County Materials Exchange Is a Sort of Swap Meet for Trash

Today’s shopping list: milk, carrots, toothpaste, hot tar crack sealant, dirt, broken plastic nursery containers and asphalt.

Any market should be stocked with plenty of the first three items, but for the remainder, savvy shoppers should check out the Ventura County Materials Exchange, a program run by the county’s Solid Waste Management Department.

Through the agency’s quarterly “Discards Available & Wanted” classified ad listing, local business owners and individuals make available scrap, surplus items and other materials no longer of use to them. Rather than dispose of the items, the suppliers offer them at no or low cost to anyone interested.

On the other end of the ledger, nonprofit organizations, schools and individuals place ads requesting the trash of others.

“Our goal is to divert valuable discards, primarily from businesses, to users who want them, which often ends up being nonprofits, schools and even other businesses,” said Lorraine Timmons, coordinator of the recycling program. “We get really large businesses and really small ones. The material ranges from manure to computers.”

The winter edition of the free listings includes offers for 500 tons of concrete, about 1,000 galvanized 10-foot gutters, 1,000 five-gallon buckets, picture-frame glass, a dumpster-load of foam and polyester laminate, and light gray latex paint.

“We run across a lot of businesses that have things they don’t need any longer--either things that were made wrong, ordered incorrectly, maybe they remodeled and have stuff stored in the back of the building,” Timmons said. “This offers them an opportunity to give it to an organization that can really use it. Often it can be considered a donation or a tax write-off.”

OST Trucks and Cranes in Ventura began advertising materials in the exchange newsletter three months ago. In the latest listing, the operation is trying to unload about 80 3 1/2-by-12-foot reinforced fiberglass panels removed from the roof of Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara.

Don Zermeno, co-owner of OST, said that along with the recycling benefits, moving the materials on to another user can be a big money-saver. At $100 per ton in dumping fees, getting rid of the hospital panels would have cost OST several hundred dollars.

“A lot of the stuff we end up with is what they call ‘hard to handle’ at the dump and it’s very expensive to get rid of,” he said. “We have gotten a few calls for the panels from a school district and some individuals. Somebody was going to use them for shoring up a creek.”

Russ Garcia, general manager in charge of production at Coastal Multichrome, would like to see similar interest in the 500 pounds of glass beads he wants to unload. The Oxnard plating shop uses the beads for blasting work, until they wear down almost to a powder.

“Sometimes there are metals in it and we can’t put it in the trash,” Garcia said. “We save it and ask people if they want to use it for decorations or something. People can use it for making little scenes--they can use it to look like dirt.”

So far Garcia has had no takers. But he’s optimistic.

“Somebody has got to use it someday,” he said.

The county program is modeled after a statewide exchange founded in 1992 by the California Integrated Waste Management Board.

“The state has encouraged local governments to do local programs,” Timmons said. “There are a handful of local exchanges, and on the Internet you can find lots of materials exchanges--industrial exchanges, hazardous materials exchanges. It’s all to keep usable, valuable discards out of the landfill.”