Recology Pursues Zero-Waste in Bay Area

Apollo News Service

San Francisco-based Recology is the national leader in helping American cities draw ever closer to becoming zero-waste communities. With the company’s guidance, San Francisco has achieved a recycling rate of 72 percent, the highest in the nation.

Recology, which until this spring was known as Norcal, has also been a boon to workers. When San Francisco donated the land now occupied by Recycle Central, Recology’s state-of-the art recycling center at Candlestick Point, the city required that any company bidding for the site recognize a union that signed up a majority of the workers. The winning company also needed to hire residents from three of the city’s most economically distressed neighborhoods, including those near Candlestick Point.

“When we built the recycling plant in a big shed on a city pier - in a separate location from our other facilities - we agreed that we would try to fill all of the positions with workers from two zip codes impacted by that location,” said Recology’s CEO, Mike Sangiacomo. Recology currently employs 2,100 workers, 80 percent of whom are unionized.

Recology also uses energy efficient vehicles to transport the materials it recycles and composts. Two years ago, Recology converted its entire fleet of 400 trucks to run on locally-produced B20 biodiesel fuel - which means 20 percent of the fuel comes from vegetable or corn oil. Sangiacomo said the next step for Recology is to work with next generation battery and truck manufacturers to enable its vehicles to run on electric motors.

The company’s trucks pick up recyclable and compostable material from approximately 2,100 restaurants and 75,000 homeowners in San Francisco, according to Waste News. Much of what they receive is already sorted, thanks to Recology’s grassroots efforts to promote recycling.

Color Coding Works

San Francisco residents get color-coded plastic bins affectionately known as the Fantastic Three. Recology provides a blue cart for paper, glass, plastics and metal; a green one for food and yard waste; and a black cart for landfill-bound waste. Recology was the first company in the nation to provide green bins citywide.

Food waste is transferred to long-haul vehicles that travel to one of the company’s two California composting facilities. Paper, plastic and hard materials are taken to Recycle Central.

The $38 million facility opened in 2003 and features conveyor belts capable of sorting and baling single-stream and co-mingled materials. Recology recycles 350 tons of yard and food waste and 750 tons of paper, plastic, and other household and industrial materials every day.

Worker-Friendly, Community-Friendly

Teamsters Local 350 organized the workers and negotiated one of the best labor contracts in the industry with Recology. The starting wage is $20 an hour, and maintenance worker John Andrews and others at his pay grade earn $29.50 an hour, with $42.81 per hour for overtime. Andrews, who lives in the nearby Hunters Point-Bayview neighborhood, began on the sorting line in 1999, handling garbage.

Employees start with one week of vacation per year and can build up to eight weeks of vacation after 30 years on the job. Recology provides quality health insurance for workers and their families- what Sangiacomo calls a “Cadillac plan.”

“This company has taken care of its people,” said Sangiacomo. “We’ve raised a tremendous amount of families and seen their kids grow into good people. A number have come back and now work for us.”

In terms of worker safety, the Recology facility is considered superior to most other recycling operations. Local business agent Larry Daugherty was quoted in Teamster Magazine as saying that Recycle Central is “definitely a state of the art facility- especially in comparison to many nonunion facilities I’ve seen. It is fully automated. The materials are presorted by machinery and it all goes up on belts, which makes it much safer because the workers can see everything that goes up instead of just reaching blindly into a pile.” And unlike many other recycling sites, Teamster workers at Recology get high-quality protective gear.

Another sign of Recology’s devotion to the local community is its artist-in-residence program, which the company has sponsored since 1990. During a four-month residency, local artists receive a stipend and access to a well-equipped studio. They create works out of trash and recycled material and display them at Recology’s headquarters. Sangiacomo estimates that more than 70 professional artists and several hundred student artists from the San Francisco Art Institute have benefitted from this innovative program.

Rise of Recycling

Mike Sangiacomo’s story parallels the rise of recycling in San Francisco. When he was young, Sangiacomo accompanied his Italian-born father on a garbage collection route through San Francisco’s famed Chinatown. The work was dirty, salaries were paltry, and people often didn’t pay their garbage bills.

Jobs collecting San Francisco’s garbage and recyclables have traditionally been filled by immigrants. Sangiacomo remembers the days when scavenger companies comprised mostly of immigrants would scour the city’s streets for anything they could sell or reuse.

“Not only did they collect paper and cardboard, newspaper and office paper, they collected bottles and actually washed them and resold them,” Sangiacomo recalls. “(Companies like Sunset Scavenger) had a rag-washing plant, before the days of synthetic fibers. They had a crew of Russian immigrant women who would cut off buttons, size pieces, wash them, bleach them, and then sell everything from wiping rags to Turkish towels.”

When people realized that garbage landfills were harmful to the environment, the recycling movement began to regain momentum - not just as a way of reducing costs, but to protect the environment. Twenty years ago, Norcal established a curbside recycling program in San Francisco. More and more communities recognized the benefits of recovering materials and putting them back into reuse.

In 1990, California initiated an ambitious law calling for 25-percent waste diversion by 1995 and 50 percent by 2000. But as the millennium approached, Norcal found itself stuck at around 35 percent, in an industrial urban environment that didn’t produce much clean waste.

“Between yard waste, paper, bottles and cans, most communities can get to 50 percent,” said Sangiacomo, who became CEO in 1991. “We couldn’t. So we started looking at what could help us get there.

“What could we do with food? The only thing we could think of was to compost it.”

Norcal learned how to establish an industrial-scale food-waste composting system almost from scratch. At the request of then-Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, Norcal visited restaurants, produce markets, and grocery stores and established a successful composting program in the East Bay that recovered nearly 100 percent of food waste.

Future Growth

Today, Recology is the largest employee-owned company in the solid waste industry, and a key player behind the city’s push toward zero-waste.

Recology provides waste management services to more than 570,000 residential and 55,000 commercial customers in California, mostly in the Bay Area. The company collects and processes garbage in more than 50 California communities and is currently the 13th largest waste management firm in the United States.

The company is still expanding, with the acquisition of two Oregon composting companies in Portland and Salem and a contract to provide collection services for much of San Mateo County in 2011. According to Sangiacomo, Recology’s annual revenues, which now total half a billion dollars, have increased by 7-8 percent annually over the last five years.

“Most of the work we do is with franchises or municipalities,” says Sangiacomo. “That growth can come in decent-sized chunks. We don’t go out and get a new customer at a time. We go out and get a new city at a time.”

Jacob Wheeler, a writer based in Chicago, is a regular contributor to the Apollo News Service.