Steve Kopa talks about recycling and litter in his Galvin shop Wednesday.
Since 2007, The Chronicle has recognized organizations and individuals with the Russ Mohney Recreation and Stewardship Award who have stood out for their work to advocate for natural resources or enhance our enjoyment of the great outdoors.
In a community with such great access to the outdoors, and so many people working to preserve our scenic vistas and natural wonders, it’s a difficult job at best to pick just one person to single out.
This year, The Chronicle chose Steve Kopa, a former Centralia business owner who has spent the better part of the last two years organizing community cleanups of public areas.
“I was really bothered by all this litter,” he said.
Kopa, 53, has long been an avid recycler and owned a salvage and antique business in Centralia. Recently his business interests turned toward building garden sheds out of salvaged materials, but on Wednesday he described himself as “quasi-retired.”
Rather than sit back and let someone else worry about the growing problem he saw in the community, Kopa started collecting groups of volunteers to pick up garbage in parks and public areas around Centralia. Recently, he’s focussed particularly on areas around the Interstate 5 on and off-ramps in Centralia.
In two years, Kopa said his volunteer crews have collected more than 66,000 pounds of trash. The City of Centralia has supplied the crew with grabber tools and garbage bags, but the volunteers work for free.
“It’s all just a bunch of volunteers,” he said. “It’s different every weekend.”
Mohney wrote a much-loved outdoors column for The Chronicle for a decade, and died in 2010.
While it may seem to some like a loose interpretation of environmental stewardship, The Chronicle believes Kopa’s work brings awareness to the damage trash can do to our area’s natural beauty, and is certainly in the spirit of what the Russ Mohney award is meant to celebrate.
“It’s hard to enjoy the great outdoors when it’s full of garbage,” Chronicle Editor Natalie Johnson said. “Steve Kopa and his volunteers have done a mountain of unpleasant work for the benefit of Centralia.”
In fact, Mohney, a self-described “backyard naturalist” wrote about trash and its impact on the outdoors in his 2010 New Year’s resolution column.
“Resolved: I shall carry a supply of plastic bags every time I am outdoors. I shall deposit in such bags bits of spent monofilament line, candy wrappers, broken spinning rods, cigarette butts and packages, fish hooks, beer cans, worn out sofas, cranberry juice boxes, auto parts, castoff clothes dryers, shag carpeting, refrigerators, and every other specimen of trash I encounter,” he wrote.
Most times, a lot of people show up. A cleanup at Riverside Park had 60 volunteers. Last weekend though, Kopa and his girlfriend were the only volunteers.
“It’s amazing what six people can do as opposed to two or three,” he said.
The loosely knit group doesn’t have a name or any formal structure, and that’s how it will stay, Kopa said.
“Anybody can do this. They can pick up in front of their house, they can clean up their road,” he said.
Much of the trash comes from fast food restaurants, he said. Volunteers see a lot of cigarette butts and random scrap of garbage.
“I pick up very few straws, if that makes any sense,” he said.
Kopa said he has received a number of angry comments through social media due to his volunteers’ work on several occasions to clean up abandoned homeless camps. He clarified that the group was always careful to not clear away current campsites, only those long disused.
“We were very sensitive to that,” he said.
Kopa said he has always been interested in recycling and reusing items, partly from a business standpoint — the raw materials are cheap and can be turned into highly sought-after products — and also because he believes older products were just made better.
“I think it’s human nature to see and connect the dots of something (that) you don’t like where it’s going and you want to change the direction,” he said.
In 2016, Kopa was a recipient of the Recycler of the Year Award, recognizing nearly 20 years of diverting items from landfills, including at least 9,000 doors, 4,500 claw-foot tubs, 1,800 porcelain sinks and 36,000 windows.
“My dad always told my brother and I we should pick something to do that nobody else wants to do, then do it better than anyone else around,” he said.
