(Courtesy/Dakota Tangredi)
For Dakota Tangredi, a day at work as a waste reduction coordinator for Marion County often means showing up at apartment buildings with a safety vest, clipboard and gloves to examine their garbage.
Starting with the recycling bins, Tangredi makes a rough estimate of what percentage of the contents don’t belong. He then pivots to garbage and does a visual assessment of the top layer for what he calls “opportunity,” or recycling in the garbage.
“I am looking at both, but contamination is a big deal because recycling is really a business,” he said. “When somebody is trying to buy all of your milk jugs, they just want a bale of milk jugs that’s compressed and only milk jugs … not 90% milk jugs and 10% plastic bags, because at this point in time, we’re not always able to sort out every contaminant that gets into recycling. It can be very laborious.”
Other days, the bulk of his duties involve teaching courses that train people to do volunteer work in their community toward recycling and waste reduction.
Tangredi, 26, said his dedication to doing environmental work hit him suddenly, starting at Clackamas High School in an AP environmental science class taught by Rod Shroufe, who he said was instrumental in him finding his career path.
He said the course felt like being bludgeoned over the head as he realized the many pressing issues his generation and future ones would face. “It seemed really interesting to me to say, ‘hey, this is a really big issue, but how can I be a part of the solution?,” he said. “That was sort of the turning point for me of going, ‘Oh, there’s this really cool field that’s emerging, there are some cool opportunities to support people and the planet.”
Tangredi graduated from Portland State University in 2017 with an environmental science degree before spending a year in Spain teaching students English. He then worked as a waste reduction specialist for Clackamas County through AmeriCorps until this past March.
A month later, he joined Marion County to fill the waste reduction coordinator role that Alan Pennington previously held for 12 years before his retirement in January.
“We’re a humble team of two, plus our supervisor,” he said.
One of his primary duties is coordinating the Master Recycler program, where he creates curriculum and teaches multi-week courses on where garbage and food waste ends up. The classes offer over 30 hours of training, according to the county’s website, and those who complete the program then volunteer for environmental events and projects.
“They will go and do waste reduction and outreach and education, action in the community,” he said. “They can do tabling and presentations, they can speak at schools and their community groups.”
(Courtesy/Dakota Tangredi)
Tangredi said reducing barriers is integral to his work, which is why they offer free classes and scholarships.
He has also spoken Spanish for about 13 years, which he said is helpful to his work in Marion County. “Our team and I think local government in a lot of ways can be really bad about gatekeeping, so keeping information and resources,” he said. “Spanish speaking to me is just another way to offer the cultural competency, help people develop resources if they want or do outreach if they request it in another language.”
When Tangredi goes to multi-family apartments for visual assessments, he said he tries to educate property managers and work with them to get people in the community up to speed on recycling.
“We’re not like a state agency, we’re not regulatory. So this is never to punish anyone, it’s really just for us to have an idea of, okay, this is improvement. This is where I can focus outreach, and it’s no one’s ever getting in trouble,” he said.
“I’ll first engage the property manager and say, ‘Hey, I’d love to check out your (garbage) enclosure and just see what’s going on,’ or I’ll ask, ‘Hey, are you noticing any issues? Are you getting more fees from the hauling company?’”
Tangredi said the hardest part of his job is untangling the issue of reducing and reusing versus recycling.
“We’ve got state laws that encourage us to recycle and compost as much as possible,” he said, but recent state Department of Environmental Quality data showed that recycling and composting everything consumed in the U.S. would only reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 3%. “There’s this tension of, we’re always going for these goals, but really the environmental bang for your buck comes from reducing what you use,” he said.
In Oregon, he said 99% of carbon emission associated with making something comes from transportation, manufacturing and extraction “before it ever gets in our hands.”
In an era when China has begun rejecting bales of imported recyclables and stopped accepting plastic from the U.S., he said the key for his work is balancing helping people live well, use less and stay resourceful. “As we live in a culture where we have more and more new stuff, we lose skills, we lose values in my interpretation of that. It’s really that reclaiming of, we can repair things, we can be resourceful.”
The courses Tangredi teaches in the Master Recycler Program include training in what can be recycled, cleaning and separating materials, waste reduction, consumption and home composting, according to the county website.
Tangredi said he hopes in the future to expand the volunteer program to engage as many people in the work as possible and educate them on the climate crisis.
As the climate crisis and other environmental disasters continue to hit communities across the country, he said he does what he does to be part of the solution.
“No matter how small or big of an impact, I want to know that I fought for something,” he said. “I think at the end of the day, a lot of younger generation folks and Gen Z are saying, “Is anyone listening? Is anyone doing anything?’ And I want people to know that we are. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, but it’s my small way of saying I’m trying to be part of the solution in ways that I can.”
Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.
JUST THE FACTS, FOR SALEM – We report on your community with care and depth, fairness and accuracy. Get local news that matters to you. Subscribe to Salem Reporter starting at $5 a month. Click I want to subscribe!
