Elmer Bigham was the first to find it, lying among the flattened, discarded boxes in one of the cardboard bins.

The pile of quarter-inch thick fiberboard weighed “several hundred pounds” by Bigham’s estimation  — and broke a bit of his heart.

“It’s aggravating,” says the 72-year-old retired minister who volunteers with the national award-winning recycling program at Yakima’s Wesley United Methodist Church. “It’s frustrating. And it costs. We have to pay for it.”

The dumping of trash, junk and nonrecyclables doesn’t happen every day. But it happens frequently enough to be a problem at the church recycling program.

“It’s not constant, not continual. But it’s not infrequent either,” says Bigham, who is often left to deal with the mess. “We’re doing our bit” to help the environment, he says.

Except for the few offenders.

“They’re just plain dumping.”

Wesley United Methodist isn’t alone.

Most Yakima-area recycling drop-off bins have been pulled in recent years due to dumping. But the problem continues to plague many remaining church, grocery store and community recycling programs as well as thrift stores, like the Salvation Army.

“It’s really bad,” says Julia Fouts, store manager for the downtown Yakima Salvation Army. “It’s a problem. It’s always been and probably always will be.”

Most dumps — furniture that’s beyond repair, “tore-up” washing machines, refrigerators without doors, computer equipment, old mattresses — occur at night and on weekends. The load of fiberboard was left at Wesley United Methodist sometime between 2 p.m. last Monday and 10 a.m. the next day.

At the Salvation Army, people have even dumped bags of garbage from their homes, Fouts says.

“People’s bills have been in the garbage with their names and addresses on them,” says Fouts, who’s considered installing surveillance cameras as a deterrent. “We are definitely thinking about it, but it’s an expense that we haven’t been able to afford.”

The volunteers at Wesley United Methodist have also considered cameras. After the mound of fiberboard was dumped, it took three volunteers two hours to load it into a truck, then haul it to the dump, where they had to pay to unload it.

Bigham guesses it was leftover from someone’s remodeling project: “They were obviously redoing a room, and they left us the walls. It was a whole room.”

But construction materials aren’t as common at the church recycling program as other materials.

“We get Styrofoam every week,” Bigham says. “We’ve had TVs. We’ve had chairs. We’ve had a complete computer system — the computer, the monitor, the printer, all of the cables — in the original boxes.”

Those cardboard boxes are recyclable. But everything else gets hauled to the dump — on the church’s time and dime.

“It’s a cost and a hassle,” Bigham says. “Why should we have to deal with that?”

He’s got a message for dumpers: “Be responsible for your stuff. If it’s junk, deal with it. If it costs, pay for it. Don’t damage a good program because of your own selfishness.”

John Distler, 86, has been volunteering at the church recycling program for about three years. He’s out there almost every day, sorting and hauling recyclables — and sometimes trash. He says he finds nonrecyclables “probably every week.”

“Some people have no conscience at all,” he says. “We’ve had cat litter, a bag of cat litter. (Sept. 29) I picked up an old bicycle frame. And we get quite a bit of yard waste.”

Small openings on drop-off bins might serve as a deterrent to would-be dumpers. Yakima’s Holy Family Parish has had a recycling program for about 10 years. Its three bins — two for newspapers and one for aluminum cans — are sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, and raise money for the Diocese of Yakima’s seminarian fund.

The bins feature thin slats just large enough to push papers or cans through, and that might help.

“We don’t seem to have much (garbage dumping),” says a parish employee who asked not to be named. “I do know that occasionally the Knights of Columbus say they have found garbage, but not a lot of it and not very often.”

Dumping forced Yakima Waste Systems to pull its remaining 40 recycling bins in Selah about two years ago. The company originally had about 270 recycling bins in Yakima but discontinued most of them in 2004, leaving the ones in Selah until December 2006.

These days, Wesley United Methodist’s recycling program is probably the most comprehensive, free, community recycling program in the Yakima area, Bigham says.

The church accepts clear plastic containers, milk jugs, aluminum cans, clear glass, newspapers, magazines, cardboard and shredded paper.

A white sign with red lettering lets folks know the rules: No clothing, no furniture, no colored jugs or glass, no junk.

“Please,” the sign implores.

A core group of about a dozen retired men — most of whom are in their 70s and 80s — run the program at the church, 14 N. 48th Ave. Recently, they’ve been processing about 60,000 pounds of recyclables a month.

In fact, they’re on track to handle more than 700,000 pounds this year. That’s a church recycling program record. And it all adds up.

Since it started nearly 30 years ago, the church’s program has kept 5 million pounds of material out of local landfills. And this year, the Washington, D.C.-based Eco-Justice Program of the National Council of Churches recognized the church for its recycling efforts, giving Wesley United Methodist a national award.

The program isn’t only good for the environment, it’s also profitable for the church, which estimates it’s raised $100,000 from recycling for its ministry since 1979.

But, Bigham says, “We’re not doing it primarily for the money. That’s nice. But it’s 5 million pounds we’ve kept out of the landfill.

“Why bury it if it can be recycled?”