Nonprofit expands decades-long effort to reduce and reimagine waste in Tillamook County

The Refindery in the tiny coastal town of Wheeler, Oregon, is not your typical thrift store. For one thing, you won’t find secondhand clothes for sale. But if you’re looking for a 1986 wall calendar, a used door hinge that still works or that missing piece for a Monopoly board game, you might be in luck. The Refindery invites visitors to reimagine and repurpose items otherwise destined for the landfill, like the glass fish and salvaged seashells mounted inside a vintage television displayed in the store. It also hosts a monthly event in which community members can bring in broken vacuum cleaners, lamps and other objects for repair by a team of volunteers. The Refindery and the Repair Café are operated by Heart of Cartm, a nonprofit formed in 2021, which grew out of a volunteer-run recycle transfer center started in Manzanita three decades ago. Jessi Just, the executive director of Heart of Cartm, joins us to talk about her organization, which was recently profiled in Oregon ArtsWatch, and its ongoing work to reduce and reimagine waste on Oregon’s North Coast.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Refindery in the small coastal town of Wheeler is not your typical thrift store. There aren’t any secondhand clothes, for example. But if you’re looking for a 1986 wall calendar, an old door hinge, a missing piece for a Monopoly game or some doohickeys for a found art project, you might be in luck. The Refindery invites visitors to reimagine and repurpose items otherwise destined for a landfill. It also hosts monthly events where people can bring in broken vacuum cleaners or lamps or other stuff for repair by a team of volunteers. The Refindery and the Repair Cafe are operated by Heart of Cartm, a nonprofit that was itself upcycled in a way from a group that started in Manzanita in the 1990s. Jessi Just is the executive director of Heart of Cartm and she joins us now in the studio. It’s great to have you here.

Jessi Just: Thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure.

Miller: So you arrived in Manzanita 20 years ago after a post-college road trip, I understand. And you went to the old transfer station, the old county dump, run by an organization called Cartm. What did you see?

Just: That’s right. I think I saw the rest of my life flash before my eyes,

honestly.

Miller: Well, you can say that in retrospect, that’s really true. You were there and you knew that your life was changing?

Just: I did. I saw something that excited me on many levels professionally and personally. Something to know about Cartm Recycling in those days, that it was exactly where people took their family and friends. It was an exciting roadside attraction. So glad you’re in town. Let’s go to the recycling center. Let’s go to the dump.

Miller: Why? What was it that made people want to be there? And that when you saw it you thought, well, this is a pivot in my life?

Just: Yeah, I came out to Oregon with an environmental degree. It was a parks and recreation degree and I had thought that I would teach environmental education in a park setting. And when I saw Cartm Recycling, it opened my eyes to an entirely different way to teach about the environment. And I saw that immediately. I thought it was unique and it excited in me a passion to talk about resources and waste. And so I knew right then and there that I absolutely loved this place and I ended up staying and getting a job at Cartm Recycling.

Miller: What does Cartm stand for?

Just: The Conservation Action Resource Team of Manzanita?

Miller: And what was the transfer station – which always cracks me up because to me it’s just fancy words for a dump – but what was it like before Cartm arrived on the scene?

Just: Well, it was a dump. In fact, prior to the early nineties, there were many open dumps in just about every community. That’s what you did with your waste. In fact, where I grew up in Southern Missouri, I fondly remember going to the dump with my dad and we dropped some things off and, oh, look, there’s a bike. Oh, take that home. And the same thing was happening in Manzanita. That was out of town. That was the dump and you would take your pickup truck there and dump all of your family’s waste off the back of it and pay the guy that ran it a few bucks and then maybe go home with a little treasure. So it was an open dump.

Miller: What changed when a group of volunteers, right, around Manzanita took it over?

Just: So around the country these open dumps were closing. And a pretty significant part of our history is that those were no longer allowed. It is not environmentally safe. There is leaching and rats and lots of problems with that style of trash. And so [we were] moving to a lined landfill situation. So when you have a lined landfill, there’s much more investment in that system and therefore you have to have a place that collects trash and transfers it to a landfill in a safe, lined place. So, the transfer station was born in that time. And the visionary leaders of Cartm ‒ the little recycling depot in Manzanita ‒ saw that there was an opportunity to manage waste materials and redistribute them in a way that made more sense in a community than simply throwing the things away, trucking them off to never be seen again.

Miller: So fast forwarding a little bit, you said that you ended up getting a job there. What was your first job?

