Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
Serving Lincoln County for more than a century!
DAVENPORT – Christmas is a time for cheer, a time to be merry, a time to be with loved ones …and a time to acquire more new items than one needs. Inevitably, the influx of holiday gifts prompts many to look at donating or throwing away their old items.
In Lincoln County, places for carrying out this sort of holiday purge are rather limited compared to a larger county, but options still exist.
Still functioning despite the COVID-19 pandemic and tucked a couple blocks behind Safeway in Davenport lies the Lincoln County Care and Share. Coordinator Cindy Warner is still running the thrift store, taking in donations of small household kitchen items and food.
She said the biggest change caused by the pandemic is that her staff is limiting what types of clothing donations are being taken in.
“We don’t take a lot of clothing, because we don’t know how clean it is,” Warner said. “We’re just taking winter clothes right now, and household items.”
Only four customers are currently allowed in the building at a time right now, and masks are required.
Other donation options include the Wilbur Senior Center Thrift Store for those in the western part of the county. Sales are used to pay for senior center operations.
In Harrington, an ongoing rummage sale around the corner from city hall takes donations and sells them to benefit the Opera House.
If all else fails, and one simply wants to dump or recycle their items in a landfill, the Lincoln County Transfer Station allows for just that. It’s an option many have chosen in the last nine months.
“Our customer count is way up,” solid waste supervisor Rory Wintersteen said.
Wintersteen wasn’t able to provide exact customer count numbers for a comparison to pre-pandemic times due to recent computer issues at the county, but estimated at least a 30% increase in customers.
The largest recycled item has been cardboard, he said. At the end of October, the transfer station shipped out 65 tons of cardboard, and Wintersteen said they’re halfway to that number already since then.
“Everybody is doing Amazon and those types of things,” Wintersteen said.
Plastics and aluminum has also increased at the transfer station. The station holds the same hours it normally does, but the influx of new customers is noticeable.
“The first two quarters this year, we’re up 630 tons of garbage,” Wintersteen said. “People are home and they’re not doing nothin’.”
He noted that a recent influx of new people coming to the county could also contribute to increased activity. He said typically, December isn’t as busy as summer months, but that isn’t the case this year.
The next common item that traditionally is brought to the transfer station between Christmas and the Super Bowl is TV’s, Wintersteen noted.
E-waste, or used electronics, are also a common item at the transfer station.
“Every three months, we get about 1,400 pounds of e-waste,” Wintersteen said.
The transfer station also brought in 3,500 tires as a tire recycling event Nov. 6-7.
All recycled and trashed items at the transfer station are loaded onto a train and transported to Spokane before being moved to Roosevelt Regional Landfill in Klickitat County.
Drew Lawson is the former managing editor of the Davenport Times and a graduate of Eastern Washington University.
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