Can Do : 1-Man Recycling Facility Fills Big Need in Tiny Piru

Oxnard has a new $25-million state-of-the-art recycling facility complete with elegant marble floors and bronze sculptures.

Piru has a new recycling facility as well, but it cost just $1,500 to establish on a patch of wind-blown dirt surrounded by a rickety fence behind an old gas station at the corner of Main Street and California 126.

Oxnard’s facility boasts a staff of 80 that processes 300 tons of recyclables a day.

Piru’s center is manned by a burly, bearded biker and former carny named Dave Spencer who reckons he handles 200 to 300 pounds of aluminum cans a week.

But in another respect, the impressively named Del Norte Regional Recycling and Transfer Station and the modestly titled Spencer’s Recycling Center are equals. Both are official, state-certified recycling facilities designed to reduce the amount of trash hauled to the dump.

Although the 40-year-old Spencer has operated his open-air recycling lot since mid-December, the facility has its grand opening today. The event will be marked by giveaways of such prizes as free refrigerator magnets, tire-pressure gauges and license-plate frames, and the visit from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. of a Ventura County oil recycling trailer.

It’s the first time the county has used the new $35,000-mobile oil-recycling trailer, which comes complete with a 500-gallon double-walled tank and a bathroom. A county representative will pay 16 cents a gallon for up to 20 gallons of used motor oil per person. Piru doesn’t have a gas station where do-it-yourself mechanics can take old oil.

“When we put this together I didn’t even have a job,” Spencer said Friday between drags of an unfiltered cigarette as he sat on a purple milk crate in his dusty lot. “I made this job.”

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His operation may be a for-profit business, but it also provides an important community service that did not previously exist.

Most residents of the poor, largely Latino community do not have a curbside recycling service. People were forced to travel to Fillmore or the Santa Clarita Valley to cash in their aluminum, plastic and glass containers.

“We need this here,” said Stephanie Acosta, president of the Piru Neighborhood Council. “There are lots of people who can use the extra money.”

A county study showed that a recycling center in Piru would be feasible, said David Goldstein, a county waste-management analyst.

“The fact is most people in the community of Piru had no convenient way to recycle until David Spencer developed the recycling center,” Goldstein said. “The real question isn’t how or what to recycle, the real question is where. If it’s not convenient, people won’t do it.”

To be sure, the demand for recycling hasn’t exactly overwhelmed Spencer. Indeed, exactly one customer arrived with bottles during a one-hour span Friday and that was a regular who lives next door. But Spencer doesn’t mind.

“That’s one of the reasons I like it out here; there’s not a whole lot of people and it’s quiet,” he said over country music blaring from a small radio as trucks thundered by on the nearby highway. “I know people who aren’t even out of bed yet.”

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But Spencer is usually out of bed to open the recycling center by 8 a.m. daily except Wednesdays. And even on his day off, he will trade cans for cash if he’s around.

His busy times are on the weekends when people cash in their cans to buy beer, and on Mondays and Tuesdays when people cash in their containers for money to get through the week.

Spencer isn’t getting rich off his endeavor and isn’t likely to, he concedes. But he makes enough money to eat, and plows the rest back into the business.

“I’m having a hard time believing I’m doing it myself,” the ex-Marine said with a gap-toothed grin. “But I’m enjoying it. I’m not just a bum anymore.”