By Deb Peterson
Melinda Caldwell’s mother, Marjorie Caldwell, brought up her daughter to care for the Earth, partly by picking up trash. She modeled the lesson even when Alzheimer’s disease had taken her speech and made it difficult to walk.
“My mother could be stubborn, and Alzheimer’s made it worse,” Melinda remembers. “A trip to the doctor could be an ordeal. One day, she would not budge on the sidewalk outside the doctor’s office. She pointed, and there in the grass was a gum wrapper. It had to be picked up before she would move. She never lost that passion.”
Once a steward of the planet, always a steward.
“Smiles are hard to find when navigating Alzheimer’s,” Melinda says, “but I will always treasure the smile that simple act evoked.”
Melinda inherited that passion for protecting the Earth.
“I know it’s an odd thing, but I have always been fascinated with trash,” she says.
That fascination changed Melinda’s life when she most needed a change. She and her 4-year-old son, Skylar, were new to Harrison, Arkansas. She had a degree in counseling and consulting psychology from Harvard University, and had worked in the past with juvenile delinquents, battered women, and child protective services. When she had a child of her own, she wanted to change her focus to raising a healthy family herself.
“My goal was to be an at-home mom as much as possible, and I found work that supported that, but professionally, I was lost and embarrassed to have this Ivy League degree and not be applying it,” Melinda says. “Being a mother made me so happy, but I knew I had a purpose beyond that, and I couldn’t figure out what it was.”
Sitting at her kitchen table one day feeling frustrated with herself, she gazed out the window at Dry Branch Creek behind her house and had an “Aha!” moment.
“I was just so tired of listening to myself whine,” she says. “I looked at the creek and thought about the cleanups I had organized on the Kings River in Eureka Springs. There were more rivers that needed to be cleaned up, and I was going to start in my own back yard.”
She told herself to get up and do it. And that’s exactly what she did.
She applied to the Keep Arkansas Beautiful program and received free trash bags. She made flyers and passed them out in her neighborhood, notified the newspaper and city officials, and arranged with Public Works to have the trash collected after the cleanup.
“I met with my neighbors and we had a creek cleanup,” Melinda says. “That cleanup turned into a Dry Jordan cleanup, and I was off and running.”
Through newspaper articles and the grapevine, Dr. Jimmy Moore of Lakeview, Arkansas heard about Melinda. He was ready to sell his small recycling brokerage business, and he wanted to discuss the opportunity with her.
“I guess he found in me the steward he wanted to pass his work on to,” Melinda says. “We met at his house one afternoon, he told me what he knew, and he sold me his business.”
Melinda was ready to take the baton and carry on. She now had the resources she needed to get her own recycling business off the ground. It was time to put her Harvard smarts to work.
“I took off at a sprint, and I haven’t really slowed down,” she says.
Via Recycling Opens for Business
The word via means “by way of” or “through.”
“I wanted something short and easy to remember,” Melinda says of her decision to name her company Via. “It perfectly describes what a recycling business does, and it just resonated with me.”
Her mission was crystal clear, too. It came from her strong environmental upbringing—preservation and stewardship of the environment, a focus on economically viable solid waste solutions, minding the Earth, and knowing that when you are blessed with much, much is expected.
She had already assisted Harrison with a waste research study that helped the city establish a citywide waste and recycling program. She refined her audit process, and it has become one of the first things she does for new clients. She audits their trash by following it. Literally.
Melinda puts on her boots and follows the garbage truck from her client’s business to the landfill, where she analyzes their trash, inventories what they are throwing away, and retraces each recyclable item back to the point where it is tossed in the trash bin. Once she identifies the waste being generated, she creates systems that help the company collect, package, and sell recyclable items, redirect reusable goods, and eliminate unnecessary waste.
Some of the materials Via buys and resells are cardboard, newsprint, office and mixed paper, aluminum, plastics, shrink film, steel, graphite, oil, and carpet.
Melinda helps her clients safely dispose of electronics and used tires, and collaborates with alternative fuel companies. She helps companies actually make money from their waste by helping them find appropriate markets. Cardboard makes new cardboard. Shrink film becomes car parts and home decking.
“We even found a market for waste graphite,” Melinda says.
That success converted a previously wasted manufacturing by-product into cash for a client.
“Recycling markets are growing every day,” Melinda says. “If you have enough of anything, you can often find a market. It just takes persistence and a client who is willing to make the effort to divert it.”
