Our mission at Orcas Recycling Services (ORS)/The Exchange is to build a Zero Waste community and mitigate climate crisis through service, education, and stewardship of our waste/resource streams.
Our Zero Waste Committee aims to invite and involve Orcas community members to help educate our Orcas Island community and tourists about Zero Waste concepts, resolutions, actions, and the potential for using Zero Waste tools to share responsibility for discarded materials among residents, commercial waste generators, service providers for reuse, recycling, compost and solid waste, product designers, and manufacturers.
Zero Waste is the simple concept of reducing the waste we create and then reusing, recycling and composting most of what we throw away.
A true zero waste system is cyclical, like nature: Everything we produce, consume and dispose of eventually goes back to feed the larger system at the end of its useful life. It’s a loop rather than a one-way street.
At ORS/The Exchange, both yard waste and glass are zero waste materials – they can be recycled and reused right here on the island.
But why do we need Zero Waste if our waste can just go in a landfill?
Landfills are imperfect places to send waste. They’re designed to prevent water, oxygen, and sunlight from entering. Therefore, very little of what is buried there breaks down quickly—even materials like plant matter or those marked “biodegradable” or “compostable.”
Burying trash in the ground is a one-way street where we purchase, consume and dispose of materials, and then pay to bury these materials in the ground—never to see them again.
Zero Waste is precisely the opposite.
ORS/The Exchange Zero Waste Goals:
- Educate people about the links between Zero Waste actions and climate change
- Get Zero Waste actions into city, county, and state climate action plans
- Get our county to adopt a Zero Waste policy and set goals to develop and implement Zero Waste actions
- Enact organics out of landfills bans as well as help set up and develop a sustainable composting facility or equivalent system for Island residents
- Push local governments to maximize commercial reuse, recycling and composting efforts for the full range of materials via local ordinances, contracts and franchise agreements
- Educate the public about the types of Zero Waste operations that are required in climate friendly communities and other sustainable Island models (composting, resale, reuse and recycling-based manufacturing)
- Enact single use item bans
- Enact pharmaceutical disposal bans at local government level
- Support green job generation from Zero Waste activities
- Support appropriate energy from source separated parts of the waste stream and defend against the inappropriate high temperature conversion technologies such as incineration