**Title**: Energy in the North - Shae Bowman
**Date**: June 11, 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Shae Bowman


00;00;00;16 - 00;00;11;14 [Shae Bowman] Landfill is 13 miles out of town, which means that they're driving trucks. 26 miles round trip. And they're making that trip multiple times a day.

00;00;11;14 - 00;00;22;09 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North. Guest host Danny Elkin from Rocky Mountain Institute speaks with Shae Bowman, the energy development specialist for Rural Community Action Program or RualCAP. Shae is a co-owner of Copper River Brewery restaurant in Cordova. She's also a member of the 2025 Energy Leadership Accelerator cohort, which is a National Science Foundation funded collaboration between RMI and the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. We were in Shae's home community of Cordova for the last portion of the Alaska Leadership Lab, a part of the ELA program, and Danny started the conversation by asking Shae about some of the challenges that Cordova faces.

00;00;48;03 - 00;01;14;27 [Shae Bowman] There's challenges with energy. One of the big challenges that I've worked a lot on is waste management for a rural community, and now in my new position with RuralCAP, I'm really interested in how those two things intersect energy in Cordova specifically is not such a challenge because we have hydropower and CEC is such a great, innovative cooperative, but we're still on some diesel fuel for some of our power. I for several years was managing a fishing web recycling program in Cordova, and I had also done recycling program for plastics, because you have to stockpile enough material to be able to ship it out in a way that is economical. And so that oftentimes means stockpiling and baling enough material to fill, like a 40ft shipping container. And for instance, cardboard is very hard to do in a climate that is this wet and rainy because it would just mold before you even got it to the recycler. And, plastics is also very challenging, because the price that you receive for the plastic is so low that it doesn't cover the cost that it takes to run the recycling program and cover the cost of shipping. So just back hauling waste is a big challenge. And then there's a lot of challenges with landfilling in rural communities as well. 

00;02;10;66 - 00;02;12;09 [Danny Elkin] Is there a landfill here? 

00;02;12;09 - 00;02;35;29 [Shae Bowman] There is a landfill here. Yeah. One of the things that I think is an interesting tie with energy is that our landfill is 13 miles out of town, which means that they're driving trucks 26 miles round trip, and they're making that trip multiple times a day. So if we could find a way to deal with waste more locally centralized in town, that would save a lot on fuel. 

00;02;35;29 - 00;02;39;08 [Danny Elkin] As a small business owner, I mean, does that impact you even more? 

00;02;39;08 - 00;03;09;25 [Shae Bowman] I mean, as a small business owner, I'm very concerned about the amount of waste that we're generating as a restaurant, and there's not a lot of ways for me to get around it. We only have, fishing, web recycling and aluminum can recycling. And what's cool about the aluminum can recycling is that it directly supports the fishing web recycling program. So the more cans we can recycle as a community, the more nets we can recycle. 

00;03;09;15 - 00;03;09;26 [Danny Elkin] And have you found good buy in from the from the fishing community here? 

00;03;09;26 - 00;03;33;03 [Shae Bowman] Yeah. The recycling program has been going on for quite a few years, and it's definitely widely supported among the fleet. And it's a good partnership between the copper River watershed project. Net your problem in the city of Cordova is, along with the Native Village Act, they all kind of partnered together to make it happen. It's a great program. One of the main benefits is that it keeps nets out of the landfill. One of the reasons it's important is because net tangle up the landfill equipment and cause breakdowns and problems like that.

00;03;33;04 - 00;03;54;21 [Amanda Byrd] Shae Bowman is the co-owner of copper River brewing. Danny Elkin is the strategic communications and media specialist at RMI, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.