Alex Chambers:  It's Inner States and Alex Chambers. I'd been hearing about Mary Hunter for a few years, so when I finally emailed her and asked her if I could come and hear about her work, I was really excited, when she wrote back saying "YES" in all caps. Mary Hunter works at the Monroe County Waste Reduction District. Us lay people know it as the Recycling Center. To find her, you go past the trading post, where you can trade household goods, and you open the door to the Materials for the Arts office. That's Mary's place. It's maybe a 12 by 12 room and it's chock full of stuff. The walls are covered with handmade objects made of bottle lids, cardboard, old silverware. There's a dress made out of soda can tabs, jewelery made of glass bottles. It's kind of an art museum and it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of what Mary accomplishes. The goal of Materials for the Arts is to divert reusable materials from the waste stream. Mary has arrangements with companies like Cook and Baxter. Both of them make medical equipment and they send bins and bins of objects they don't need.

Alex Chambers:  Small bottles, tiny pliers, rubber stoppers. She takes paper, cardboard, sheets. Then she connects with non-profits; churches, schools and artists working on community projects who need materials. When someone gets in touch and asks for something, Mary's co-workers join in. Once they collected tons of milk jugs for an igloo building project a school was doing. That brought me to a bigger question. When I heard about the igloo project, I wondered what happened to the milk jugs after they'd been used. I didn't get a clear answer. Odds are they did end up in recycling or a landfill. But here's the thing. It took them longer to get there. It may not save the planet but, I don't know, Mary has interesting relationships with materials. It was good to spend time with her. I hope you agree. After the break, we'll hear from her, and a couple of the guys she works with.

Mary Hunter: I had one little lady, the sweetest little thing and I really miss her. I shouldn't have. I've learned better. She brought me this little tiny jewelry box and she said, "Honey." She was just a little thing. She must have been 90, probably close to that. She said, "I've got something here. Can you use this?" She said, "I'm going to therapy and I can't throw anything away." I just tapped her on the arm, patted her, you know, and I said, "What is it?" And I opened it up and it looked little pieces of thread cut in pieces. It was brown, white, black, tan, everything you can imagine. It was full. I said, "Well, what is this?" And she said, "That's my cat's whiskers." She said, "I've been trimming them for years." And she said, "Can you use it?" I said, "No, but you take that home." And I said, "Don't give up on me, you bring me something else, 'cause I will take something from you." I should have taken that then. I realize now how courageous that was for her to even bring that. I should have taken that. I've always been sorry about that. I haven't seen her since.

Mary Hunter: I'm Mary Hunter and I've been at this company for 34 years. It's a really neat job, 'cause you try to keep everything you can out of landfill. Certain containers like this are good for bug fest. That can make bug catchers.

Alex Chambers: Oh yeah.

Mary Hunter: So that's why I went for this one type only.

Alex Chambers: Orange juice containers. Plastic orange juice containers.

Mary Hunter: My dad fell off of the IU Football stadium when they were building it. I was, like, three or four years old. We were so poor back then. Had five kids. And my mom would recycle our clothing to a family that needed 'em. And I will never forget asking her, "Mom, where are you taking these clothes over there the for, they're just rags?" And that family was so glad to get those. They had eight kids. And just that's my mom was like that. A reason to everything. And I'm just, I wouldn't change being raised that way for nothing.

Mary Hunter: That's ribbons and pop tabs.

Alex Chambers: Ah, blue ribbons through pop tabs. Yeah.

Mary Hunter: It's coming in.

Alex Chambers: It really is.

Mary Hunter: I gather little Hot Wheel cars or little jewelry items and I put 'em behind my desk and when kids come in, little kids they want a surprise. I want them to have a good feeling when they come to the recycling center. So I'll go out and ask 'em. I'd say, "Would you like a Hot Wheel?" "Oh yeah." And then the parents, if they won't say thank you, like especially little boys, "Say Thank you, say thank you." I say, "If you don't say "thank you" I have to kiss you." "Oh thank you." And it works every time.

Mary Hunter: This is a journal made out of cereal box. This is made from recycled glass bottles. These, I have no idea what they are.

Alex Chambers: Sort of, like, plastic sheets?

Mary Hunter: Some kind of pliable blind things. But when I had my bird cage you could take these and weave 'em in a bird cage.

Alex Chambers: Oh.

Mary Hunter: You can't get the seeds all over the ground so much.

Alex Chambers: Wow!

Mary Hunter: So you can find a use for 'em.

