Everybody loves bulky trash day, the one day of the year you can set your busted water heater or hideous shag carpet out on the curb and the city magically makes it go away. For those with raccoonlike garbage-sifting tendencies, the night before is a free-for-all treasure hunt. Artists look for materials. Neighbors seek freebies. Street-level recyclers scavenge cardboard, metal, or glass to trade for cash. Semipro “rooters” dig for stuff to resell. Students, the homeless, and other low-income folks search for life’s little necessities. They all love bulky trash day. You might even say it’s being loved to death.
And that’s a real problem for people like John Ryan. During the months when it’s not raining, he can be found tooling around Contra Costa County in his white Isuzu truck, cheerfully chucking bags in the back. But unlike most junk pickers, Ryan is on an official mission: He works for Pacific Rim Recycling, which collaborates with the Central Contra Costa Solid Waste Authority and the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse in a charitable donations program that gives new life to old junk. Residents are asked to set out reusable items such as clothing, books, and furniture on the curb a day before the trash trucks come for the big stuff, and Pacific Rim takes what it thinks can be reused. The next day, the garbage guys haul away the dregs.
Ray Lingo supplements his income by scavenging. Credits: Kara Platoni You can tell anything you want to know about a person by looking through their garbage, says John Ryan of Pacific Rim Recycling. Credits: Kara Platoni Linda Levitsky forged bulky trash reuse pacts with several East Bay cities, but savvy scavengers have driven some programs into oblivion. Credits: Kara Platoni Albanys Bonnie Sugg loves bulky trash days: Its those odds and ends youd put in your garage or backyard, and if it gets broken oh, well. Credits: Kara Platoni Found-materials artist Erik Groff builds a lollipop into each artwork, to ooze and remind buyers that their purchases were once junk. Credits: Kara Platoni
Ryan is wiry, quick, and tan from working outdoors. “I love doing this,” he beams, popping in and out of the rear of his truck with armfuls of donations. “I get paid to go to the gym. Let’s put it this way: I fill up one of these trucks, it’s right about five thousand pounds. I lift it twice — putting it in and taking it out. That’s ten thousand pounds I lifted up in an eight-hour day.”
The truckloads add up: Last year Pacific Rim collected 446 tons of stuff that, instead of being shipped to a landfill, helped sustain the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse and a half-dozen other charitable causes.
Ryan’s job is like the most complicated game of Tetris ever, which compels him to meticulously wedge unwieldy, bizarrely shaped objects into the limited space of his truck. Hefty bags of clothes? No prob. Overstuffed armchair? A challenge, perhaps. Giant hole-riddled kiddie pool in the shape of a green turtle? He slaps that one with a yellow sticker, condemning it to the landfill.
The weirdest thing Ryan ever found on his rounds was an unexploded mortar. Other contenders: silicone breast implants, dialysis machines, and sex toys. Here in CoCo County, he snaps up the castoffs of the affluent: DVD players, golf clubs, set after set of skis. Today, as he makes his Orinda rounds, he picks up an espresso machine, a stained-glass lamp, a leather briefcase, and too many hard drives and mountain bikes to count. It’s silent testimony to both the generosity of the town’s residents and their consumerism, since most of this stuff was likely tossed to make space for something new.
Ryan views his job with an anthropological eye. “You can tell anything you want to know about a person by looking through their garbage,” he says. He knows what residents along his route read (in Orinda, wine and travel magazines, and endless copies of National Geographic). He knows when they give up a hobby (witness the four sets of golf clubs neatly stacked along the curb). He knows when someone dies, or when someone moves. He can guess how many kids a family has, and whether they’ve recently gone off to college. He eyes one donation — a bag of relatively new-looking games and stuffed animals. “To me it looks like a little girl did not clean her room, so mommy and daddy did it for her,” he says wryly.
He knows how hard it is for some people to part with battered belongings, and how their family members often resort to force or subterfuge. “I’ve had a couple little kids crying on the side of the road because mommy’s getting rid of their bike,” Ryan says. “I’ve got a lot of wives going, ‘I’m glad you’re here, my husband’s not home from work yet and I’m getting rid of his favorite chair.'” A few houses later, Ryan notices a woman watching him from the driveway, a cell phone clamped to her ear. She has a rug she’s dying to throw out, but her son has begged her to save it for his dorm room. She’s calling to give him one last chance to pick it up, but he isn’t answering.
