Editor's Note: This post is a companion piece to our September/October 2020 issue, featuring articles about living green in the region. You can read Layla Khoury-Hanold's feature, "Waste Not, Want Not" here to learn more about restaurants and their efforts in sustainability. See more in our digital guide here. Thank you for reading!
The community-led advocacy group is helping restaurants and consumers do their part to keep Roanoke green.
Celeste Delgado-Librero, Courtesy of Sustainable Roanoke
Sustainable Roanoke's Sorting Party, held August 8, 2020.
Celeste Delgado-Librero founded Sustainable Roanoke with modest goals.
“I had been environmentalist for 30 years, but I have gotten to the point where I’m overwhelmed and depressed and anxious about where we’re going,” she says. “I needed a group to support me [in my efforts]. I thought it’d just be my friends, but Sustainable Roanoke has grown to over 900 members.”
The robust membership she’s referring to is Sustainable Roanoke’s Facebook page, which serves as an online forum and resource for promoting local recycling events, community-wide initiatives, and environmental news that shed light on the sustainability issues.
“What I really believe is that by sharing information and by acting, we can work at a grassroots level to create a culture change,” she says. “We’re making people aware of these things; if we don’t talk about these things, they’re not a problem and they don’t exist.”
One of the most pressing needs in Roanoke has been recycling, leading to the creation of regular volunteer-led recycling events. These events are focused on collecting items that Recycling and Disposal Solutions, the local sorting facility, doesn’t take. Sustainable Roanoke collects up to 19 different types of items that are then shipped to companies such as TerraCycle, who have developed programs for monetizing hard-to-recycle products through partnerships. The reason a community-led effort is so critical is because these programs often require volume. So, while you may not have five pounds of Brita water pitcher filters lying around, the amount needed can easily be collected within a few hours of a community-led drive.
Composting is another top-of-mind issue for locals. For this, Delgado-Librero hopes to partner with Davey Stewards of Harvest Collective, which will serve as both a community compost facility and a cooperative farm. Once the program is up and running, Harvest Collective will offer a tiered membership program for individuals and households that will provide access to dropping off food scraps, obtaining compost for your home garden, or sharing in the farm’s harvest.
“There are people in Roanoke who really want to recycle and compost and do all these things. We’re trying to provide a channel,” Delgado-Librero says.
Sustainable Roanoke is also hoping to serve as resource for restaurants; together with green advocate Mim Young, Delgado-Librero is developing programs to help restaurants engage in more sustainable practices. One idea is a “Green Star” program that, over the course of ten months, would focus on a different monthly tenet to implement eco-friendly practices, such as composting. “I was hoping to engage high school students to go with a checklist and mark it so that restaurants would earn stars and badges,” Delgado-Librero says. (Some of this work has been halted due to the pandemic, but it’s still top of mind.) Also in the works is a plastic-free program designed to help restaurants reduce their carbon footprint by helping source eco-friendly packaging, single-use utensils and containers without incurring burdensome costs.
Delgado-Librero also hopes to eventually open a “zero-waste” store where you can bring your own containers to purchase bulk products like soap. But it will also serve as a community space to exchange items, as well as an educational space to host hands-on “life-hack” workshops, like making your own sanitizing wipes.
“We want to create sense of community and connectivity that the Internet is okay at, but that I think we’ve lost, especially now with COVID,” Delgado-Librero says. “We need to reconnect with our community physically and with our environment. And all these initiatives do the same thing and have that in mind.”
About the Writer:
Layla’s food obsession started early; growing up in cities like Paris, Aberdeen and Jakarta, Layla counts escargots, Haggis and beef rendang among her first memorable meals. She’s always looking for the next exciting bite—and relishes uncovering the story behind it. Her work has appeared on Saveur, Food Network and Refinery29 and in The Chicago Tribune, Drinks International and Our State. Follow her on Instagram @theglassofrose or on Twitter @glassofrose.