Tompkins Weekly

Diane Cohen receives state award for work at ReUse



Diane Cohen (center), executive director of Finger Lakes ReUse, poses with her 2021 Lifetime Achievement Recycling Leadership Award from the New York State Association of Reduction, Reuse, and Recycling with Awards Committee members Lynn Leopold (left) and Gary Carrell. The ceremony was held during closing ceremonies at the annual New York State Recycling Conference in Cooperstown, New York, on Nov. 10. Photo provided.

Those who know Diane Cohen, executive director of Finger Lakes ReUse, know of her dedication to recycling, reducing and, of course, reusing to benefit communities and the environment. That dedication was recognized late last year, when Cohen received the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Recycling Leadership Award from the New York State Association of Reduction, Reuse and Recycling (NYSAR3).

NYSAR3, the professional recyclers’ association for New York state, recognizes outstanding achievers each year for their dedication, innovation and passion for recycling, according to a recent press release. The awards — including Cohen’s — were presented during closing ceremonies at the annual New York State Recycling Conference in Cooperstown, New York, on Nov. 10.

Cohen was recognized for her “outstanding efforts in developing a unique Community ReUse Center model that reinvests revenue from the sale of donated materials into employment opportunities and career pathways for traditionally marginalized people, while aligning material reuse efforts with UN Sustainable Development Goals and issues of environmental justice,” according to the release.

Cohen’s history in Tompkins County goes way back to when she was an art student at Ithaca College. Most of her early work experience was in food and dining, working at a pizza restaurant and in the dining halls at Ithaca College. It was actually her job bartending at the Rongovian Embassy in Trumansburg (now permanently closed) that led to her joining the nonprofit world.

“I was bartending on Friday — happy hour — and that’s when I heard about the job for Historic Ithaca’s Significant Elements Program that had been a volunteer-run program for 10 years,” Cohen said. “Tompkins County had put out a call for anyone who’s doing any kind of material diversion [and] waste reduction. They wanted to help invest in those types of efforts. And so, Historic Ithaca applied for a grant to have someone paid to run the program to kind of take it to a new level. And I got very lucky and got that job. So, that I started in January 2001, and I did that for nearly eight years.”

Significant Elements’ goal was and still is to save architecturally significant materials from going to landfills, and Cohen said that, as her time there went on, she “was seeing things that weren’t significant but were still really usable. Plus, not just building materials, I was seeing household goods, and I was seeing whole houses getting demolished. … And my program couldn’t absorb it.”

Cohen brought the issue to the county at a meeting in 2005, and someone at the meeting lamented, “If only we had our reuse center.” Tompkins County administration long had a plan for a reuse center, an idea sparked by Barb Eckstrom, director of Tompkins County Recycling and Materials Management.

“Someone said, ‘If only we had a reuse center,’ and I kind of gently pounded my fist on the table. I was like, ‘We need to start planning one,’” Cohen said. “And [Eckstrom] took me aside after the meeting and said, ‘What do you need to start planning this reuse center?’ and that was that lucky moment that I got this huge opportunity.”

So, that year, Cohen, Eckstrom and plenty of county leaders began the three-year-long planning process to make the reuse center a reality. And their effort paid off in 2008, when the first Finger Lakes ReUse Center — the current ReUse MegaCenter in Triphammer Marketplace — opened. ReUse grew considerably after that, soon opening a second location on Elmira Road in Ithaca.

Since its opening, Finger Lakes ReUse has kept an estimated 4,500,000 items in use and out of the waste stream, which amounts to roughly 40 pounds of materials for every person in the county, according to the release. ReUse generates between $2,000 and $3,000 of revenue per ton of material sold for reuse, a stark contrast to the $96 per ton it costs for the county to dispose of waste. ReUse’s revenues are then funneled back into the community to support local businesses, organizations and residents.

“What I am sometimes calling the ‘deceivingly simple’ act of reuse can change lives,” Cohen explained. “Early on in the ReUse Center years, I realized it’s not about the stuff; it’s not about keeping stuff out of the landfill. It’s about the people who the waste impacts, who the unfair labor practices of the production of these materials impact, that toxicity in the leachates in the byproducts of production, the mining, the logging. All of the negative impacts of production and consumption can be mitigated by this very simple act of reuse.”

In addition to the community and environmental benefits of reusing, Cohen said learning how to effectively reuse can be a very rewarding process for anyone involved, including staff members at ReUse who make donated items ready for sale.

Thanks to sales revenues accounting for over 70% of ReUse’s operating budget, its two locations have weathered the pandemic considerably well. While ReUse did initially have to furlough some of its employees, nearly all have been brought back, and things are only looking up from here. In fact, Cohen said their biggest challenge has been keeping up with demand.

“2021 was a really challenging year because we kept our staff the same level and yet, the volume of donations continues to grow and our sales continue to grow,” she said. “So, we’re busier than ever. We’re serving more people. We’re trying to hold steady at the same level of staffing. COVID caused some instability with any business and any organization with people calling in sick, people needing mental health days, and so, 2021 was a year full of strain is the best way I can put it.”

But through it all, ReUse’s staff members have been ever-dedicated to its mission.

“It’s been a test of human strength and integrity this last year,” Cohen said. “But we’ve come through it, and we’re looking ahead at 2022.”

There’s a lot to look forward to this year for ReUse. For one, several community leaders from Monroe County are planning to come down and tour ReUse because “they’re really interested in what we’re doing,” Cohen said. And that interest is widespread, as shown in Cohen’s award from last year. Cohen said she hopes the award helps spread the message of reuse well beyond Tompkins County.

“If we can take the work that we’ve done here in Tompkins County and share it with other communities, our impact expands tremendously,” she said. “From the beginning, when we were designing Finger Lakes ReUse and writing our initial grants, we said, ‘We want to take the lessons learned and share them in an open-source, creative commons kind of way so that people can get these up and running and really have a reuse system.’ We’ve been calling it a reuse ecosystem. So, if the award helps support that work, that would make me really happy.”

On a more local scale, Cohen said among her goals for ReUse this year is to collaborate with other county leaders to help decide the best model to keep growing and keep up with the growing demand for reuse.

“We’re trying to bring together some experienced community leaders and business leaders who have gone through the type of growth that Finger Lakes ReUse has experienced and trying to help us understand what type of resources, what type of facility, what type of capacity building do we need to do to be a stable and long-lived institution for this community,” Cohen said. “I think that we’ve demonstrated that there are all these impacts. Now, we just need to kind of bring it all into balance.”

Learn more about ReUse at ithacareuse.org.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@vizellamedia.com.

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