Recyclers Suddenly in a High Cycle

Gary Petersen’s Santa Monica business address--No. 1 Recycle Way--is perfectly appropriate for a company that collects, separates and ships cans, bottles, paper and other household throwaways to processing mills. What the address doesn’t indicate is the current phenomenal success enjoyed by Petersen, who started in the recycling business 17 years ago with $2 (for gas) and a Volkswagen bus, from which he knocked on doors to solicit subscribers for his pickup service.

By the time Petersen’s company was bought last April--by Waste Management Inc., the largest waste-hauling company in the world--it was recycling 2,000 tons of material a month, and Petersen had helped design a cluster of buy-back centers, drop-off centers, curbside collections and other programs that make the City of Santa Monica’s recycling program one of the most comprehensive in the nation.

What’s more, at age 41, after going into recycling primarily because he believed in the cause, Petersen finds himself the seasoned veteran of a “career” whose practitioners are so in demand that supply can’t even begin to keep up with it.

Pricked by the sight of their own overflowing garbage, and suddenly aware of the need to reform the nation’s staggering yearly throwaway habit (approximately 150 million tons a year), private citizens and public officials are reconsidering recycling--or perhaps seriously considering it for the first time--as a solution to the garbage glut. In the process, help wanted ads and college catalogues list an expanding array of new jobs, many under the unglamorous designations of waste management or waste utilization.

“The field of recycling has just exploded in the last year,” said Petersen, whose company, Ecolo-Haul, had clients all over the nation. “It is incredible in putting people to work, both in blue- and white-collar areas.”

A national specialist, Neil Seldman, director of waste utilization at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Washington, reports that not only are the jobs mushrooming, but so is the pay. “Right now, I know of two solid waste recycling coordinators who are getting paid $50,000,” he said last week. “Three years ago, they were making less than $15,000.”

The cause of this spectacular acceleration? Essentially, Seldman said, it’s the problem of where to throw the trash--as the nation’s landfills slowly fill up, and new landfills and incinerators become increasingly difficult to develop. “Cities are spending a lot of money to keep materials outside the landfills and the way they do it is to hire recycling coordinators,” he said.

Not incidental to the growing problem, Seldman will be a speaker at an Aug. 6-8 recycling conference in Arcata, Calif., a woodsy town near the Oregon border. Titled “Preparing for the 1990s: A West Coast Summit,” the event is expected to attract about 400 participants, including state and local officials, who will spend three days immersed in workshops, legislative reports and action plans. And although this is the California Resource Recovery Assn.’s 13th annual conference, almost everyone agrees this one is special.

After years of preaching and practicing “recycle” while no one listened and cities continued to dump and burn their trash, seasoned recyclers show every sign of coming into their own.

Confirms Margaret Gainer of Arcata, a recycling consultant who is coordinating the conference: “The recycling ‘movement’ is now the recycling industry. It’s in the mainstream. There are a lot of new businesses starting up; there is a lot of entrepreneurship at work.

“If I were entering college today,” Gainer said, “I would look into an educational curriculum that would train me in waste utilization management. It’s a very future-oriented career.”

So new is the field, and so sudden the clamor for practitioners, that veteran recyclers--who often refer to themselves as “environmental economists”--usually have to explain what it is they do. As they patiently note, picking up the trash is only part of the equation. The recycling process is not complete until the recovered material has been made back into a new product and sold. The nuts and bolts of this recovery-reuse cycle is what Seldman’s Institute for Local Self-Reliance teaches when local governments and private businesses come to them seeking a way out of the landfill trap.

Explained Seldman: “We help them transform their garbage system into a recycling system, then help build factories to take the recycled materials and make new products out of them.”

He cited some examples: An Oakland factory that sterilizes wine bottles and re-sells them to the wine industry, a Fresno company that manufactures cellulose insulation from old newspapers, and a Minnesota plant that transforms old tires into industrial roofing, flooring and a whole variety of rubber products.

“We call that the ‘pot of gold at the end of the garbage rainbow,’ ” said Seldman. “That’s where the profits are.”

This optimistic outlook is a welcome turnaround, industry veterans say, mostly people in their early 40s who have been maintaining a tenuous hold at best on their careers. For the most part they are people, such as Petersen, who got into recycling because they loved the environment and were willing to work for next to nothing because they believed in what they were doing.

‘It’s Really Been a Struggle’

“I’ve been in this business for 17 years, and it’s really been a struggle,” said Dan Cotter, vice president and general manager of West Coast Salvage & Recycling Co. in San Francisco. Typically, he started on a shoestring, setting up a community recycling center in Arcata. “Recycling centers were an outgrowth of the first Earth Day in 1969. We were environmentalists, and all of us struggled very hard through the years.”

An early-day recycler not only drove the truck and kept the books, but also swept the floor and made the coffee, Cotter said. “It was hand to mouth. We called ourselves ‘recyclers,’ kind of coining the word. The people before us were in the salvage business, and before that the term used was junkman.”

His business has grown from 13 to 80 employees in the last two years, he said. “We were rediscovered, almost overnight, and pushed into prominence. There’s a tremendous demand for people, and very little expertise out there.”

That observation is repeated throughout the industry. “We’re conducting a massive talent search,” said Richard Gertman of R.W. Beck & Associates, an engineering and design consulting firm that works with cities across the country on utility projects.

Gertman is a materials recovery specialist, which is, in short, a recycler. He recently joined Beck’s San Jose office, working with California’s city, county and state government agencies designing projects that range from recycling plants to compost programs for the leaves, tree clippings, grass and shrubbery that make up a third of an average city’s residential waste.

“I’ve been in the field since 1970 (he started as a college student volunteer recycling newspapers) and a lot of things have been happening recently. There has been an explosion in state legislation--more than 2,000 bills have been introduced nationwide focused on the problem of solid waste. Clearly this creates a need for people,” Gertman said. But potential jobs spring from a wider area than just recycling, Gertman added.

Not only those with science and engineering backgrounds are needed, he said, but the field is looking for writers who can do public relations, for teachers to do curricula education guides, for sociologists to survey recycling data and psychologists to study recycling habits among other specialties. Marketing and sales of recycled products provide more employment opportunities.

“Something is happening in every area,” he said. “All across the country there are job openings and a new emphasis on recycling.”

“It was the garbage barge,” he added, that really raised our consciousness. The 1987 saga of the barge that left New York loaded with trash and spent six months at sea, being rejected by six states and three nations, dramatized the dwindling landfill situation in a unique way, he said.

“It brought attention to recycling--that was exciting in what it led to,” he added. That will be the theme of the August conference in Arcata. “We want to plan for the ‘90s, talk about the next generation,” said Richard Anthony, president of CRRA. Anthony is solid waste program manager for the County of San Diego, which has one of the nation’s most comprehensive programs.

A major issue, he said, will be developing incentives for both government and private companies to buy recycled products. “Recycling wasn’t even in the dictionary 20 years ago and today it’s one of our common buzzwords,” he said. “Our program was funded last August and I’m looking for a staff of 12, and can’t find people to do it. I’m going to advertise for three recycling specialists.

“I think it’s a great field to get into--a chance to understand how the Earth works.”

(Information about the Arcata conference is available at (707) 822-4448.)