2025 has been a year without recycling in Soldotna’s Central Peninsula Landfill. Since the landfill’s 33-year old baler machine broke in December 2024, aluminum and cardboard dropped in the former recycling receptacles have piled up in containers or been buried along with the trash.
Since 1992, the borough had used its baler to compact aluminum and other recyclables into dense, easily shippable cubes that could be trucked to recycling centers—most recently to WestRock Recycling in Anchorage. Without a baler, nothing from Central Peninsula Landfill has been recycled.
Borough acting solid waste director Tom Winkler wrote in an email that the landfill can no longer store or handle aluminum, and asked people to take it elsewhere.
- In the central peninsula, we recommend taking cans to Peninsula Scrap and Salvage at 42462 Kalifornsky Beach Road. They pay 10 cents per pound of aluminum. Peninsula Scrap and Salvage is roughly seven miles by highway from Central Peninsula Landfill, so if you’re going to the landfill, the salvage yard won’t be too far out of your way.
- Material from the Homer Transfer Station is baled and shipped separately, and is still being sent to a recycling center.
Smelting fresh aluminum accounts for 4% of the world’s power consumption, according to the World Economic Forum. Recycling it, though, requires just 5% of the energy needed to produce it from ore. For every landfilled aluminum can, it takes 20 times more energy to make a brand new one, rather than recycling. Aluminum is important, so we’re fortunate that it can be recycled indefinitely, and that it’s easy and even profitable to recycle.
Cardboard
Although it is important to recycle, aluminum is far from the Borough’s largest volume of recyclable material. The landfill received 790 tons of cardboard in 2024—more than double the 326.25 tons it received in 2020. The surge of cardboard follows a national trend driven by online retail companies, like Amazon, delivering their products in cardboard packaging. In addition to consuming landfill volume, cardboard and other woodpulp products buried in landfills can decompose into methane, a greenhouse gas many times more potent than CO2.
The borough may be closer to a cardboard solution than one for aluminum. At their Oct. 10 meeting the assembly will be voting on whether to spend $1.2 million from a federal grant to buy a used bailer from Valley Recycling in the Mat-Su. The replacement bailer “will be used primarily for the recycling of cardboard,” according to the ordinance memo.” The ordinance also appropriates $450,000 for work on the building that houses the baler.
The borough needs to be more public with recycling plans
“Failing to plan is planning to fail,” as the saying goes. Intentional or not, this is the path that borough recycling has been traveling. Who could have foreseen a 33 year baling machine breaking down? Recycling wasn’t enough of a priority to plan for this inevitability. Thanks to the borough’s reactive stance, the baler failure has meant nine months of landfilling recyclables. Spending a million dollars on a used replacement might or might not be the best deal available. Though we support the new baler, we hope assembly members will ask questions on October 14 about other options considered and how the baler fits into broader recycling plans going forward.
As of mid-September, the same aluminum receptacles used for recycling are sitting in the same locations at the landfill, with no signage indicating that their contents won’t be recycled. The borough has poorly communicated what it does with material people dump into these receptacles.
What you can do:
- Don’t give up on recycling. You can take your aluminum to Peninsula Scrap and Salvage or the Homer Transfer Station.
- Tell your assembly representative and borough staff that you want them to fix their recycling issues. Find assembly members and their contact information here.
- Don’t forget to reduce and reuse. The most effective way to minimize impact is to keep refuse out of landfills.
Keeping the borough committed to recycling will take engaged residents and community pressure. Tell your assembly members and borough staff that you value the wise use of materials, and want your borough to be active in solving our waste problems.