Mary Hunter: I do rescue dogs. They have to be old or special needs, end of life type dogs. Like the ASPCA called me from Lafayette with a paw swap four of five years ago and they asked me if I'd come and get this one dog and it was a sad, sad thing. An electrical worker went off the road, way off the road. A metal building. Hot. And he knew it was a big dog half rotted in the front yard. They hadn't even bothered burying it. Came to find out they were fighting the dogs. 64 dogs and they could only save, like, 34 of 'em. They were all in this big building. Some of 'em were stolen they thought. They found the stuff where my dog had been tied up for a bait dog for pit bulls to chew on her. She's half English hunting hound, they think, and half, maybe half pit bull. They're not for sure. I took her to Ellettsville and had her assessed-- Madalyn, Mad 4 My Dog-- and she couldn't find the aggression. So, before covid, she used to go to all the nursing homes with me. I've had eight dogs, I'm down to two and two geese.

Alex Chambers: And two geese?

Mary Hunter: And two baby squirrels. They fell 40 ft out of a tree. I'm raising them in my living room. [LAUGHS] Yes. And they're the messiest things you've ever seen. But WildCare wouldn't take 'em. They've got too many and the DNR wasn't interested. They were three weeks old. Their eyes were still shut. Now they're a mess. They're all over the place. So, I have to watch if they jump out the cage on my shirt and I was trying to wean 'em off the bottle. I'm feeding them once a day on the bottle. But they're just so funny.

Alex Chambers: Are you gonna set 'em free?

Mary Hunter: Oh no, no. I don't believe in them being pets. They're gonna be free. I'll probably have to keep 'em 'til the spring, 'cause they don't have enough hair and stuff. I'm afraid in the wintertime they couldn't do it. So, I'm postponing my vacation to go down to Florida, Georgia to see my cousin until I turn them loose.

Mary Hunter: This is just toilet paper tubes, paper towel tubes. Any kind of plastic tubes like this. Peanuts and bubble wrap and stuff, you can never get too much of that. And I just keep any kinds of little bins that could be for pencils or crayons. Anything like that I'll grab 'cause you never know what somebody's gonna use.

Alex Chambers: How do people find out about this and how do, like, materials come to you?

Mary Hunter: Well, Cooks has been donating to me for probably 20 years. FrameMaker has probably been donating over 30 years to me. All their mat board scraps. I get word of mouth or I'll go and talk to groups.

Joey Long: I like the fact of all the different creative ideas. Like people take stuff from bottle caps to pop tabs or whatever and create many different things. So, you get to see how everybody's mind works different. And I like that.

Joey Long: My name's Joey Long. I'm the Operations Director for Waste Reduction District. Probably the coolest thing, I think, would be the tin man out of soup cans somebody created. Being that I like movies, so from The Oz they done a really good job and I would have never thought of that.

Tom McGlasson: I agree with Joey, the creativity and it's just neat to see the things that people can come up with out of items and materials that the rest of us think are just trash or recycling.

Tom McGlasson: Tom McGlasson. Junior Executive Director for the Waste Reduction District. She moves things that never come to this facility. She connected person A with person B and, you know, they were able to swap things or make a trade and get something reused that would have otherwise been recycled or disposed of.

Mary Hunter: We've had people just call and say, "I need a hundred long cardboard tubes." Or, "I need this." And if they give me enough time, everyone here will look for 'em.

Mary Hunter: Cooks gives us, like, tons of these. They're great for water fights.

Male worker: Those are like giant syringes.

Mary Hunter: Yeah. And they use 'em for all kinds of stuff. If they're doing a little bit of paint they want dyed. They can come up with something.

Mary Hunter: These are all the Cook trays and they come if different sizes and these, they're so heavy. One of the teachers said that they even take those and they put boiling water in for tie dye and they didn't melt. Hilltop likes it. They put dirt in 'em. They give a garden kit and they put the other one on top and they put little holes with clips. They've got a greenhouse.

Mary Hunter: And then they've had fingertips come in in containers at HAZMAT. A woman worked at a lumber yard, or whatever it's called. I think she worked in a lumber yard and for years she retired from there. Used to, they would have arsenic as a way to treat the lumber. She handled those all those years and it rotted her fingertips. So, when they were removed, she had to keep 'em 'til after the court case. She won.

Alex Chambers: Alright. Let's take a break. When we come back people leave their problems at the recycling center.

Mary Hunter:  Pool noodles I'll take them any size, any length. Some of the teachers it's got water tables that cut these in sections and it's same for the water table [INAUDIBLE] tables.

Mary Hunter:  Some people just don't want to mess with it, they're throw it away and it's a shame. They just can't imagine the things we can really use here.

