About Town: Stacey Auer Lives Her Sustainable Redmond Values

Redmond native Stacey Auer is a green machine.

An administrator for the City of Redmond’s Recycling and Waste Reduction Programs, Auer and her family strive to live by the same principles she counsels Redmond residents and business owners on, from the basics like avoiding using pesticides on lawns to a more meta approach, shopping for organic local goods at Redmond’s Farmers Market to reduce energy required to ship foods long distances. Auer and her family live just on the Bellevue-Redmond border.

For the city, Auer is dedicated to outreach, promoting Redmond’s waste reduction and recycling programs in the city she grew up in. She says Redmond is ahead of the curve with programs such as its yard waste program, which makes it easy for people to get all kinds of food and organic items out of the waste stream and into a composting program.

Another big city initiative is helping businesses reduce their waste, Auer said.

“We offer free technical assistance to businesses," she said. "We come and help them figure out how to reduce the size of their garbage containers,” resulting in savings to the businesses as well as creating a more sustainable Redmond.

Thanks to the city’s efforts and strong response by local businesses, 82 Redmond businesses, as well as its public schools, city facilities and fire stations, participate in the program and compost about 35 tons of food every month.

One of those businesses, Keeney’s Office Supply, has reduced its amount of garbage by about 75 percent, said general manager Steven Sterne, winning the city’s Clean Cart Challenge in 2010.

“Stacey and her group have been really strong in encouraging us to compost and recycle more,” Sterne said.

The city’s compost program was a pilot program when Auer first took her position with Redmond five years ago and is now a robust and successful program.

In addition to efforts with businesses, the city offers special recycling events for residences, including a drug disposal program, and provides consumers with information about what to do with unused household materials.

For example, now that the hazardous waste collection by King County doesn’t accept latex paint, the city can offer information about how to properly dispose of unused paint. (You dry it out using a hardener or kitty litter, and then it goes in the garbage.)

Since beginning to work with the city, Keeney’s Sterne says Auer’s outreach has been effective. She goes to other businesses and finds out what they are doing and shares their strategies with Keeney’s, and vice versa, he said.

“We always want to get better and listen to what people are doing. Having Stacey do that under the mantle of the city is really helpful,” he said.

For more information on Redmond’s recycling and waste reduction efforts, check out the city’s website.