on the cover / By Ryan Burns

Redemption Value

As the county takes recycling to the next level, will it toss out the group that started it all?

(June 17, 2010) Used to be only hippies recycled. Back in 1971, when a ragtag crew of AmeriCorps volunteers and conscientious objectors (including current Assemblyman Wes Chesbro) launched the Arcata Community Recycling Center, hauling in your empties was like another form of protest — a rejection of America’s wastefulness and imperialism. Buoyed by the inaugural Earth Day in 1970, recycling showed that you were part of the small but growing community of those who got it.

In the nearly 40 years since, recycling has been systematically mainstreamed and streamlined. No longer do residents of Eureka and Arcata need to schlep and sort their containers, tossing green glass into this bin, brown into that one, number one plastics over here, cardboard over there and CRV bottles on the scale for some deeply satisfying redemption scratch. With the advent of mandatory curbside service in Eureka and Arcata — and voluntary curbside expanding to unincorporated areas — recycling is becoming nearly as simple (and impersonal) as taking out the garbage. Which is no coincidence: It’s the garbage companies doing the pickup.

A truck owned by Recology Humboldt County, which operates Eureka’s curbside recycling service, lifts a 96-gallon bin with its mechanized arm. PHOTO BY RYAN BURNS.

GALLERY >

Such is the case across the country. As the environmental movement wended its way into legislation, governments began implementing incentives and mandates for waste diversion, like AB 939, California’s Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989, which established solid waste diversion goals — 25 percent diversion from landfills by 1995, 50 percent by 2000. It was through such laws that recycling began its transformation from altruistic practice of the conscientious few to government-funded industry. Community recycling centers like ACRC were soon bidding on municipal contracts worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and garbage companies — whose reputations for thuggery were as established as their truck routes — took notice. By the mid-1980s they’d begun taking over the fledgling industry. Turned out, their model of curbside pickup and established shipping networks proved cheaper, more efficient and popular — not to mention environmentally friendly — than the community center model, which required diligence, know-how and car trips from each and every participant.

“By the ‘90s, nonprofits were all but dead,” ACRC Executive Director Mark Loughmiller said recently from his office, a cabin-like room adorned with salvaged baubles and a recycled door-turned-amateur-mural. ACRC is now the oldest continually operating nonprofit recycling center in the country, though Loughmiller said the competition has gotten slim: “There’s only about six of us left.” Like so many proud, beer-and-soda-stained brethren before it, ACRC, the pioneer of local recycling, now stands on the precipice of extinction. Why? The explanation begins with the recession.

Not long after ACRC finished constructing an $8.1 million state-of-the-art processing facility on the Samoa Peninsula (in September 2007), the nation’s economy fell into the trash bin. In a few short months, starting in late 2008, the average value for recycled commodities plummeted from around $145 per ton to just $18 per ton. Simultaneously, credit markets froze and interest rates skyrocketed. ACRC’s monthly payments on the $5.75 million bond it had used to finance the plant shot from $15,000 to $70,000. Hemorrhaging money, ACRC slashed its budget by 40 percent — laying off staff, reducing hours of operation and cutting managers’ salaries by 15 percent. It wasn’t enough. Throughout 2009, ACRC continued to bleed money.

And so this year, ACRC did something it had never done before: charge money for recyclables dropped off in Samoa — a $60 tipping fee per ton of material. Members of the Humboldt Waste Management Authority, which represents the county and most of its cities (all customers of ACRC), were dubious. The way they saw it, no one asked ACRC to build that massive processing plant, yet here they were being forced to foot the bill. This was their perception, at any rate.

Disgruntled, HWMA’s board — comprised of elected officials from the county and constituent cities — began looking into their options, and it turns out they have a few. Other agencies are willing to take the recycled material for free — or even pay for it. ACRC, which has been the face of county recycling for nearly four decades, is now facing the distinct possibility of losing most or all of its major customers, a development that would almost certainly spell bankruptcy for the nonprofit institution.

By lunchtime at the Samoa processing facility, a crunchy layer of glass grit has settled on the concrete beneath the sorting cages. Within the corrugated metal walls of the 38,800-square-foot hangar, olfactory eddies of beer hops, corn syrup, bleach and countless mystery odors swirl, stirred by the ocean breeze that drifts in through the roll-up doors at either end. The pair of doors on the south wall sits in a temporary valley, which gets recreated daily between two repeatedly forming mountains — one made of plastic containers, the other of paper and cardboard. (Hillocks of glass, much of it shattered, lie in other corners.)

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