“You know what?” she says mischievously. “Just take it.”
Ryan shrugs good-naturedly: “That’s what he gets for not answering his phone.”
People have a tendency to confess to the recycling guy. They want to tell Ryan how they got the items, or why they’re getting rid of them. Mostly they just want to explain — guiltily — how they ended up with so much stuff. Twice already today, people have zoomed out of their houses to justify particularly massive piles by saying that they’re moving. They often thank him apologetically. Ryan understands. “Do you ever sit down and spill all your problems to a bartender?” he asks. “Why? It’s a stranger. You won’t be judged on what you say because this person doesn’t know you. That’s the way I look at it.”
Ryan is upbeat even on days when the sun is hot and the trash piles are mountainous and full of pointy or odd-sized stuff. Even when his truck begins spewing a wicked black smoke on uphill climbs and he has to stop and baby it with several quarts of transmission fluid, he remains cheerful.
Sure, a few things annoy him. The drivers who nearly sideswipe him. The junk donors who forget to turn their sprinklers off, leaving sodden piles he can’t use. The people who try to con him into cleaning out their garages.
But there’s one thing that truly irritates the man, and even threatens his livelihood. Ryan points at a curb where plastic bags of donated clothing have been ripped apart, their contents strewn across the road. A set of flowerpots has been knocked over, scattering potting soil. Ryan glares. “This is what scavengers do,” he says dolefully.
He isn’t talking about the neighbors who poke through the curbside piles for a free treat, but the pros: the guys who patrol entire neighborhoods in pickup trucks using preplanned route maps, and then sell their hauls at the flea markets. For Ryan and for sanitation workers, these guys are trouble. When residents leave out donations in opaque garbage bags, the scavengers will rip them open to see what’s inside and toss the contents everywhere. And Ryan gets stuck with the cleanup. The scavengers, he says, “take most of the good stuff and leave a big old mess.”
This, it turns out, is the main reason local governments no longer love bulky trash day, and why so many have decided to get rid of it. In past years, most cities in Alameda County cities hosted these neighborhood spring cleanings, and several had programs like Ryan’s that gave the nonprofits first dibs. Now Ryan’s Contra Costa reuse program is the last of its kind in the East Bay, and Orinda is one of just a handful of local cities that still does neighborhood-wide pickups. The pro scavengers simply got so good at the game that they would routinely beat the nonprofits to the punch. Sanitation workers, meanwhile, were tired of dealing with the mess, and homeowners were getting creeped out by the strangers sifting through their belongings.
So this spring, Berkeley, Oakland, El Cerrito, and Livermore all quietly nixed their bulky trash days in favor of appointment-only systems in which residents must call the city for a pickup. Alameda, Hayward, San Leandro, and Richmond already made this switch in recent years. The cities hope that the scavengers, no longer knowing when and where lucrative piles will appear, will simply give up.
But for the scores of nonprofit recyclers, artists, and other amateur rubbish diggers who relied in one way or another on the old system, the question is whether these cities are simply destroying their cottage industry in order to save it: Will the relative inconvenience of an appointment-based system discourage people from recycling unwanted stuff? What happens to those who depend on bulky trash for their livelihoods? And will the crackdown in Alameda County drive the scavengers through the tunnel to perhaps spoil things for Contra Costa as well?
Bulky trash day is more important than some people might think. Just ask Linda Levitsky, godmother of most of the East Bay’s bulky trash programs.
A slight woman with a quiet voice, Levitsky says her passion for turning trash into necessities began with her work for the United Nations and international relief associations, where she was moved by the abject poverty of refugees. She recalls with perfect clarity a mission to El Salvador to broker an exchange of medical supplies. She was living in a leaky tent in a refugee camp, and complained of the leak to another worker, who replied that there was simply nothing available to patch it. Levitsky remembers her reply: “There’s always a creative way.” To prove it, she recalls, she went out and scoured acres of the camp. “There was nothing,” she says. “I came back humbled and said, ‘I’m so sorry.'” Since then, Levitsky has dedicated herself to transferring materials from where they’re overabundant to where they’re needed.
