Community Members Keep Santa Barbara’s Planet Protectors Afloat

Dry cleaners are not known to be the most environmentally friendly businesses. But in Santa Barbara, it was the owner of Ablitt’s Cleaners, Sasha Ablitt, who spearheaded a solution for difficult-to-recycle plastics.

Ablitt took over her family business, Ablitt’s Fine Cleaners, a little over twenty years ago. From the start, she tried to make the business more environmentally friendly, installing greener cleaning machines and ridding Ablitt’s of petroleum and perchlorethylene, both common dry cleaning solvents that have proven health risks. 

Another convention of dry cleaning that bothered Ablitt was all the plastic garment covers, made of thin-film plastic that customers take home with their clean laundry. Thin-film plastic often cannot be recycled through single-stream recycling, so consumers who want to make sure this type of waste doesn’t end up in landfills need to transport it to recycling facilities that have special equipment to process it. 

Initially, Ablitt tried using plant-based plastic covers, but she had to abandon this strategy because the plant-based plastic began to disintegrate before customers picked up their clothes. In the end, recognizing that it can be difficult to change consumer expectations and find alternatives to keep clothes clean, Ablitt’s kept the old plastic covers but encouraged customers to opt for plastic-free dry cleaning. 

Eventually, Ablitt heard that Trex, a company that makes outdoor decks out of post-consumer plastic, accepted thin-film plastic. Ablitt put a drop box outside of her store where customers could leave their dry cleaning covers and any other thin-film plastics they wanted to recycle. The drop box quickly became popular, but Ablitt wound up in a bind when people brought in the wrong types of plastic. The drop boxes were meant to accept only plastic types 2 and 4, but Ablitt’s was left with mounds of plastic types that could not be recycled, and they had to pay to get it all hauled away. 

Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and Ablitt’s shut down their plastic collection program for safety reasons. But it wasn’t long before messages began pouring in from community members asking when the program would be reinstated. Ablitt was receiving more than twenty requests a week to reopen the program, and she knew she had to find a way to make it possible. 

The previous model of a store drop-off wasn’t going to work — it was too expensive and time consuming for Ablitt to sort the plastic and pay to get the trash sent away.

“We came up with a new model, and we called it Planet Protectors,” Ablitt says,  because the people who wanted to recycle their post-consumer plastic were doing just that: protecting the planet by taking charge of the new operation. Planet Protectors, now a registered non-profit organization, holds weekly community events at which people get together to sort their thin-film plastics. Hosted at Ablitt’s, the events take place twice a week for one hour each. At every event, a volunteer, called a sorting mentor, sits with the participants and helps them sort their plastic, accepting the types of plastics that their partner facility can process, and sending the participants home with the trash they can’t accept. With Planet Protectors, Ablitt’s has been able to recycle four times the amount of plastic they had recycled with their original drop-off program. (The Santa Barbara Independent named Sasha Ablitt a “Local Hero in 2021 for her Planet Protector efforts.)

Initially, Ablitt felt bad for the folks lined up halfway around the block to drop off their plastic, until she noticed that everyone was smiling and thanking her for creating the program. Participants would chat with their sorting mentor and each other, exchanging recycling tips and discussing environmental resources and events in town. 

“It was like a little recycling happy hour,” Ablitt says. 

Despite the community’s enthusiasm, Ablitt has found that running a small-scale plastic collection program has its challenges. The first big one came when Trex, facing pandemic-related economic setbacks, decided they would no longer pay to haul small-lot plastic collections to the recycling center. 

At a sorting event following this news, Ablitt asked if any participants would be willing to pay to send their plastic to a recycling center, and she received more than enough checks to cover the transportation costs. Time and again, when Planet Protectors has needed funds to keep going, community members have pulled out their checkbooks.  

Planet Protectors is currently working with Greenpath, an organization that operates a recycling facility in Colton, California. Ablitt says she would like to work with Trex again, but Planet Protectors would need to collect more plastic (40,000 pound loads, to be exact) to be eligible to participate in Trex’s program, and to have the capacity to collect more plastic, they need storage space. Rent in Santa Barbara is expensive, but Planet Protectors is looking for a facility, and the continuing popularity of Planet Protectors’ sorting events gives Ablitt hope that Santa Barbara’s eager recyclers will find a way. 

Ablitt says that some participants collect plastic from their book clubs, neighbors, and friends to bring to the recycling events. Students at the Cate School collect their thin-film plastic and bring it to Planet Protectors’ events once a month. 

“It makes me feel like there’s hope,” Ablitt says. “There is a plastics crisis happening, and people are recognizing it, and our community is dedicated to figuring it out.”

Planet Protectors currently holds two plastic sorting events each week, one on Tuesdays at 2:00 pm and one on Saturdays at 10:30 am, each an hour long. Participants can sign up on the Planet Protectors website.