Recycling Center Proposed at Egg City

An Oxnard company hopes to open a recycling center at the former Egg City, where 3 million chickens once roosted, laid eggs and left a stink that offended noses from Moorpark to Fillmore.

M Maintenance Construction Clean-Up has applied to Ventura County for permission to use 14 of Egg City’s 208 acres near Grimes Canyon to recycle construction debris collected around east Ventura County, said Joseph Reisdorf, a spokesman for the company.

The company would lease the land from Okura & Co., the Japanese firm that took over the troubled Egg City in 1992.

Officials at Embly Ranch, the El Cajon firm that maintained the flock of chickens left after Egg City changed hands, could not be reached Wednesday for comment.

M Maintenance plans to accept no more than 50 truckloads of construction debris per day into the recycling facility and separate it on the concrete slabs that once supported Egg City’s vast henhouses on the north side of the property near Grimes Canyon Road in Moorpark, Reisdorf said.

Workers would cut scrap lumber to usable lengths. They would bundle up used cardboard and metal straps for recycling. And they would crush concrete and bricks to be sold as road surfacing material. The center would refuse to accept demolition debris, liquids, hazardous material or asbestos, Reisdorf said.

“It’ll help keep a lot of the materials out of the landfills,” said Reisdorf, an environmental consultant working with M Maintenance owner Sal Plascencia.

California law requires all cities to recycle at least 50% of their trash by 2000, and any material recycled at the M Maintenance site would count toward that total, Reisdorf said. “A new area for them to tackle will be construction debris, particularly if they have a lot of home building going on,” he said.