Posted
Wednesday, December 5, 2007; 7:45 p.m.
Recycled Income
In the college town of Isla Vista, CA, a group of residents makes their living collecting and recycling aluminum cans.
By Stephanie Harnett
The University of Southern California
The numbers on the digital scale increase rhythmically; so does the anticipation at the grimy little recycling center. Eleven pounds. Twelve. Jose Gomez and Anna Ruiz*, two illegal immigrants whose names have been changed, wait for the final weight – the value of the cans they’ve brought to recycle. Thirteen pounds. Fourteen. In the late afternoon sun, the two perch at the edge of a plastic crate, smiling and wide-eyed. Fifteen pounds. Sixteen.
They hope to earn enough to
support themselves for another day here in Isla Vista, CA, a college town with a reputation for expensive housing, pervasive partying and a surplus of recyclable cans and bottles.
“$37.14”
From beneath the wide-brim of a well-worn straw hat Ruiz smiles. Gomez responds with an overly dramatic sigh of relief, then a hearty chuckle. It’s enough. Gomez and Ruiz have been working since 10:00 am for this small fortune. It’s nearly four o’clock now and the couple is that much closer to paying their rent. The two make a living collecting bottles and cans from the streets and trashcans of the town adjacent to the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Now Gomez is standing in line at Keg ‘n’ Bottle – the local liquor store – to redeem his day-long paycheck for cash. Just ahead of him in line, a gangly college student grips a 30-pack of Milwakee’s Best. That’s $1.50-worth of cans. At the entrance of the store, there’s a special on 12-packs of Corona Light. That’s 60 cents-worth of bottles. Behind the cashier is an awe-inspiring wall of glittering bottles of vodka, rum, tequila, whiskey, gin, brandy, and just about anything else a college student could thirst for. A twenty-foot library-style rolling ladder stands poised ready to assist the hurried cashier in reaching the top tiers.
Gomez smiles. He knows that the bottles will be bought off the shelves, emptied and discarded. They will, no doubt, end up in his hands, or those of the many other resident recyclers. It’s just a matter of time.
Most nights, a steady stream of student customers flow through the Keg ‘n’ Bottle liquor store, which sells alcohol until midnight. UCSB was ranked the #2 party school in the nation by Playboy magazine last year, and its annual Halloween celebration attracts thousands of college students from across the state.
“We always have a ton of bottles and cans when we have a party,” says Brianna Schultz, a junior at UCSB and an Isla Vista resident.
At a recent get-together, her beverage inventory included two 36-packs of beer and nine large, glass bottles of vodka and rum. That means Schultz paid $4.50 in California redemption value, or CRV, a deposit paid on recyclable beverage containers in California. Schultz said she hardly noticed the extra charge on her receipt.
When Jeremy Guy came to UCSB from Washington in 2002, he was astonished at the CRV program; there’s no such deposit in Washington. He was even more surprised to find a whole population of Isla Vista residents supporting itself on the CRV system.
As a student and resident of Isla Vista, Guy made a documentary about the recyclers. The film, Perspectives, follows the daily lives of three locals supporting themselves by recycling during the most difficult months to do so – December and January. Due to cold weather, rain and the absence of students during winter break, recyclers have a particularly hard struggle at this time of year.
As part of the documentary, Guy took up a challenge from one of his can-collecting subjects; for one week, Guy himself collected cans and lived off his income from recycling. He said he collected enough cans to get about seven dollars a day.
“It’s actually relatively easy to live off seven dollars a day for a week if you want to,” he says. “I didn’t eat very well. I figure if I really wanted to I could have made more money than that. I would quit as soon as I could. Basically, I ran into more issues of being seen by other students, being seen by people who were recycling and what that meant.”
The recyclers in Isla Vista are seen – and personally known – by many in the community, who call them variously scavengers, foragers, recyclers, homeless. But the people who know them best, the people who are bonded to them in a symbiotic relationship, are the men who operate the three local recycling centers.
“I know people doing this thing [recycling] for like three or four years,” said Rene Chavez from behind a folding plastic table, shaded by the upturned lid of the dumpster beside him. On the table lie only a simple calculator, a paper pad of receipts and a sign posted in Spanish and English with the exchange values for bottles and cans. $1.55 for a pound of aluminum cans. 89 cents for a pound of plastic bottles. 10.2 cents for a pound of glass. This folding table, the scale beside it and the dumpsters that line up behind him, already half filled, some with bottles and some with cans, comprise his open-air office. It’s located in the back of a convenience store parking lot.
Chavez gets 25 to 30 customers a day. Many of the same customers return every day of the week. He says he’s friends with most of them; some stay for half an hour or more after trading their recyclables for cash. They talk about their plans to go to school or their family and friends back in Mexico.
Chavez earns only minimum wage for his work and he doesn’t know how much his boss, who owns several other recycling stations in Los Angeles, makes off the business. But he says some of his customers earn as much as $20 per hour. In Isla Vista, rents are expensive and often even this isn’t enough. Chavez pays $1,100 per month for an apartment where he lives with his mother and brother. Bachaca and Rodriguez pay $1,300 for their two-bedroom apartment. One of the characters in Guy’s documentary revealed that he needed to make $35 per day to support himself and his family of four.
“They work awful hard,” says Ross Cutler, another recycling center operator. “I think they get up super early in the morning, even maybe when the…students are going to bed they’re out there starting their scavenging, you know. They’re probably out there one, two o’clock in the morning working all night until they come in here and cash in.”
Cutler works for Marborg Industries, the largest disposal service in Santa Barbara. His center is just outside of the plant on Bob Love Avenue, where the cans are melted down and recycled. Behind him, the crushed cans and bottles ride an outdoor conveyer belt to their fate.
Cutler said he’s seen the same faces for years. His regulars are forty to fifty “professional scavengers,” as he calls them.
Cutler has been working the massive plant for nearly a decade. Chis Halle has been a recycling center operator for only five weeks now. He was truly surprised at the amount of money to be made recycling.
“Can you picture it? One couple put their son through MIT doing this!” Halle says.
And it’s true. In 2001, the Boston Globe published the story of Yolanda and Rogelio Garcia, who collected cans in Los Angeles. At the time, the couple had a son at MIT, a daughter at UC Riverside, and another son still in high school. They supported their family by sifting through the garbage in back alleys. Their story is memorable, but it’s not unique.
Halle has about thirty customers daily, many of them with stories like that of the Garcias, each day. Today alone, customers brought in more than 1,100 lb. of glass, plastic and aluminum. About 80 percent of them will be back tomorrow, Halle predicted.
It’s a cycle. Tonight, bottles will fly off the shelves of the Keg ‘n’ Bottle, alcohol will flow at the innumerable house parties, cans and bottles will be forgotten on lawns or left thoughtlessly in trash cans and dumpsters, and as the party dies and the music fades, the recyclers will follow the sun to collect their treasures.
As cans clang noisily into the plastic trashcans for collection, Halle looks on. Can he guess the value of the trashcan-full?
“I’d say it’s something like twelve bucks,” he estimates.
Halle brusquely lifts the trashcan onto the sticky scale. The can, the scale, it’s all covered in the sticky-sweet residue of left-over soda and beer. The scales add up. The computer-powered calculations are made. The total value? $12.75.
*Names changed for the protection of those involved. |
