Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 22, 1992 TAG: 9203200245
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-12 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
"They told me it looked like it was describing me," she said.
The Appalachian Regional Recycling Consortium board apparently agreed. Its members interviewed her and four others for the job of marketing director, and telephoned her the next morning to tell her she was the unanimous choice.
Therrien, 38, had spent the last two years setting up and expanding a recycling program in Floyd County. Now she is suddenly faced with covering 21 counties and five cities in six planning districts.
She seems totally undaunted at the prospect.
But then Therrien never has worried over challenges. She has been a professional auto mechanic, greenhouse worker, truck driver, toy maker, tree planter and safety director at an ethanol plant, among other things.
The eastern Pennsylvania native moved at age 5 to Schenectady, N.Y., when her father, a mathematics professor, got a job there. She stayed until one October when she decided its winters were too cold and too long. A single parent, she loaded her two pre-schoolers into her Volkswagen bus and headed south.
She stopped to visit a friend in Floyd, with plans to go on to Florida or Arizona or California. But she ended up staying in the New River Valley.
"Basically, when I waved at somebody and they waved back, I knew I was where I wanted to be," she said.
Her belief was reinforced two months later in Roanoke when a car hit her VW outside a health foods store and three people immediately ran up to see if they could help.
"I was brought up to believe that that was the way people ought to be," she said, but they had not always done so in Schenectady.
Therrien credits her ownership of that particular VW with her later working as a professional mechanic. It was a case of either learning to fix it herself or constantly having it in a shop. She is mechanically inclined, she said, "and I'm usually successful in working my way out after I've jumped in."
She was working in maintenance and as a truck driver at Union College in Schenectady when she met H. Gilbert Harlow, a professor there known for his work in hybridizing begonias.
He needed someone to oversee an isolated greenhouse in case of problems like the boiler going off at 3 a.m., "which it frequently did, and that's how I learned to fix boilers."
In Floyd, she owned and operated Sequoia Woodcrafts, using native woods to make musical toys finished with natural vegetable oils "so they were totally safe for kids to chew on," she said.
She spent five years in many Southwest Virginia counties from February to May on state forestry division tree-planting crews.
At Floyd County's ethanol plant, where she worked for five years, she was a technician, process supervisor, technician supervisor and safety director, not dropping any of the earlier jobs when a newer one was added.
Next came the recycling program where her sons, Kipp, 20, and Jeff, 17, are now working.
The consortium where she has been marketing director since early February is financed with an 18-month Appalachian Regional Commission grant. At the end of that time, the consortium is expected to be self-supporting.
She works out of New River Planning District headquarters at Radford, which is not included because it is not part of the ARC region. But Therrien said she has every intention of working with non-ARC cities and counties too.
The consortium has been set up because of the special problems rural counties have in meeting tougher state recycling mandates. It covers the counties of Alleghany, Bath, Bland, Botetourt, Buchanan, Carroll, Craig, Dickenson, Floyd, Giles, Grayson, Highland, Lee, Pulaski, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise and Wythe, and the cities of Bristol, Clifton Forge, Covington, Galax and Norton.
Localities will be required to recycle 15 percent of their solid wastes by 1993 and 25 percent in 1995. Landfill requirements are making it constantly more expensive to bury waste.
"There is not a lack of markets. There are markets out there," she said, but they are mostly far from Southwest Virginia and require bigger loads of recyclables for cost efficiency.
Therrien said Floyd County could gather up every bit of recyclable plastics in its borders and still not have the minimum amount for many recycling centers.
Therrien's job is going to be providing connections between those who have to get rid of the wastes and those who can re-use it.
Recycling equipment, for example, could be exchanged or shared. Localities could pay a per-use fee or five or six counties could purchase it jointly. Therrien has approached the New River Resource Authority about the possibility of sharing its wood grinder, which it uses only a few days a month, "because individually it's going to be impossible, basically, for each individual locality."
Grinding waste wood into mulch for other uses also could help conserve landfill space. At $500,000 an acre, Therrien said, "you don't want to be throwing sticks into it."
She expects more people to get into the recycling business in the years ahead and worries that they are not coordinating their plans with one another.
"The idea is first to find out what's already going on," she said. "We don't want to duplicate anybody else's efforts. . . . When they all come on line at the same time, they may find that they've over-covered the market."
State and federal people have asked her how to persuade rural people they need to recycle. No problem, Therrien said. They grew up saving and reusing things.
"Rural people in general have been much less inclined to jump into the disposable society," she said. When she talks to them about the government mandates, she said, "they just want to know what took us so long."
Her hope is that people will recycle to help the environment. "I grew up with that sort of mentality," she said. "There's no joy in complying with a mandate."
One of the first things she did in her new job was design her business cards and compose a newsletter to the 26 local governments with which she will be working.
The cards and newsletters, of course, were printed on recycled paper.
by CNB