Find Out How a $3.5 Million Processing Plant and a Bunch of Worms Are Keys to SLO County’s Impressive Recycling Record

BY JEN STEVENSON

It’s a sunny Monday morning, and the Cold Canyon Landfill is a popular place to be. A long line of assorted pickup trucks snakes out almost to Highway 227, filled with an odd assortment of broken couches, musty nail-speared boards, dead branches, and brush clippings.

With a raucous burst of acceleration, a huge, dirty white truck marked with the San Luis Obispo Garbage Co. insignia thunders through the turn lane and up into line. The driver, his bright orange shirt and shiny sunglasses visible through the window, chews gum obsessively as he tries to squeeze past the line. Right behind him, three more trucks hurtle down Highway 227, headed for their drop-off point–the brand-new Cold Canyon Processing Plant.

From a distance the fledging plant sports a drab outer shell, reminiscent of a large, cavernous aircraft hangar–the inspiration for its design. But inside the plant sports veins of green gold, so to speak, where it's diverting precious recyclables away from the garbage-sodden landfill and into the hands of companies that will reuse them.

Only 21 days into full operation, this plant–which replaced the old Tank Farm Road Processing Plant–is already changing the face of recycling on the Central Coast.

Inside its unremarkable metal shell 1,600 tons of goods are recycled every month–more than 50 tons a day–and shipped to domestic companies as well as the far corners of the Earth.

Besides its hefty capacity, this new plant has also been designed so that recyclables that pass through its doors need not be presorted, an enormous improvement that both encourages recycling because it's easier and makes for a more streamlined process at the plant.

From its massive front doors you can see its festering cousin, the Cold Canyon Landfill, with its stinking piles of rotting discards, 80 acres of San Luis Obispo County garbage, a beacon for the flocks of ecstatically circling seagulls that feast on its dying sludge.

But unlike its sedentary relative, within the Cold Canyon Processing Plant there is life. Upon entering, the noise is nearly deafening, a boisterous combination of the large sorting machine, the forklifts and balers, and the huge trucks that come in, dump their loads with a clatter, and roar off again.

Recycling has never been this much fun.

Inside, it’s still impossible to escape the sickly sweet smell of refuse, the odors of rancid milk left in the bottom of cartons, decaying bits of food clinging to tin cans, mildewing junk mail and newspapers. The smells emanate from a colossal pile of recyclables that sits crookedly on the floor of the plant, waiting to be bulldozed onto a sunken conveyor belt and transported up to be sorted.

It is a colorful mass of every discarded commodity imaginable, from empty Tide containers and wine bottles to junk coupons and glossy Victoria’s Secret catalogs. A David Blakely for Supervisor sign shimmies past on the conveyor, topped with a salad dressing bottle

Looming to the left of the pile is the centerpiece of this operation–the sorting machine, a crazy contraption sporting a metal bridge 40 feet above the cement floor that sits atop a row of steel cages that hold the various classes of recyclables.

Up a narrow flight of stairs, standing on top of the bridge, are two rows of sorters in bright yellow hard hats and earplugs, 24 in all. They stand at their stations, and as the recyclables are noisily sucked from the pile below and sped past them on a wide conveyor belt they expertly grab and sort the mass by fiber and material, throwing everything down metal chutes into the bins below.

At the end of the line, somehow, miraculously, what was a jumbled mess has become a mere scattering of broken glass, cans, and miscellaneous items that cannot be recycled and therefore must be doomed to a small garbage heap.

As these lingering bits and pieces pass under a low metal bridge over the conveyor belt, suddenly the cans are lifted into the air, twirling and flying frantically as though caught in a small tornado. In a flash they are simply gone, sucked up magnetically onto a speeding magnetic strip running perpendicular under the small bridge. They are released into a bin automatically, and not one escapes the magnetic clutch.

Toward the end of the bridge comes the sound of a huge, out-of-control party as bottles are sorted by color–clear, amber, and green–and hurled into special containers below. Most break on impact, but lying atop the heap is a perfectly preserved wine bottle bearing the bright yellow and purple Tobin James label.

The huge bins below slowly fill, and when their time comes the metal gate rises and their bounty is thrust onto yet another conveyor belt, one which slowly carries it toward a cramped fate.

Two-liter bottles are currently the specialty of the hour and they trickle slowly up the belt, their various labels making a collage of colors that catch the light. They pass through the blue baling machine, where they are completely crushed and compacted into huge, dense cubes of plastic that are set aside until they are to be picked up and sent away to a buyer.

Watching over all this din and commotion is this amazing operation’s greatest fan, John Ryan, the plant’s general manager. Since 1994 Ryan has planned and nurtured this state-of-the-art processing plant, molding it into a model of efficiency, a system that is ahead of its time and completely equipped to handle the recycling needs of most of SLO County for a long time.

Things are hectic for Ryan, as he transitions equipment, workers, and all operations from SLO Garbage’s old Tank Farm Road recycling facility into the new building.

Inside the facility’s soundproofed office only a slight hum can be heard from the factory outside its front windows. The smell of fresh paint lingers in the air, and the chairs are still covered in plastic. Outside a handyman screws cement blocks into the blacktop to mark parking spots. A messenger in the form a grizzled truck driver brings Ryan a pile of messages from the old facility, as the phones here won’t be hooked up for days.

But amid the ruckus Ryan is calm as he surveys his domain, his finely tuned pet project. Although his personality doesn't seem prone to undue excitement, he is clearly thrilled with how smoothly operations are going at the plant, and he shows off all its features and nuances with pride.

Sitting back on the heels of his brown boots, a glint in his eye behind the safety goggles, he surveys the operation.

