E-Cycle and Food Waste Program

Our Continued Commitment to Environmental Stewardship

We want to extend a hearty THANK YOU to all of our tribal members, staff and volunteers who recently helped our Tribal Community and 2 of our recent hosting events to the next level of stewardship. 

Our job as a department is to help protect, preserve and restore natural resources that are important to the tribe.  We can only succeed with the help of our entire tribal community.  Two of the most important ways that we can all help the environment are to reduce the amount of waste we are sending to landfills and to responsibly handle and recycle items that contain contaminants like mercury and other heavy metals.

To this end, we were able to sponsor an E-cycle event during the weekend of General Council.  Because of everyone who participated, we collected an amazing number of items that otherwise would go straight into a landfill.  Here are the results or your efforts:

Zero Waste

“Where do I put this?”

If you attended either the 15th Anniversary Celebration and Canoe Races or the Canoe Journey Landing at Samish, you might have noticed a new program, Zero Waste!  The goal of our zero waste program at recent events is to minimize the amount of garbage going into landfills and recycle as much as possible, including composting food waste produced.  The new 3 waste bin process (1 garbage, 1 recycling and 1 food waste) definitely takes some getting used to and will become more familiar for everyone the more you see it at events.  Thank you to the Skagit County Zero Waste program for providing the set up during Canoe Races/General Council and support during Canoe Journey!

Thanks to dedicated volunteer monitors and patient/dedicated participants, we are proud to announce the results of our first two Zero Waste Events:

Thank you all for learning along with us in this process and look for Zero Waste at Camp Samish and more E-cycle events in the future.

Funding for both programs was provided by an EPA grant, thank you for supporting our Environmental Stewardship efforts.