Freilichs, with their sons Alex, now a 20-year-old student at the Evergreen State College, and Ben, 17 and a junior at Port Angeles High School, came to discover yet another place of city-park symbiosis.
Educating
In her position with the city of Port Angeles, Freilich is doing something she has always done: educate people about recycling. The difference is that this is a paying job. In other communities where she and Jerry have lived, Freilich volunteered with local environmentalist groups. And though recycling is much more integrated into people’s lives than it was a few decades ago, city and county staffers like Freilich still have an uphill climb.
Port Angeles is populated by people who want to do more for their planet, Freilich has found. But in a rural place such as this, with a relatively small tax base, the city cannot afford urban-level recycling services.
Many people move to Clallam County and are surprised at this. Freilich has to explain the fact that a small town can’t offer Seattle-size services when it comes to recycling. She also has helped draw up the citywide survey on recycling habits and preferences that went out with this month’s utility bills.
More important, however, Freilich hopes to teach residents that recycling is far from the whole answer.
“We’re recycling more, but we’re also generating more garbage,” she said, adding that reducing our trash will take us further down the path to a cleaner Earth.
When Freilich sees what people throw away — the packaging, the appliances, the things that could have been recycled or reused — she gets upset. But she knows, at the same time, that many want to learn more about reducing their trash output. She estimates that she receives five or six calls each day from people seeking information about waste reduction.
Freilich also attends conferences and state Department of Ecology meetings, where she shares ideas with her counterparts around the state. That, along with her interactions with the public, gives her fresh inspiration. She also helped write the Clallam County Solid Waste Management Plan, a blueprint for what’s possible.
There are times, though, when people from the Puget Sound metropolitan area turn a condescending eye on the state’s rural areas. But Freilich no longer lets Seattleites and other urban counterparts make her feel inferior when they imply that Port Angeles and Clallam County are far behind in the environmental revolution.
“It’s not a race,” she said.
This community is making progress on the ground. It’s a matter of talking to people, often one at a time, in their homes and businesses — and Freilich finds many who are receptive to the information she’s offering.
Peninsula success
She and her intern Meggan Uecker, a student in Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment, conduct waste audits for local businesses and organizations. Peninsula College is one such place.
“They have cut their waste tremendously,” said Freilich.
The waste audit and the addition of more recycling bins plus a garbage compactor are part of the college’s modern sustainability policy. This is just one instance of a rural organization setting an example for its community.
“I don’t believe in stereotypes,” Freilich added.
This rural area is no backwater, she feels.
While apartment complexes are typically the last to adopt a recycling program, there are several in Port Angeles where residents have taken it upon themselves to call for bins and service, Freilich added.
“People want to do the right thing,” she said.
And the city itself is expanding its efforts: a new program will start soon with the addition of a pollution prevention specialist, a grant-funded staffer who will go out to businesses to teach ways to cut down waste.
Freilich and her family do big and small things to reduce waste at home. She buys fresh foods instead of packaged, to avoid all that paper and plastic.
Her son Alex is studying business at Evergreen, where environmental consciences are healthy. And just about every chance she gets, Freilich shares with him information she runs across about “green” business.
“That is the future,” she said.
The Freilichs try to keep their daily carbon footprint light, living in a house in town instead of out in the country; they can often use Clallam Transit buses or walk to work and school.
To refresh herself, Freilich also practices yoga, grows her flower garden and meditates. Two years ago her friend Lynda Bishop, a nurse, told her about Holosync meditation CDs, and Freilich began using them for an hour a day.
“[Meditation] allows me to see the big picture and not get too wrapped up in the details; and not get upset about what is ‘not going right.’ It has really made a difference in how I react to things,” she said.
“I was hoping meditation would help me lose weight. It hasn’t,” she added. But the benefit she does receive is a welcome one.
“I am much calmer,” she said, “and ready to accept the good things that come my way.”
Other interests
Freilich also enjoys swimming, reading and activities with her sons.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten a lot more interests,” she said.
Port Angeles has been a good place to pursue them.
“The mix of industry and the national park is an interesting combination . . . Jerry and I always end up in places that are a little bit different. It’s hard at first, but it’s interesting. We like the nature; we like the people.”
These days Freilich dreams of designing a new house, an energy-smart place made out of recycled materials. This home would have a special hatch in the kitchen, something like a pet door: a “compost exit,” Freilich said with a smile, that would make it simple for the family to toss their kitchen scraps out to the composter, which will ultimately feed the flower and herb garden.
Back at work, Freilich continues her teaching on all fronts. She spent a recent Saturday afternoon in front of Albertson’s in Port Angeles, defying the near-freezing temperature. Handing out brochures on composting and recycling, she chatted with the many passers-by who paused at her table.
Progress happens, Freilich believes, when people converge: staffers such as herself, city residents and most of all, elected officials. After some 40 years of work in the environmental movement, she’s learned well to cultivate patience.
“Change happens slowly,” Freilich said. “I keep telling myself that.”