Reuse for Refuse : ‘Salvatologist’ Scours Landfill, Sells Recycled Items to Poor

Mike Atkinson, 29, of Costa Mesa is a refreshingly happy young man who pays Orange County about $10,000 a year for a permit to work as what he laughingly calls a salvatologist.

Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, Atkinson salvages and recycles the things people throw away at the county’s Prima Deshecha Sanitary Landfill in the hills east of San Juan Capistrano.

Most of the items he collects are sold, very cheaply, at swap meets in Calexico on the Mexican border, where many impoverished Mexicans cross over to shop.

Once in a while, he hits real pay dirt, like the time he found a full set of sterling silverware and another time when he discovered a $15,000 cashier’s check and collected a $300 reward.

Not a Flattering Picture

Such instances certainly helped pay his $200 weekly county fee and support his wife and four sons (he clears about $500 a week), but the job has also given him an impression of much of modern day society that is not altogether flattering.

“So many people are too lazy or too careless to fix a perfectly good bicycle or a nice big aluminium pot with a dent in it, so they throw it away and get a new one,” Atkinson said. “Or maybe they take their affluence for granted and don’t realize how lucky they are.

“To me, it just feels good, the best part of my work, to know that I can provide something for poor people, like a mattress for $3, that they wouldn’t be able to afford otherwise.”

Prima Deshecha, at 1,600 acres, is the largest of the four county-operated landfills. The others are Olinda in Brea, 550 acres; Santiago Canyon in Orange, 350 acres, and Coyote Canyon in Irvine, 550 acres. The Coyote site will soon be closed and replaced by a new landfill in Bee Canyon just north of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, according to Frank Bowerman, director of the county’s waste management program.

Operations manager Mike Giancola said that several other people, usually one per landfill, hold permits to recover and recycle cast-off items, but they pay higher fees than Atkinson--as much as $400 a week--for the privilege. He said the reason for the difference is that the other landfills are close to more densely populated communities and thus receive more recoverable materials from garages and back yards.

Bowerman said the “salvaging program is a worthwhile operation in that it recycles so much material instead of having it buried.” It represents a big step in the state’s move to promote recycling of aluminum, glass and other materials, he added. Permit fees are added to the general funds that help pay for landfill operations.

Atkinson collects an amazing variety of stuff--motorcycles, television sets, washers and dryers, clothing, mattresses, cardboard, wooden planks, small boats.

He has a deal with a television repair man: “I take him two older sets I find here. He fixes them both, keeps one and gives me one good one to sell. I also have a guy who takes old mattresses--we get scores of them--and he rebuilds and sterilizes them and I sell them, sometimes for as little as $3, and somebody has something to sleep on.”

Just the other day, he pointed to a burned-out skiff with a slightly damaged outboard engine that someone had thrown away.

“I can get the engine fixed,” he said, “and in a few days I’ll probably get a repairable boat to put it on. I get boats pretty often.”

That same day, a man drove up in a pickup truck with camper shell and was getting ready to unhook the shell and toss it away.

“It cost me about $500 when I got it, but now it has a little leak in the roof,” he said.

Atkinson took it.

“It’ll be a cinch to patch,” he said, then, thinking of the people who come across the border at Calexico, added: “Somebody could just put it on the ground and sleep under it.”

Atkinson, of medium build with an outgoing personality and seemingly boundless energy, uses a small cleared area in the landfill to store his findings until he is ready for his trips to Calexico in the Imperial Valley about twice a week, along with other trips to the Costa Mesa swap meet.

In his storage area were a child’s bicycle in workable and near spotless condition, heaps of aluminum strips from sliding glass doors, piles of mattresses and black plastic pots for potted plants. Some of the larger pots still had small trees in them.

“Look at that,” he said. “The trees just needed some care, but when they started to wilt, people threw them away. That one little lemon tree is doing fine, though, because I water it regularly. It’s getting new green leaves.”

Atkinson said he has been scavenging the landfill for 5 1/2 years and loves every minute of it. “Before I came here, I worked in a fast-food place back East. It got so bad that every morning I just hated the thought of going to work. But here, all out in the open, with fresh air--because they really do a good job of filling over the stuff that comes from garbage trucks--well, I can hardly wait to get to work everyday.”

He finds it a pleasant drive up La Pata Avenue off Ortega Highway, because the county has paved and landscaped the road that curves through the hills and offers an occasional glimpse of the ocean.

Picnic tables have been set up for workers, and in about 20 years, when the 1,600 acres have been filled and tamped down, waste management director Bowerman said, there’ll be room for at least two golf courses and maybe a regional park.

But that is in the future. Now, Atkinson is “picking up a little here and a little there, saving a little money, saving some good building materials for a home I might build, even though I’m not much at construction, and by doing it little by little, pretty soon I’ll have quite a lot.”

One part of his work he finds both fascinating and frustrating is trying to figure out the history of the collectibles.

“I didn’t even finish high school,” he said, “but I’m sort of starting to write a book. It’ll be all about the stuff I find here and maybe who it belonged to and why they threw it away.

“Like, a couple of years ago, a guy threw out a box full of stuff that he had cleaned out of his grandmother’s attic after she died.

“I went through the box and found some old, really old, family photographs, stuff that should be priceless to somebody. I tracked them down and found a daughter in the family and gave them to her, and she was just so excited.”