Just: I did. I couldn’t wait. I was so excited. They needed someone to work in the yard, assess loads and drive a forklift, and I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than that.

Miller: Assessing loads and driving a forklift? Those seem like two different jobs. So what were you assessing?

Just: Well, that’s a great question. The difference between a transfer station that is simply moving, collecting trash and then moving it to a landfill and what we were doing was very different. We were a resource center and so every employee assessed loads for what was still usable. We were essentially gatekeepers to the landfill and we were trained to know what was hazardous, what was recyclable, what was reusable. All of us had a vast knowledge base of how to manage materials in a more efficient and appropriate way for a community. And it was a fascinating job.

Miller: And you got to drive a forklift.

Just: And I got to drive a forklift!

Miler: The look on your face when you mentioned that part said it all. So, it was just also fun to have some heavy equipment.

Just: Yeah, by nature a transfer station is an industrial environment. It requires lifting very heavy things. It requires loading things onto pallets and loading trucks. Just a recycling center, those bales are over 1,000 pounds. You can have a bale of material that weighs a ton. So moving that stuff around is dangerous work. And it’s considered industrial work.

Miller: I want to really fast forward now, because we were talking about the 1990s there, and you moved up in the organization, but what happened at the county level in 2018?

Just: A really short-sighted and sad decision is what happened. County commissioners at the time and the board were negotiating the contract that at that time was quite a few years old. It was over 20 years old at that point. And during negotiations, they never reached an agreement about how much money it should cost to run that transfer station, about what was happening there and there was a lot of unrest between the two parties.

Miller: So that the nonprofit Cartm had been contracted by the county to run the transfer station.

Just: Yeah, we were under agreement to operate the county transfer station, which in and of itself is not an odd agreement. There are currently lots of businesses operating transfer stations for entities. So that’s not the weird thing, but the fact that we were a nonprofit operating that county service was the unique piece. So there were like layers of an onion, many, many layers to the story. But the heartbreaking piece was that an agreement was not reached on how to manage it and ultimately that it ended the contract for us to operate there. We were forced to leave, which meant that everything we had built over 20 years just went away and it was very, very sad.

I was the operations manager at the time, still working out in the yard. At that point, we had 12, 13 employees and it was right before Christmas and I had to tell everybody, including myself, that we needed to find something else to do and in a small community that’s tough. It was really scary. It was a scary time.

Miller: How did an organization that you now run called Heart of Cartm come from the end of that county contract with an entity called Cartm?

Just: Right. I remember this kind of fire as I was sitting at the county in that meeting and listening to the decision, and it was very meeting-like. It was like, we are voting to approve this contract and yay or nay and how do you vote .

Miller: The Roberts Rules of Order, breaking your heart?

Just: Yeah. And so as I was listening to this and, and there was that final order of we are voting to end the contract and my heart broke and I cried and also a fire started. And I remember thinking this isn’t the end of Cartm. This will not be the end of Cartm, even though I had no vision.

Miller: I may not be the only one who’s confused when you say a fire started, you mean a metaphorical fire started inside you?

Just: Yes, yes.

Miller: We live in a society now where fires, literal ones, are starting all the time.

Just: Good to mention there.

Miller: So you just had this sense that Cartm somehow is going to continue?

Just: I did and I wasn’t quite sure what that was going to be. But I stayed in close contact with the board of directors who continued to meet monthly and try to figure out what they were going to do with the organization that no longer had a home. The organization had only known operating a recycling operation and a transfer station, so without that place to be, it was a confusing time. So I stayed in contact with everyone. And at the point that the board said, you know what… COVID had begun and they were meeting on Zoom once a month and getting very tired and thinking, what are we going to do? There’s nothing else we’re going to do.

Miller: The thing we were doing, we can’t do it anymore?

Just: Yeah.

Miller: We can’t even meet in person. Why bother to exist?

Just: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: And what was your answer to them?

Just: Well, I said is this really it? Are you really going to fold the organization? And they said, we think that we could grant the rest of the money in the bank account to some local organizations and then yes, we would dissolve the organization and I said, what do you need to not do that? And they said we need a business plan and five new board members.

Miller: Because we’re outie.

Just: And I said, ok, and I came back with a business plan and five new board members.

Miller: Whenever I hear Heart of Cartm, I have to say it sounds to me like a video game or a sort of a Settlers of Catan style game, [laughter] what are the different things that your nonprofit does right now?