As interim executive director for the nonprofit East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, which primarily collects supplies for teachers and artists, Levitsky developed several programs that encouraged residents to set out reusable donations with their bulk trash. The Berkeley program was pioneered by salvage company Urban Ore in the mid-’90s; the depot replaced it three years ago with its “First Chance, Second Chance” program. Discards that weren’t resold at the depot’s retail store were turned into artwork or rehabilitated to make “shabby chic” household fixtures and furniture, which the depot sold and presented at art shows. Levitsky had similar collaborations with Emeryville and Albany, but three years ago, funding for those programs was discontinued. This year, the city of Berkeley decided to pull the plug as well.
The depot faced two big logistical problems. The first was limited storage space; the second was that the scavengers were getting there first. The depot recoups its costs by selling salvaged items, but it just wasn’t getting enough stuff that could fetch a decent price. By this year, the cost of sending out trucks and workers outweighed the value of the materials collected. “The economics didn’t work,” Levitsky says.
Yet the depot’s collaboration with Central Contra Costa Solid Waste Authority and Pacific Rim is flourishing. The partnership, now in its fourth year, has consistently produced bumper crops of reusable goods. During the first few weeks of this season, which began in May, its crews were taking in twice as many truckfuls as last year. Sometimes trucks would get filled up when the drivers were only halfway through their routes — they’d have to haul everything back to the Pacific Rim Recycling yard in Benicia, then start over.
About a fifth of what John Ryan picks up — mostly the art supplies and decorative objects — goes to the depot. The rest feeds a vast supply chain with tentacles all over the world. Some of the bikes are distributed to Berkeley’s Tinkers Workshop, where they are refurbished and often given to local kids. The rest are donated to Danville nonprofit One Family, which fixes them for charities overseas. Last month the program shipped a forty-foot container of bikes to Afghanistan; later this year, more bikes will go to an orphanage in India. Battered-women’s shelters and other Bay Area charities get first crack at the clothing and housewares, and Concord’s Books for the Barrios program sends reading materials to the Philippines. Athletic shoes get shipped to the Nike Corporation, where they are chewed into “Nike Grind” and used to surface playgrounds, running tracks, and tennis and basketball courts.
In the end, though, most of Contra Costa’s reusable bulky trash is trucked up to Oregon, where Terry McDonald figures out what to do with it. He is executive director of the St. Vincent de Paul Society of Layton, Oregon, and is renowned in environmental circles as a champion of waste diversion. His organization is a behemoth that finds new uses for more than 25,000 tons of trash from around the globe each year. St. Vincent de Paul does everything from deconstructing mattresses to restoring old appliances. It also runs an empire of thrift stores, which are happy to stock the relatively opulent goods collected from Contra Costa County. “It’s very high-quality product we get from across the county,” McDonald says. “I love the books — good novels, good textbooks. You obviously have a very well-educated population.”
What he can’t resell locally or give to shelters and homeless programs gets sent to relief organizations overseas, and all the work it takes to sort, sell, and ship these materials provides jobs for chronically underemployed people. “It’s a way to turn your discards into a real social service,” he says.
To many observers, what’s most important about this county partnership is where all that trash isn’t going: the dump. Many local reuse or recycling organizations see themselves in direct competition with the garbage haulers, who in their view prefer to simply dump everything and not have to hassle with recycling or reuse programs. “We’re trying to keep all those materials out of the landfill and those landfill people are trying to keep it in because it’s an incredibly lucrative business,” says Urban Ore CEO Dan Knapp. “If they could only find more holes, they’d put more garbage in them.” By incinerating or burying garbage, he says, “you turn its value into less than zero and make it a complete liability.”
Dave Williamson, operations manager of Berkeley’s Ecology Center, argues that landfills are far from benign. “They offgas methane and they leak,” he says. “The water picks up toxics and it oozes out of the landfill and can potentially pollute water and streams. That’s a liability that extends 150 years into the future.”
Recycling, meanwhile, is an asset. According to a 2000 National Recycling Coalition study, the US recycling industry employs 1.1 million people and grosses $236 billion annually from sales of recycled steel, glass, and aluminum. “The largest volume of material leaving the Port of Oakland, both by volume and by value, is scrap material: paper, metals, and plastics,” Williamson says. “That’s what America is sending overseas — our waste products. And we’re getting manufactured goods.”
