Richmond store is all about 4 R’s

Earth Day reached out and touched Penny Ausmus more than 50 years ago. She is still trying to do what she can to get people to recycle, reuse and repurpose waste.

Ausmus and a group of like-minded friends have opened the East Central Indiana RE Hub at 1700 N.W. Fifth St. in Richmond. To the three R’s, Ausmus adds “rethink.”

“The premise of this is education,” Ausmus said. “We want to educate the public on the importance of recycling because so many people think it is so hard.”

The RE Hub offers a place where people can drop off many kinds of recyclable items and, if interested, find out a little more about how those items won’t turn into waste.

Ausmus found herself smitten by the environmental “bug” as an eighth grader when she read about the first Earth Day celebrations in 1970. Of recycling, she said, “It’s a passion. Over the years, I wanted to recycle. I got to the point where it overflowed my garage and (a friend’s) barn.”

Ausmus has been the paid volunteer adviser to the Green Club at Centerville Senior High School since 2010. The RE Hub’s staff includes three former club members: Dylan Burke, Courtney Collins and Shawn Holland.

Burke said, “I’ve learned a lot from Penny. I just think it’s important to recycle and reuse things. I don’t just throw away things like water bottles. If it’s reusable, don’t just put it in the wastebasket.”

Near RE Hub’s entrance are two benches and four bird baths made of plastic bottle caps collected by the Centerville Green Club. The bottle-cap-to-bench project is now housed at the RE Hub and has grown a new product with help from a local plastics factory.

“Primex is making recycling containers from bottle caps and letting the Green Club have them,” Ausmus said. “We gave them 5,200 pounds of bottle caps and they said that is enough for 721 containers.”

The RE Hub also gives local people a chance to participate in reusing materials that otherwise would have been dumped in landfills. “People can come in here and shop for free. All we ask is they weigh what they are taking so we can keep track of it,” she said.

Several shelves – themselves donated by a business — are filled with school supplies. 

“At the end of the year, the kids (at Centerville high school) clean out their lockers and they throw out all kinds of notebooks, paper and other things,” she said, adding, “I hear people saying they don’t have enough money for school supplies. If they only knew what their kids are doing. I have half a dozen calculators over here and they all work.”

Similarly, office supplies from local businesses are available for pickup: hanging files, keyboards, computer monitors. 

The RE Hub takes donations of many kinds of recyclable materials. Among groups that take them is TerraCycle, which takes recycled goods in 125 different categories. “All we have to do is make it clean and ship it to them. They pay us to do that and they recycle it into products.”

Some groups are charities, such as an organization that takes “gently used” running shoes and passes them on to people in needy parts of the world.

The RE Hub includes an area where Ausmus envisions party-like workshops where people make things from used products.

People can shop or bring in their own recycling on Thursdays from 1-6 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. While most recyclable items are received at no charge, there is a fee for monitors and TVs.

The RE Hub involves four local environmental programs and is applying for nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service. Calling the group Opt Out, it includes RE Hub, Family Earth Day Celebration, a pollinator program called Flutter and WIPER, the Wayne County Invasive Plant Education and Removal program.