Mary Hunter:  We even got an old medical kit one time. They had a little bottle of medicine, it had cocaine in it.

Alex Chambers:  Like really old?

Mary Hunter:  Oh yeah.

Alex Chambers:  That's why it had cocaine, because it was like--

Mary Hunter:  Oh yeah, it was old. And the medicine case was in really good shape. Cliff Mitcheff up here for the county clinic he would always be looking for old medicine bag. So I gave it to him, he said, "Oh I can't take that. I'll lose my license." So we had to call the police to get it of course.

Mary Hunter:  And this is what you can do with your old shorts. You can make you a bag to put your stuff in. Isn't that funny?

Mary Hunter:  Isn't that funny?

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS] That's great.

Mary Hunter:  We've had several dogs that left here. We found one in a cage around the building here. We've got a shed with the big Gaylord boxes and somebody walked around there and there was this black puppy in a cage. Probably 2 ft, maybe 3 ft, probably 2 x 2, 3 ft or something and that dog had been there for so long his legs and his hips were touching the wire. There was nowhere he wasn't touching. He couldn't move, he couldn't turn. He'd been there a long time. We finally got him out, super-skinny. So Terry was here from T&T Pet Food Store. He went up and got me some special food for him and different things and another customer was here from Martinsville. They went and bought me some wormer for the dog. I mean everybody pitched in. And the dog was just like this when he walked. I mean, he couldn't walk. So I called down a girl that was a head start teacher at the time and she came and got the dog and they still have the dog. It's old but it still walks funny.

Mary Hunter:  This was made 20 years ago by a five year old boy. His grandmother helped him and he brought that in for me. it's dryer lint.

Mary Hunter:  I used to take dryer lint because a laundromat would bring it down to me, bags of it. It got over too much I had to quit. But Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts would take a cardboard egg carton to the Dryer up there, wax over it, and they're fire starters.

Mary Hunter:  About eight years ago I was here by myself on a Saturday. I had one other person I think. This woman came in and she said, "I just moved here and where I moved from I got snowed in all winter long. I got something see if you want it." And this is what it was. All winter long when she was snowed in she took junk mail, subway wrappers, cut them into little pieces of paper and made these chains. It's one big piece of chain.

Alex Chambers:  Wow!

Mary Hunter:  It took two men to lift this up.

Alex Chambers:  Really?

Mary Hunter:  Heavy. And I thought well when she comes back I'm gonna have the newspaper see if they'll do a story on her. Never seen her again.

Mary Hunter:  I built a chicken coop. It's a 10 x 20 and I only have about $300 and I used pallets to build everything and then reclaim the wood. People can do that.

Alex Chambers:  Yeah.

Mary Hunter:  We need to be more self-sufficient, more self-sustained. .

Mary Hunter:  We made this so full two days ago. It took him 45 minutes to pull it, it was so packed full of cardboard. The driver had to travel time.

Mary Hunter:  We were out the cardboard baler probably ten years ago and I told them I said, "Do you hear that?" And the guy said, "I didn't hear anything." I said, "Shut that compact drive." And they said, "I think it was a bird." I said, "No, I think it's coming from out cardboard." The got in there and pulled it out and that was a hard thing to do. We found a little box that wasn't crushed yet and it was completely wrapped every inch nowhere. No way of getting it in at all with duct tape. We cut it open and it was three sick baby kittens.

Alex Chambers:  Oh my god.

Mary Hunter:  Someone threw them in there to be crushed. The animal shelter's right here and they had to put them to sleep because they were so sick.

Alex Chambers:  That's really sad.

Mary Hunter:  But they were gonna crush them.

Alex Chambers:  It's like people's problems they bring them here.

Mary Hunter:  Sometimes they do.

Mary Hunter:  The funniest thing we ever found here. I wasn't here that day. A guy that used to work here was here. He was such a grouchy man. He was gonna retire and he was just [GRUNTS] all the all the time. A woman came up and she puts this black bag on the sidewalk. And he said, "Ma'am, is that electronics?" Because you know about what it is when you hear it a lot of times, when you've been here long enough. "Yes". He said, it goes to Hazmat. Take it to Hazardous Waste." She said, "Well someone might want to use." And kept arguing. He finally said, "Fine, I'll take it." She got in the car and left. He put it on the cart and he reached his hands in and and started pulling it out, and it was a half trash bag of used sex toys. [LAUGHS].

Mary Hunter:  You want to see inside our metal bin?

Alex Chambers:  Yeah.