It also takes a good analytical mind. One of the services Via provides is a software program that analyzes waste data.
“It isn’t enough to feel good about recyling,” Melinda says. “It has to make economic sense. The only way I could figure out how to prove that was by crunching the numbers. My new division, Via Analytics, does just that.”
Via Analytics offers data analysis and bill pay services.
“The numbers speak for themselves,” Melinda says. “If I can find markets and systems that support diversion economically, we are in a pretty good position. If not, I have to keep working toward solutions.”
Via helps clients answer the following questions:
• How much waste can you divert from the landfill?
• How does diversion reduce your costs for waste services?
• How much revenue do you receive for each recyclable commodity?
• How much do you spend for each container, compactor, or baler?
• How efficient is each haul?
One of her longtime clients is Bass Pro Shops, a company devoted to recycling.
“Before recycling was cool, Bass Pro Shops was recycling,” Melinda says. “I was brought on board to dig into the system a little deeper, to find out what was left in the trash and find ways to get it out.”
Melinda follows containers from the distribution center to the landfill, rides her mountain bike around a 40-acre facility to discover where trash is generated, and creates new ways for Bass Pro Shops to collect and sell it.
“I have been honored to work with Bass Pro Shops in their landfill-free waste initiatives for a few years,” Melinda says. “We are working on the last few percentages of trash they generate. This is the hard part, but as a team, we are getting closer and closer.”
Helping Communities
Minimizing the waste going to landfills is at the core of Melinda Caldwell’s efforts, so when the Ozark Mountain Solid Waste District board approached her to manage their waste diversion programs, she said yes.
“I knew it would be a challenge,” Melinda says, “but it was a challenge I wanted to take. I knew it was a great opportunity to bring fresh, responsible approaches to handling recyclables, waste tires, and electronics.”
She helped the district find a new tire service provider that grinds more than 140,000 tires a year into playground mulch and park benches. She manages electronic waste grants that help divert computers to a regional, domestic recycler that responsibly recycles them. With the help of recycling grants, Melinda helped establish and grow district-wide programs, including glass recycling, recycling services in Gassville and Cotter, and the new horizontal baler at Baxter Day Service Center.
The district is currently going through some very difficult times, including a bankruptcy filing associated with the landfill side of the business, which is not managed by Via. Nevertheless, the situation weighs heavily on Melinda. She relies on the same persistence and resilience that got her up from her kitchen table and into the creek to keep her focused on the positive aspects of the district’s programs that she has worked so hard to realize. She stays focused on her role in keeping waste out of the landfill.
“I was hired to help steward the district’s recycling programs, and that is what I continue to focus on,” Melinda says. “There are very real successes throughout our district. Each and every day, our six county recycling centers are open for business, providing reliable and responsible services to our citizens. It is my job to help us all focus on these responsibilities. We still need a place to recycle our old TVs, cardboard, and bottles. I’m committed to keeping our services strong and available to our citizens, as best I can, until sunnier skies prevail.”
“Melinda is driven in all that she does and is very purposeful about her mission,” says Jan Badovinac, Melinda’s friend and Marvelous! Take a Hike! writer. “She is passionate about the welfare of our environment and, by natural extension, the welfare of the people living here. Every decision she makes, whether it’s for her son, her community, or her business, is always framed and directed by what will bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people. She inspires me greatly, and is one of the strongest, smartest, and most fearless women I know.”
There’s no doubt that Melinda has found her professional purpose, working with both corporations and municipalities to improve their stewardship of the Earth, and that her mother would be proud. In the end, it comes down to individual people and single gum wrappers.
“Getting to work with both corporations and municipalities couldn’t be a better fit for me professionally, but providing services for the people is where my heart is,” Melinda says. “I’m challenged. I’m intrigued. I want to get out of bed in the morning. The compass points of my life brought me to this place for a reason, and I know I am on target. For some, trash is just trash. For me, it’s opportunity. Opportunity to solve problems, find solutions, contribute to my planet’s health, to do my part, and put milk on my table.”
For more info on how Via Recyclables can help your company, visit viarecyclables.com. For a list of recycling resources available in the six-county district (Baxter, Boone, Carroll, Marion, Newton, and Searcy), visit ozarkmountainsolidwaste.com and click on your county on the left side of the screen. To organize a cleanup effort in your community, visit keeparkansasbeautiful.com. M! February/March 2014
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