Photograph by Robert Scheer
Ignacio Basutta empties jugs into the motor oil reservoir at Green Valley's recycling center in Santa Clara.
By Torre Peña
Under a whitish-gray canopy of scavenging seagulls, Guadalupe Landfill's yawning chasm awaits a steady stream of dump trucks lining the entrance. The rumble of bulldozers making way for fresh garbage drowns out the seagulls' cries of protest. Wrestled from their foraging, the birds take flight and circle the bulldozers that move enormous piles of waste to the far corners of the landfill.
Guadalupe, located in the Almaden foothills of San Jose, serves as the garbage dump for the South Bay. And at current dumping rates, about 40 years remain before it reaches capacity, according to General Manager Jim Lord.
Below the landfill area, trucks that previously brought items to the dump haul "green" waste in the form of yard clippings to the Home of Hog Heaven Composting, adjacent to the dump. The composting site is part of an effort to conserve landfill space.
"If the waste stream continues to go down, it will increase the years remaining for the landfill," Lord says. He adds that Guadaloupe has one of the longest projected capacities in the Bay Area, where space for landfill appears to be running out.
Scott Morey, director of recycling for Green Valley Disposal Co., says that waste diversion in the form of recycling greatly reduces the amount of landfill space needed.
"From a residential standpoint, all of the cities served by Green Valley are recycling tremendous amounts," he says.
Green Valley Disposal Co. collects garbage and recycled materials, such as paper, plastic bottles, aluminum, glass and yard waste, from residential and commercial areas in Campbell, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno, Saratoga and unincorporated neighborhoods in the West Valley area.
Since Saratoga's curbside recycling program was initiated in 1989, it has been embraced by residents, who put out newspapers, aluminum cans and glass jars in colorful yellow and blue bins each week.
"Saratoga does a thorough job of recycling," says Phil Couchee, Green Valley's director of operations. "The people in Saratoga are socially aware, well-educated people, and that tends to lend itself to people being more environmentally conscious--and Saratogans definitely are."
The Integrated Waste Management Bill passed in 1989 by the state legislature provided the impetus for aggressive curbside recycling. The bill required local governments to divert 25 percent of their waste from landfills by 1995 and 50 percent by the year 2000. The mandate carries a stiff penalty of $10,000 per day for noncomplying cities. However, a "good faith" loophole may be used by cities that institute serious change in waste management and increase recycling.
Saratoga and other West Valley cities easily diverted well over the required 25 percent last year. And now, their success provides a model for other cities.
"The West Valley cities have a really good program," says Paula Stoner, management analyst for Santa Clara County's Integrated Waste Management group. "It's the most comprehensive in the county."
Currently, Morey estimates that Saratoga's diversion of waste is in the mid-40 percent range.
"Saratoga's base is primarily residential, and the programs implemented to date have all focused on the residential sector, from curbside recycling to yard waste," says Gerard Wen, Green Valley's president. "With curbside recycling, Saratoga more than exceeds the 50 percent goal, but it's the commercial sector where the next efforts need to be made to find ways of increasing diversion."
In any given week, 75 percent of Saratoga households leave material out for recycling, Morey says. He adds that more than 90 percent of Saratogans participate regularly in the curbside program, with the average Saratoga household recycling 983 pounds of material last year. That's a lot of soda cans, newspapers and milk cartons.
The recycling program's success is due to the convenience and flexibility of the program, Morey says. There is an unlimited collection of yard waste and three separate bins for mixed paper, glass and plastic bottles and aluminum.
"One of the key contributors to the success of recycling is the yellow bin we provide customers for mixed paper," Morey explains. "They can put in any type of paper, and they don't have to separate their junk mail from their newspapers, or the cereal boxes from their magazines."
After collection, yard waste is driven directly to the composting yard, and paper is delivered to the Smurfit Company, a San Jose paper recycler. Glass has already been separated by color by Green Valley drivers, and the remaining plastic and aluminum is separated at Green Valley's recycling facility in Santa Clara.
At the recycling center, five employees armed with thick gloves man a conveyer belt spewing a mix of aluminum, plastic and garbage. Adroitly plucking a can or bottle from the moving debris and nonchalantly launching it over a shoulder into a bin, each worker is responsible for a different material. Adhering to the magnetic belt, tin cans are the last to be separated. The cans cling to the belt until hitting the end of the line and drop into a container under the conveyer.
"We work real hard to develop good, stable markets for the materials that come out of Saratoga," Morey says. "If we pick it up from your house, it gets recycled." Stoner adds that the high cost of disposal after collection ensures that most materials do get recycled.
Accustomed to fluctuating markets, Morey says that the selling price of recycled paper has plummeted from $100 a ton during the summer of 1995 to the current price of $20 a ton. Regardless, a contract with Smurfit Co. maintains the flow of recycled paper to be reused as packaging, toilet paper or newsprint. There is also a thriving demand for waste paper in Asia.
"We are very fortunate here in the Bay Area that there are enough people who want the material, so I never have a glut of material," Morey says. He sees yard waste from the West Valley shipped to farmers in the San Joaquin and Salinas Valleys who use it as a soil amendment.
While glass and aluminum processed at Green Valley can be remolded into beverage containers, recycling plastic presents the toughest challenge, Morey says. The breaking down of toxic resins in the recycling process caused the FDA to ban the use of recycled plastic in food or beverage containers. The lack of consistent, stable plastic markets causes Green Valley to accept only plastics they can guarantee a market for.
The entrepreneurial spirit has opened new plastic markets and returned milk jugs to supermarkets as shopping and trash bags. Plastic "lumber" now supports people sitting on park benches, and plastic soda bottles provide synthetic filling for winter jackets. One California manufacturer, Patagonia, makes fleece garments from recycled plastic bottles.
Morey says the value of recycled material covers only about 25 percent of the total cost of recycling. The remainder is passed on to the customers. But he warns that the consequences of not recycling may be more expensive in the long run.
"Nobody wants a landfill in their backyard," he says, hinting at the political baggage that accompanies landfills. He adds that the exorbitant cost of shipping garbage to other areas would raise garbage bills.
"It is extremely hard to find good sites for landfills, because of geologic conditions in the county and lack of space," Stoner says. "There probably won't be another one in this county during our lifetime."
As Saratoga strives toward the 50 percent waste-diversion mandate looming just three years away, Green Valley has proposed an industrial recycling facility with the aim of recycling more commercial waste. Stoner says that such a facility would boost the overall waste diversion.
"West Valley cities are in pretty good shape," Stoner says. "It might be a stretch, but I think we'll make it to 50 percent."
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, January 8, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.