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Updated 18 hours ago
When she set out to become a master gardener in 1998, Ellen Keefe never imagined that she would end up becoming an expert on recycling.
Sitting in her office at Westmoreland Cleanways in Unity, the nonprofit's executive director enthusiastically relates the history of recycling programs in the region and then pauses.
“You can see I get a little bit excited about this,” Keefe, 60, of Derry laughs. “I have no idea why. I just really took to this.”
A stay-at-home mother who took Penn State's Master Gardener Program “as a lark,” Keefe needed to perform 50 hours of volunteer work to complete her certification. With no strong preference about where she did the hours, she agreed to become a composting instructor for what was then Pennsylvania CleanWays.
“I had no background in recycling — the environment — except that I liked to plant flowers and do landscaping in my own yard,” she said.
She spent more than 50 hours with the nonprofit, which local residents established about eight years earlier to combat illegal dumps.
“I just fell in love with it,” Keefe said. “I don't know any other way to say it.”
She then paused to clarify that she didn't fall in love with climbing down hillsides to root out abandoned tires and other trash.
Instead, she enjoyed organizing the cleanups and the Saturday collections where volunteers would gather in a parking lot to take in appliances and other hard-to-recycle items so they wouldn't end up in illegal dumps.
Westmoreland County Commissioner Charles Anderson said he first met Keefe about 15 years ago when he got interested in cleaning up illegal dumps.
“She's one of the players that make the county a better place,” he said.
Her job has become increasingly important to the county as people discard more high-tech items that contain heavy metals and other toxic substances, Anderson said.
Without Keefe and the Cleanways volunteers, “this place would be a trash heap,” he said. “She certainly fills a vital need in the community.”
The nonprofit has been the county's official recycling coordinator since 1995. Keefe took over that effort when she started working for Cleanways as its program director.
She joined the Professional Recyclers of Pennsylvania, took classes and met other recyclers from across the state.
“I just kept going with it. The more I learned about what other communities were doing with their recycling, the more I realized how little was being done in Westmoreland County,” Keefe said.
Her “first big quest” was developing a paper recycling program. After two years of learning about the recycling industry and knocking on company doors, she found a private business willing to partner with the county.
The program started with 14 bins in 2001 and four years later had grown to 250 bins, she said. Another company bought the program in 2006 and hired Keefe as its district manager.
“That was a real baptism of fire,” she said. “It was one thing sitting in an office telling people how they should recycle. It's another whole ball of wax actually sitting and operating a recycling company.”
Keefe returned to Cleanways 18 months later, becoming its executive director. About three years ago she was considering retirement when an unexpected event changed her mind.
The state had passed an electronics recycling bill, so Cleanways added electronics to the list of things it would accept at its next Saturday collection event, held in the parking lot of a Delmont movie theater.
When the event started at 8:30 a.m., cars were already lined up to drop off TVs and computers. It quickly became a “mob scene,” Keefe said.
“This parking lot is packed,” she said. “Cars are coming and there are no cars moving through the intersection on Route 22. It was a total standstill in both directions.”
The collection ended at noon. The Somerset company that was taking the electronics had to make multiple trips with its tractor-trailer to clear the lot.
“It took them, going back and forth, until 2 o'clock in the morning before they were done cleaning up,” Keefe said.
Opening a recycling center had been one of her longtime goals, and the event demonstrated a permanent collection point was needed. Three years later, the center is a success and she's working on other projects.
“As long as it's this much fun, I'm not going to leave,” Keefe said. “When it gets to be work, maybe I'll think about it.”
Brian Bowling is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-850-1218 or bbowling@tribweb.com.
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