Mary Hunter:  Any kind of scrap metal. You'd be surprised. I mean, we don't let anybody take anything out. If it's something like, "I pulled a dog cage out this morning." It was a big one, perfect for the dog rescue.

Alex Chambers:  Oh hey.

Mary Hunter:  There's no sense in wasting that stuff, that's just ridiculous.

Alex Chambers:  So right now it looks like there's a frame for like some swinging chair, outdoor chairs.

Mary Hunter:  Oh we get a lot of those, don't don't buy them they're junk.

Alex Chambers:  [LAUGHS] Good to know.

Mary Hunter:  And there's one that are just regular chairs that are not recliners. They come in, I mean, all the time. They don't last, they're just junk.

Alex Chambers:  So if someone wanted to, if there was something someone was interested in and they weren't part of an organization they could come and ask you and you would say yes or no?

Mary Hunter:  Then that would depend what it is. Some of the things if it's from a business I have to get a thank you probably not. But if it's regular tins and different things like that then we would help them. I've had people come in and want these big cans so they can put concrete in them for their tent poles or different things you know like that then I will help them. We all will.

Alex Chambers:  So you were saying when we were earlier that you've gotten some really strange requests or--

Mary Hunter:  Oh yeah, what do you call when they inserted the woman and opened her up. You know what I'm talking about? To do that pap smears?

Alex Chambers:  Yeah.

Mary Hunter:  I made three of those for Carl Cook, he sent me a box of them. I thought what do you think I'm gonna do with this?

Mary Hunter:  If I can find the picture on my computer I'll have to get a copy for you.

Alex Chambers:  That'll be great.

Mary Hunter:  I painted him different colors. One I made it into a dragon, put zipper teeth on him. And they were all little toys puppet things. Oh all the teachers started taking them then.

Mary Hunter:  And I sent him a letter for a joke. And it said, I was Chuck [UNSURE OF NAME] at the time. And I said, "Dear Chuck we just want you to know how much we appreciate your donation." I had to name on there. Said, "We are a poor group and we give stuff to people and we really appreciate it. You sent me all of these and they weren't even used. So we didn't have to put them in the dishwasher. And I wrote him this letter. I made up this fake address 666 something. And he loved it and it was in the Cook's book.

Mary Hunter:  When I retire one of these days Tom has already told me. Says, "You can stay and work part-time if you want."

Alex Chambers:  Are you going to?

Mary Hunter:  He's gonna let me hire somebody for six months to train them.

Alex Chambers:  Good.

Mary Hunter:  But I just don't feel like a lot of people are raised the way that we are now. And that was the work ethics. I was raised to work when I was growing up you know I really was. You got to have that and you got to like it and I love this job I wouldn't have been here this long.

Mary Hunter:  Some people just don't want to mess with it. They'll throw it away and it's a shame. They just can't imagine the things we could really use here.

Alex Chambers:  And that's our show. We'd love to hear what it made you think about. Send us an email or a voice memo through the contact tab on our website. WFIU.org/innerstates or get in touch on Facebook or Instagram. And if you like the show give us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. It's supposed to help other people find it. And hey, tell us what you've been up to while you listen, like maybe you've been trying to figure out you next business venture since it turns out the artichokes didn't like the northern Indiana winters and you've got this land and there really aren't any water parks for miles, so you've decided to look into it. Travel around, see how other people have developed water parks on a shoestring which is pretty much what's left after the artichoke debacle. So you're headed to Montana just outside of Glacier National Park where a woman named Rhonda Carlona has a famous in the industry water park, she built solo by hand. And you were asking how she made all the slides and she said.

Rhonda:  This is just toilet paper tubes, paper towel tubes, any kind of plastic tubes like this.

Alex Chambers:  Isn't that great? Now I just need to find a source and on your drive back you turn on the Inner States and there was Mary Hunter pointing you needed to be a non-profit for most of what she was offering. And that's how you decided to build the nation's first water park with no admissions fees. Good on you and good luck. We want to hear about it.

Alex Chambers:  Okay, we've got your quick moment of slow radio coming up. But first the credits. Inner States if produced and edited by me Alex Chambers. Our associate producers are Dom Heyob and Karl Templeton. Our social media master is Jillian Blackburn. We get support from Eoban Binder and Natalie Ingels, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our executive producer is Eric Bolstridge. Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. We have additional music from The Sounds of Materials at the Waste Reduction District. Right time for some found sounds.

Alex Chambers:  That was you might have guessed, The Waste Reduction District's plastic compactor. Until next week I'm Alex Chambers. Thanks as always for listening.