Snohomish Lions Club reuses plastic bags for community benches

Have you ever wondered how to get rid of all of the grocery bags and bubble wrap sitting around your house? The Snohomish Lions Club has figured out how to turn those old plastics into community treasures.

Through recycling company Trex’s Bags-to-Benches program, the Snohomish Lions are collecting stretchy plastics by the hundreds of pounds. They turn those plastics in to Trex, which recycles them — transforming them into benches for the town.

As soon as she heard about the program, Snohomish Lions Club Treasurer Renee Deierling, a passionate recycler, proposed it to the group.

“We’re really big into recycling at our house … and it’s just important to me that we reduce the amount of landfill, because I just can’t imagine that our Earth has that much space, to take all the junk we’re sending it,” she said.

How China’s ban on plastic, paper waste impacts Seattle’s recycling

The program requires a community group or school to collect 500 pounds of stretchable plastics — the kind that make up shopping bags or packaging — in six months. Knowing how lightweight these types of plastics are, Deierling was worried they would not meet that goal.

“I really didn’t think we could get 500 pounds of plastic in six months,” she said.

Deierling was right — the Snohomish community did not collect 500 pounds of plastic in six months.

Instead, they did it in under two.

“It took seven weeks and we had our first bench,” she laughed.

Now, the recycling enthusiasts are taking just a little over two weeks to get to a bench. They’re at four benches and counting.

“We got an overwhelming response,” Deierling said.

Because a single community group can only earn one bench every six months, the Lions have been partnering with other charitable groups, like Green Snohomish, the Snohomish Kiwanis, the Snohomish Carnegie Foundation, and Girl Scouts Service Unit 223.

The benches will be placed in parks along the Snohomish River for pedestrians to enjoy.

“The idea that we’re going to have a bench in a nearby park that I can go sit on that might have been just landfill bags is pretty great,” Deierling said.

She said the group is looking for type 2 and type 4 “plastics with a stretch,” such as grocery bags, produce bags, bubble wrap, the plastic coverings on packages of items like water bottles or toilet paper, and newspaper sleeves. Plastics with a form — such as plastic cups or deli trays — do not work, and the plastics cannot have food or other residue on them. For a list of acceptable plastics, click here.

If you want to help the Snohomish effort, you can drop your plastics off at various locations around Snohomish, including Northwest Security and Sound.

Snohomish was the first community in Western Washington to take the “Trex challenge,” but any volunteer group in any location is welcome to do the same. For more information on how you can swap your plastic bags for a bench in your city, visit Trex’s website. The Snohomish Lions Club is happy to help advise any other organization that gets involved in the effort.

Besides having the chance to help beautify the town, Deierling said the experience has been transformative. Even as a longtime recycling-conscious person, she is finding herself learning more every day about how to be greener, and has even reduced her family’s garbage.

“For me, it has raised awareness at how much stuff can be recycled,” she said. “We typically do reuse our bags, but I hadn’t been thinking about all the other bags, and the things I was putting into my landfill bin … It’s just being more aware of recycling.”

Follow @NicoleKIROFM