In fact, local governments are moving toward encouraging more raw-materials recycling than ever. Alameda County hopes to cut landfill waste 75 percent by 2010, says Roberta Miller, program manager for the Alameda County Waste Management Authority and Recycling Board, a public agency that helps cities minimize waste.
Consider Oakland, which has never had a reuse program, and in February switched to appointment-only bulky trash pickup. Of the 11,590 tons of stuff collected on bulky trash days last year, only 8 percent was diverted from the landfill. The city now hopes to institute what Peter Slote, a recycling specialist in the public works department, calls “aggressive recycling.” This year, people who make pickup appointments will find that many items Oakland couldn’t recycle in the past — computers, yard trimmings, scrap metal, and untreated scrap wood — are now accepted. “People think that if they can’t scavenge a pot or a pan from their neighbors, it’s going to the landfill, which is 100 percent wrong,” Slote says. “There are significantly more recycling opportunities than there are reuse opportunities, and we’re after the biggest bang for the environmental buck.”
Staffers from most of the cities that have soured on neighborhood bulky trash day say they expect the appointment-only system will ease their workloads. They cite several key problems with the old system: Outsiders, for one, saw a chance to get rid of their own junk for free. Battered sofas and used tires would turn up all over the place and the city would be responsible for making them disappear. “The neighborhood-style events were huge targets for illegal dumping, the fly-by-night haulers,” Slote says.
There were also labor issues. Sanitation workers don’t get many days off, and bulky trash day often meant overtime shifts, usually on weekends. Plus, since cities never knew what, or how much, residents would discard on a particular day, it was something of a logistical nightmare. “A couple times they couldn’t finish in one day and had to go out on Sunday,” says Becky Dowdakin, manager of Berkeley’s recycling program. “It was difficult to manage our resources efficiently.” (Waste Management of Alameda County and Alameda County Industries, the two haulers serving most of the cities that have switched to on-call pickup this year, did not return phone calls regarding their role in the switch.)
Some residents, meanwhile, would abuse the system by setting out truly mountainous quantities. “I’ve seen deposits that people leave out — sometimes it’s twenty feet long and four feet deep — and would fill the truck by themselves,” Urban Ore’s Knapp recalls. “You’d have to have a two- or three-person crew to do it safely. It’s a mankiller.”
Then, of course, there was all the competition. When Urban Ore sent crews on Berkeley pickups, Knapp says, “they would come back fit to be tied. All kinds of scavengers would have gone out and picked up anything that was worth anything.”
Things didn’t improve much after the Depot for Creative Reuse took over. Even though the scheduled pickups were on Saturdays and the trucks were going out as early as Thursday, they were still getting beat. “I think last year they really only diverted six tons of stuff and it cost us $10,000 to do it,” Dowdakin says.
And yet who’s to say scavengers haven’t the right? While they may be a thorn in the side of the reuse programs, their activities also keep waste out of the landfills, especially in cities that lack reuse programs. What they sell at flea markets or garage sales supports a secondhand market that some consumers rely on. And not all of them are exploitative mess-makers who don’t care about the community — many are from the community. “There are people that do it because they’re curious or they love getting something for nothing, and that’s a very valid and legitimate thing to do,” Knapp says.
“One could argue it a hundred different ways,” Levitsky concurs. “What about all the stuff that’s left behind that’s not picked up? Who cares where that goes as long as it’s off the street?” At the same time, aggressive scavengers did drive the depot’s program out of Berkeley, and in cities with donations programs, would-be benefactors complain angrily when their contributions don’t make it to the intended charity. “Since we’re funded by a government agency,” Levitsky notes, “it is on some level stealing from a government agency, where goods are going to a very specific place.”
One of the few places in Alameda County where you can still find a neighborhood collection day is Albany, which did its pickups early this month. Even before the sun set the evening before, the streets were filled with neighbors combing through each other’s piles and darting home with their finds — someone lugging a shoe rack here, or a computer monitor there. It was a perfect cross-section of who uses bulky trash day, and why.
Charles Pagter, a retiree, was out loading his battered red pickup with bikes, toys, and small items of furniture, all of which he planned to fix and then donate to his church or the YMCA. “There’s a lot of good stuff being thrown out,” he says, pointing at the truck’s bed, which was overflowing with tables missing a leg, bikes missing a seat, or otherwise nice rugs with a mysterious stain. Even though Pagter wasn’t working through official channels, local charities would benefit from his finds.
