Oxnard Plans to Start Recycling Program for Apartments, Small Firms

Oxnard city officials in September plan to start the next phase in a program aimed at encouraging recycling citywide and meeting new state mandates for reducing trash.

The city already has a recycling program for single-family homes, but will expand the program to include all of the city’s apartment complexes and small businesses by June of next year.

The goal of the plan is to cut Oxnard’s waste by 25% in the next two years, said John Zaragoza, the city’s refuse superintendent.

The city has collected nearly 5,000 tons of recycled waste this year from single-family homes, Zaragoza said, adding, “We hope to double that by turning to apartments and commercial establishments.”

Bringing recycling to apartments and local businesses will cost the city $200,000 a year, Zaragoza said. As a result, the city will charge apartments to pick up recyclable materials.

But, he said, the fee will be half of what the city charges for regular trash disposal. Fees for apartments and businesses will vary depending on the number of pickups and the amount of trash, he added.

Businesses will pay about $42 per dumpster, which is also half the monthly fee for trash collection, he said.

Managers of an Oxnard apartment building with 120 occupants, for example, have been notified that they will be charged about $118 a month, or about $1 per resident.

Zaragoza said the chance to cut trash bills may be an incentive for most apartment managers to recycle.

But the new fees surprised Shelby Savage, assistant manager of Anacapa Isle Apartments.

Her complex was part of a yearlong pilot program in which the city picked up the apartment’s recycled goods for free.

“I was totally surprised when they said we were going to be charged,” Savage said. “We felt like we were doing the city a favor, that we were doing something good for the community.”

Sal Gonzalez, Oxnard’s director of public housing, said he did not expect the city to provide recycling services for free, but was dismayed by the rates.

“For our operation, we don’t have the ability to raise rents to pay for something like that,” Gonzalez said. “We want to be involved in a recycling program. We think it’s a good thing. We’ll just have to sit down and discuss the details.”

Savage said she was surprised by the prices because she thought that the city made money from recycled goods.

But Richard Woods, a manager at Gold Coast Recycling in Ventura, where Oxnard recycles tin, aluminum, plastic, glass and newspapers, said it costs the city slightly more to recycle than to dispose of the waste in a landfill.

“They pay us to dump the materials, and we give them a percentage once we are able to sell them on the open market,” Woods said. The net result is that the city pays more than it receives for the recyclables, he said.

The incentive for the program comes from state legislation that requires cities to reduce their waste 25% by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000. Zaragoza said that with the involvement of apartments and small businesses, he expects to reduce waste by about 18%.

The remainder of the 25% “will come from a host of programs we have in the works,” he said. They include taking recycling to larger industries and introducing composting of organic waste.

“I think this kind of program will be a good thing for the city,” said Pat Caviness, who manages a downtown Oxnard apartment building.

“Until we start doing it, we won’t know the glitches we’re going to run into,” she said. “I think most people would be willing to pay a little extra for something like this.”