IRVINE : Recycling Center at UCI Will Close

The UCI Recycling Center, opened by students in 1976 to promote recycling at the university and encourage recycling plans in neighboring communities, will close Friday.

In some ways, the center had become a victim of its own success, said Jose Solorio, president of UC Irvine’s Associated Students. Since the center opened, recycling has become commonplace among neighboring cities. With the glut of recyclable material hitting the market, Solorio said, the price paid by brokers to the center has dropped drastically and would have led to a huge deficit this year, he said.

If the students were to continue operating the center, the yearly subsidy would have to be increased from $6,486 last year to about $37,000, Solorio said. Student leaders decided last month that the cost wasn’t worth keeping the center open and set the Jan. 17 closing date.

The closure of the recycling center will mean that area residents recycling such materials as telephone books, catalogues and bulk-mail circulars will have to go to the Orange Coast College Recycling Center, the last place in Orange County to take such materials, said Henry Wieler, director of the UCI Recycling Center.

The center loses money by recycling those materials, Wieler said. Brokers usually don’t pay for them--they pick them up as a service, he said.

But at least the material has been recycled instead of dumped in a county landfill, Wieler said. The UCI recycling center collects about 11 tons of junk mail and catalogues a week.

“From now on, that will be exclusively going to the landfill” unless donors make the trip to Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Wieler said. “The impact is not just on the university, but on the community also.”

The decision to close the center resulted in the layoffs of Wieler and his full-time assistant, although Wieler said he was able to find a lower-paid position in another university department. His assistant is still looking for a job, he said.

“Looking from one point of view, it’s tragic that we have to let the center go,” Solorio said. “It was a very worthwhile center. But overall, it’s a positive thing because we as students of UCI met the goals for the center--to have the university, the city, the state and the nation be more aware of recycling and implement some socially responsible recycling standards. The need for the recycling center is dwindling.”

The state has passed laws mandating that every city reduce the quantity of trash it sends to landfills by 25% by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000. With those mandates, cities are rushing to set up programs to separate recyclable materials from weekly trash pickups and expand curbside recycling.

The state’s deposit law for beverage cans and bottles also has hurt recycling centers because people can get more money through returning cans for deposits rather than bringing them to recycling centers, Wieler said.

The Orange Coast College Recycling Center became a state-certified recycling center, which allows it to refund bottle deposits and still make a profit, said Michael Carey, the recycling coordinator at Orange Coast. Being a state recycling center has helped make up for the losses the center faces by accepting catalogues and junk mail flyers, for which the center often has to pay to have recycled, Carey said.