Just: That’s a good question. We have tried to keep the spirit of Cartm, the heart of Cartm, in everything that we do. And one of the main reasons that I did not change the name entirely is because Cartm has come with a package of love and financial support and care that I felt like needed to come along with us. And at the same time, it needed to have its own identity so we did change the mission and the vision slightly only to reflect that we are no longer operating a transfer station. Our daily work is a little different. However, we still carry the story of transformation and we still do work in the same community that is focused on using waste as a resource and using it for a resource for social and economic and creative benefit, all of those. It’s very important.

Miller: The classic three Rs that I remember hearing just as a kid and seeing printed in a triangle and are reduce, reuse and recycle. But your organization has three more Rs. What are they and why are they important?

Just: Yes. Reuse, repair and reimagine. Those are the three pillars of our organization now and the three ways that we carry out our mission and the way that we think about contributing to a zero waste community. And I think this is a good time to mention that zero waste does not necessarily mean that trash or waste is not created. It simply means that we are using the discards so effectively that as little as absolutely possible actually goes to landfill. Everything else is used much like nature’s systems. It isn’t that waste isn’t created. It’s just that it is used more wisely for other things.

Miller: What happens at The Refindery?

Just: Amazing things happen at the Refindery. That is where the reuse, the repair, and the reimagination happen. It’s kind of like magic, I think, that we can take dirty, sort of unloved sometimes things, things that are sort of forgotten, things that are left behind, and we give them new life.

We give them a new home. We appreciate them. And I believe that the people who come, who visit The Refindary, do the same thing. They appreciate what’s in the Refindery. And we see this light, this inspiration, that comes from people who walk through the door.

Miller: Have there been people who walk into the door in this newish place who remember the beginning of Cartm?

Just:  Oh, absolutely. Every minute of every day. Yes. And again, one of the reasons that I’m so glad Cartm is still in our name is because it is absolutely recognizable. And for a while I still have the magnets that say Cartm is open, and I can’t even remember what we use the magnets for now. They were stuck somewhere on a sign at the old transfer station. And I found them and slapped them on the side of my van. And for the first year that we were open, every time I drove through town, people would wave real big and sometimes stop me, drive behind me until I pulled over somewhere and then get out and say, Cartm’s really open? Where is it? What’s happening? So it was a great marketing tool and an ability to open up conversation about our new life.

Miller: What is Trash Bash?

Just: Oh, Trash Bash is our wonderful festival that we throw each May. In fact, this coming May will mark 25 years of Trash Bash. It was originally just an art show that was held at the dump, and people dressed up and for one night we had a potluck and music and drinks and people bought art made of found objects and trash most likely found there at the transfer station. And now, the spirit is still very much alive with costumes. We’ve added a few more activities like the Trash Tale storytelling event and a full-on, with a runway, trash fashion show.  And, still 25 years later, it is a wonderful celebration of the creative things you can do with discards.

Miller: How has working in this world for 20 years now affected the way you think about stuff? We live in a society where there’s so much money that goes into messaging that tries to convince us often very convincingly that stuff, all kinds of versions of stuff, is a key to happiness. And it’s so hard to not buy into that, literally, to then spend our money on that stuff. I’m just wondering how you think about physical objects and their relationship to our human happiness.

Just: Yeah. That’s a really great question. I think our whole team at Cartm recognizes that humans have unique relationships with things, that we fall in love with our things, that we care about our things, and also very much have to let those things go and I am no different working in this industry. I absolutely fall in love with the things.

Miller: New stuff, too?

Just: And new stuff, too. I recognize when I need new things versus old. However, I very much understand that there is so much waste, so many things out there, that it is rare that I have to buy something new. There is something that I’m not sure that we even have coined a term for, maybe besides magic. But there is this idea that if we ask for something, it will show up. And it has worked without fail at Cartm Recycling just as much as it does now in The Refindery. We just say, ‘oh, just ask for it and it’ll show up’ and it always does, every time. Sometimes you have to wait a little while. But I would say to answer your question, I think I have adopted a patience, a patience that is that it will come.

Miller: A patience that’s different from Amazon’s press a button and it will be delivered in an hour or in a day?

Just: Absolutely. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t ever need new things, but it means that if I have patience, it will show up. It will come. It will. It will appear when I need it. And if the very thing that I am asking for doesn’t show up, something that works will and I love that about this business.

Miller: Jessi Just, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.

Just: Thank you so much for having me. What a great show.

Miller: Thank you. Jessi Just is the executive director of Heart of Cartm.

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