One street over, Albany resident Bonnie Sugg was walking Emily, her three-month-old daughter, when she spotted a few things she could use. She loaded the roof of the stroller high with carpet pads she planned to use for attic insulation, and hefted a wooden kitchen chair over each shoulder. For Sugg, bulky trash day is a bit of fun neighborly bonding and a chance to save a few bucks. “I love it, it’s great,” she says. “It’s those odds and ends you would put in your garage or backyard, and if it gets broken — oh, well.”
As the new mother made her way down the street, wobbling a bit under the load, Ray Lingo rounded the corner in a tiny red car weighted down with found items. Lingo is a disabled vet with wild gray hair who lives in an RV and uses what he finds in the trash to supplement his income. He figures about half of what he’s picked up he’ll sell at the flea market where he also sells athletic jerseys. The other half he’ll keep for himself or friends in need. “I’m on disability and I can’t get work every day,” he says. “I need the extra money and I’m not going to lay down and die, so I’m out selling these jerseys and whatever I can find out here.” He’s generous with his finds, too. The blankets are for homeless friends: “I know a lot of guys who live in the bushes,” he adds. The portable toilet, Lingo says, is for a friend at his RV park who lacks bath facilities, and the plastic dinosaurs are for another friend who lives in a converted bus and likes to glue creatures to the hood.
Most of what Lingo keeps for himself he chooses for its likelihood of bringing him more work. He’ll keep one of the three rotary mowers he found because he thinks he can pick up some extra cash doing yard work; the other two he’ll sell. His top find of the day: a collapsible metal clothing rack for displaying his jerseys at the flea market. It’s getting harder, he says, to find which neighborhoods are having a trash setout. Still, he doesn’t blame the cities for changing the process — he agrees that some scavengers were getting out of control. “Certain people who pick trash were uncool about it,” he says, “so people started to get a negative attitude. Now people don’t tell you when it’s going to be.”
The new system will make his life harder, but Lingo has decided to roll with the punches. “To be honest, I don’t trip on it,” he says. “If I see the stuff out I take advantage of it, and if I don’t, I go on Craigslist.”
But the Internet just won’t do for other veteran trash-hunters. “Bulk trash day will be sorely missed by people who are found artists,” says Shoshana Berger, editor of ReadyMade, a Berkeley-based magazine that encourages its followers to find creative uses for household items that would otherwise end up at the dump. “The readymaker has an eye to see the unrealized gem in that everyday object that gets kicked to the curb,” she adds.
The magazine’s latest issue, for instance, has instructions for turning old box springs into wine racks, detergent bottles into chandeliers, and plastic trash bins into elegant chairs. It’s no surprise such a magazine would arise from the Bay Area, which Berger calls “the mecca of reuse.” And although the editor acknowledges the difficulties caused by big-time scavengers, she says people hunting for art supplies or home-improvement materials shouldn’t be the ones punished. The real concern, she says, is that residents generate too much trash to begin with. “I think the problem with these things is that they’re extremely hard for municipalities to manage because we’ve come into a day and age where people see everything as disposable,” she says. “People build obsolescence into products on a two- or three-year basis — it’s a way to keep the companies’ profits flush, but it doesn’t do much for the planet.”
That’s a critique shared by Oakland artist Erik Groff, whose art depends on scavenging. “There’s a major situation that I try to communicate about the crisis of overproduction … the thing that makes it so that it’s easier for you to throw something away than take the time to fix it,” he says. Groff’s most recent installation, “Ambush Alert,” at Oakland’s Buzz Gallery, was made entirely from West Oakland trash. His budget for the project: $7. As a comment on the sort of rudimentary bomb-making employed in revolutionary struggles, Groff turned old cell phones, garage door openers, paint cans, and briefcases into mock incendiary devices with mysterious wires ominously extruding from them. He also built elaborate, colorful cityscape murals into old dresser drawers, each constructed from street finds such as liquor bottles, toy cars, and candy boxes. Groff’s signature touch is to build a lollipop into each finished piece — it’s bound to eventually ooze, reminding buyers that their purchase is, after all, just junk. “The paradox of buying back some of their own trash might even have a little Marxist flavor in it,” he says.