"Pretty neat, huh?" he asks simply, effectively summing up the process.

On the right side of the plant, beside the office, a large room sits devoid of all furniture save a garbage can full of small hard hats–the education room. Every week busloads of schoolkids large and small are shipped out to the recycling plant and given a tour, a service funded and maintained by the county’s Integrated Waste Management Authority.

This is no ordinary field trip, Ryan says, but a learning experience that sparks changes in attitudes toward conservation.

"When I came here to work 10 years ago, there was a sizable annual budget for radio and television ads [to promote recycling]," he says. "I’m from an era where litter was combated by education, so I suggested we start a school to educate the children."

The effects of demonstrating the inner workings of recycling have been substantial, Ryan says.

"We ended up creating a bunch of little recycling cops," he explains with a smile. "They will lecture their parents if they throw a can in the garbage. It’s been one of the most successful programs started here."

While the education program targets youths in an effort to encourage good recycling habits early on, Ryan has nothing but good things to say about the general community as well.

"People are very concerned about recycling issues in this county," he says. "They participate. If we didn’t have participation, we’d have nothing."

And when you combine all the factors, Ryan says, success is an invariable result.

"We’ve got the resources, the participation, and now this facility, which is a huge tool," he says.

This "huge tool," which soon will speed up recycling production to 2,000 tons a month, or about 66 tons a day, is just one large addition to an already-thriving recycling scene in this county.

When AB 939, the Assembly bill that drew up the requirements for communities to divert 50 percent of their trash to recycling, was passed in 1989, San Luis Obispans had long been on the recycling radar screen.

In fact, San Luis Garbage Co. implemented the very first curbside recycling program in the country in 1976, according to company controller Tom Martin.

That year Rick Anthony, a Cal Poly student interning at San Luis Garbage, whom Martin jokingly refers to as a "recycling zealot," actually wrote and obtained the $10,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant that made the first curbside program possible.

While the program was well-received in San Luis Obispo, it took most communities in the county until the early ’90s to put their own recycling programs into effect, Martin says.

"It took other communities a while," he says. "You have to remember that prior to 1989 there wasn’t any mandate for recycling. It was more of a personal decision. Landfill rates were still relatively low back then, so there wasn’t an economic benefit to recycling; it was a personal benefit."

Martin, who has been with San Luis Garbage since 1988, a year before AB 939 was passed, says he was pleasantly surprised when the county met the mandate two years early.

"It was good news," he says. "I was a little surprised that we got there that quickly. I envisioned that it would be a little bit more of a struggle."

Martin credits the awareness of the community for SLO County’s success.

"The great majority of the people here are environmentally aware. There are a lot of people in the community that tend to be more involved as opposed to, say, Los Angeles, where people are involved in commuting," he says. "It’s truly different here, and that’s true of all the cities on the Central Coast–people are more environmentally tuned in."

Bill Worrell is a very environmentally tuned-in kind of guy, definitely in touch with his environmental side. That makes sense, considering he is the manager of the SLO County Integrated Waste Management Authority.

Worrell’s got his fingers in pretty much every recycling pie around the county, from the ordinary to the weird and wild. From curbside programs to bins full of garbage-munching worms, Worrell oversees it all.

On a sunny afternoon in downtown San Luis Obispo, Worrell is racing around the Integrated Waste Management Authority offices, working out the details of the IWMA’s contribution to downtown Earth Day festivities.

"Want to see our worm?" he asks enthusiastically, shortly thereafter producing a color printout of a the agency’s mascot, a fat little yellow worm dressed like a friar, in deference to the location of San Luis Obispo’s Earth Day events this year–Mission Plaza.

Worms are one of Worrell’s key topics today, specifically worms that inhabit compost bins. Last November, in hopes of encouraging yet another recycling venue, the IWMA purchased 1,200 worm bins–compost bins filled with earthworms that break down and process organic garbage scraps like melon rinds, breads, coffee grounds, and eggshells and turn them into nourishing mulch, which can then be used as a natural fertilizer.

Within a mere three hours of commencing its "Worm Sale," the IWMA sold out of worm bins and had to reorder more, says Worrell, who has a worm bin at home.

The bins, which are sold at cost for $39.95 through the IWMA and at such local venues as Farm Supply and the Bay Laurel Nursery, are stocked with local worms from a supplier in Avila Beach.

This novel approach to recycling is only one of the special programs the IWMA offers for enterprising recyclers.

There's a Christmas tree recycling program, a phone book recycling program, and a hazardous waste program. Habitat for Humanity, with the IWMA’s help, has started a program to take old wood and doors and reuse them. The Cold Canyon Processing Plant even offers businesses a confidential document destruction service, picking up special locked bins weekly and finely shredding the sensitive documents within before recycling them.

One of the most popular amenities, Worrell says, has been the oil recycling program. For those do-it-yourself oil changers, the IWMA has arranged for free curbside oil pickup when alerted a day ahead, and in place of the old oil and filter will leave a new oil-collection container and filter bag. In Atascadero, 20 percent of the residents with recycling service have signed up for the oil program, he says.

"We’ve got something for everyone!" says Worrell, beaming.

All these programs, both locally and statewide, are apparently making a difference.

While the statewide waste diversion rate is climbing rapidly, from 33 percent in 1998 to 37 percent in 1999, San Luis Obispo County is still well above average, diverting 50.3 percent of the trash from the landfill to recycling (only Paso Robles, which declined to join the IWMA, is not included in that total and diverts 28 percent).

"It marks quite an achievement" says Peck of the county’s accomplishment. "And we hope people don’t stop there. The important thing will be maintaining that level of participation and diversion." Æ

Jen Stevenson is a New Times staff writer.