Groff’s work puts him into close contact with an extremely competitive subculture populated primarily by homeless people and others whose livelihoods depend on trash, curbside recycling, and even messes left by illegal dumpers. “It’s like seagulls feeding,” he says of the reaction on the street to a particularly good-looking pile. His take on the tension between charities and scavengers is that the nonprofits should cede the trash to the people collecting it on the street, and that people driven to garbage hunting shouldn’t be penalized. “It’s the nature of the capitalist class-war machine to try to criminalize basic means of subsistence,” he says. If it’s on the street, he says, it’s fair game.
If Groff’s work is intended to suggest a paradox, here’s another to consider: Garbage is so scarce it encourages fierce competition, yet at the same time, there’s still far too much of it. Levitsky fears the recent trend toward appointment-based pickup will result in more trash slipping away from reuse opportunities. After all, she says, having to schedule by phone will dampen community participation. “It’s so much easier to just go into your garage and pull it all out and put it on the curb,” she says.
Indeed, employees of several local cities say they expect the new system will be slow to catch on, and some of them think that’s great because it will lessen the load for their garbage haulers. Since San Leandro went to appointment-only pickups three years ago, use of its new program has been light, and the city’s hauler has been happy, reports Jennifer Auletta, a recycling specialist with the city. “Only about 5 to 10 percent of residents know about and regularly use on-call service, so from a garbage company’s perspective it’s much easier,” she says. “The labor cost is lower, and obviously if you have fewer people participating the disposal cost is lower, too.”
But San Leandro’s program got off to a bumpy start when some city councilmembers began pressuring city staff to go back to the old system. The city leaders feared that without neighborhood-wide pickups, people would simply leave their trash out in public where it would become blight. City staffers argued that the old way was too expensive and logistically difficult. A compromise struck this summer calls for a “neighborhood cleanup day” on which residents are encouraged to drop off their large items at transfer stations free of charge. However, that program is an expense for the city, Auletta says, and its future is uncertain.
Nobody disputes that an appointment-based system makes bulky trash pickup more efficient. Residents are asked what kind of items they intend to discard, which allows the city to send out the appropriate collection trucks. Some environmentalists have embraced on-call pickups, arguing that having residents presort their discards and letting them recycle a wider variety of items will ultimately benefit the environment. “What we recyclers have always wanted residents to do is think about what they’re throwing away, and this will give them an opportunity to do that,” says the Ecology Center’s Dave Williamson.
So if trash hunting becomes too tough in Alameda County, will the scavengers simply swarm to Contra Costa? It’s hard to predict. John Ryan already deals with some of their messes and has even called the cops to report license plate numbers, yet so far his donations program is taking in so much worthwhile material that scavenging isn’t significantly undercutting it. In fact, most of the current scavenging, like most of the trash, seems to have an affluent Contra Costa flavor. As Ryan’s truck chugs up the hill, he points as a man in chinos and a dress shirt pops out of his SUV, inspects a picnic table left out on the curb, and then carefully begins rolling it down the hill, presumably toward his own yard. On the other side of the street, Orinda resident Malia Martin comes out to greet Ryan and eagerly tells him about the well-dressed woman in an SUV she saw rooting through her donations that morning. “She missed the bag of the really good stuff,” she says. “I had a bag with a fur stole and silk blouses, and I think it’s still in there.”
But how long can it be before the big-league guys target a county where people leave fur stoles on the curb? Levitsky ponders that for a moment. “I think it probably will not happen,” she says. “It’s very, very regulated up here. I don’t think people hesitate for one moment to call the police. They take down license numbers. They’re home a lot, they’re retired, you can see them all coming out and looking.” While personally making rounds for the depot, Levitsky has been stopped by homeowners who demanded to know what she was doing with their belongings. As have Pacific Rim crewmembers, despite the company’s logo emblazoned on their trucks and bright orange shirts.
So far there has been minimal conflict between Contra Costa’s reuse program and its street-level rivals — residents have so enthusiastically embraced the program that there’s been plenty of quality trash to go around. If the vigilance of Contra Costa residents ends up saving their bulky trash days, the depot’s program may continue indefinitely, sending desperately needed materials to charities around the world, and sparing tons of would-be junk from the landfill.
If not, history has a way of sending things to the trash heap.
