Monday morning, the machinery of Redwood Empire Disposal’s recycling facility in Santa Rosa roared to life with the hum, whir, clank and beeping of a conveyor belt that snakes around the perimeter of an open-faced warehouse, filled with clusters of refuse mounds. Once sucked into a chute and spit onto the belt, the loads of refuse are ushered through perforated screens and glass breakers, then prodded by hand-picking employees to remove unwanted garbage from clean, resalable recyclables—paper, plastic, glass, aluminum and more, all squeezed into bales and stacked onto shipping containers before being sent overseas, mostly to Asia.
“I think what we’re doing right now is going through the ‘overs’ from the weekend,” said Jim Salyers, the disposal company’s vice president. “We run this back through again”—hence, “overs”—“to make sure we get everything out of it.”
The facility processes around 250 tons of recycling and garbage daily, and it’s here where all of West Marin’s recycling—extracted from blue roadside bins—ultimately arrives. But with that recycling comes large amounts of garbage—too much, according to the Sonoma County Department of Health Services, which is now levying heavy daily fines while the facility continues to take in more garbage than what its use permit allows.
In August, the county issued a cease and desist order that found the facility failed a three-part test for complying with its permit: first, that it must haul material collected from garbage and recycling bins separately; second, that no more than 10 percent of the total material may be garbage; and third, that no more than one percent of the material may be liquid-soaked. Fines now totaling over $250,000 began slapping the company in September, when the county issued a violation order for the ongoing failure to meet each of those three requirements.
Now, Redwood Empire is seeking to acquire a solid waste permit from the county that would make the amount of garbage it receives at the facility acceptable. Loads arriving at the facility currently contain around 14 percent garbage, down from 27 percent in July, according to county inspection reports. Redwood submitted a draft application in January, and a final application was submitted on Monday.
While the permit would do away with the percentage requirements, it would still allow Redwood to haul in recycling only. “They’re supposed to be bringing in blue cans only,” said Christine Sosko, the county’s environmental health and safety director. But that’s a policy the company has not strictly adhered to in the past.
West Marin locals have long complained that Redwood trucks have been dumping the contents of both garbage and recycling bins in the same truck compartment. In March, the Light published a letter by Inverness resident Melanie Stone, who wrote that she witnessed trucks combining recycling and garbage because, as one driver told her, “they didn’t have enough small trucks with divided sections for some of our small roads with overhanging wires.”
Other residents said they have seen the same, and a truck driver stopped by the Light in March confirmed that the practice was taking place.
“We really care about the environment,” Ms. Stone wrote. “And then we find out that [recyclables are] dumped with the trash. It just seems a farce and unfair for us to go to the trouble to be conscientious and to recycle what’s appropriate.”
Responding to complaints, Mr. Salyers said drivers had been collecting recycling and garbage in single compartments so that drivers could recoup lost time and gas after a smaller truck used to navigate West Marin’s narrower roads broke down. (Generally, Redwood trucks are large enough to have split compartments that separate garbage and recycling.) He said he had directed drivers to discontinue the practice and, instead, to make two trips—one for garbage, one for recycling.
On Monday, he reiterated that drivers have been instructed to no longer combine garbage and recycling—though, he admitted, drivers are not being watched all the time.
Ms. Stone told the Light this week that she recently observed the Redwood driver in her neighborhood make two separate garbage and recycling trips. Even so, some residents have said the practice of combining recycling and garbage has been happening for years.
“It’s very disturbing to me,” said Carrie Kutchins, of Inverness. “And it’s continued to bother me.”
In 2012, Ms. Kutchins wrote to Steve McCaffrey, Redwood Empire’s then-director of governmental affairs, inquiring why disposal trucks had been collecting garbage and recycling together in the same runs. In a response letter, Mr. McCaffrey wrote that the company sends out smaller trucks—called “goat trucks”—to avoid damaging narrow roads.
“To lessen the impacts on some of the hard-to-service roads, we use a smaller truck which collects all the material on a single pass through the area,” wrote Mr. McCaffrey, who left Redwood in March. “This is a Best Management Practice adopted to minimize the impacts on your roads and lessen our carbon footprint.”
For Mr. Salyers, acquiring the permit represents the only way Redwood’s recycling facility can remain a viable operation. Customers are unlikely to make the kind of major changes in what they routinely put in their blue recycling bins that would help the facility dip below the 10 percent mark, he said.
On Monday, Mr. Salyers picked through one of the warehouse’s many refuse mounds, plucking out a battered straw hat and yanking free an airless inflatable pool. None of it, he chuckled, was anywhere near recyclable. “We’re guilty because for a long time, we said, ‘If you don’t know, put it in the blue bin and we’ll figure it out for you,’” he said, adding that the company now mails out stickers and newsletters specifying what can and cannot go into the blue recycling bins.
But some West Marin residents continue to question whether they, in truth, are the real source of the problem. Others, meanwhile, have wondered whether their recycling was actually ending up at the landfill—a scenario that Mr. McCaffrey in his 2012 letter wrote, “is not the case.”
Steve Devine, the program manager for Marin County’s Waste Management Division, said surreptitious landfill dumping was unlikely. (Redwood Empire has been under contract with Marin since 1992 to provide disposal services for West Marin and Novato.)
“To the best of our knowledge, they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing in terms of transporting and disposing that material,” Mr. Devine said. “But we’re not sitting there every day to determine that that’s not happening.”
For his part, Mr. Salyers reasoned that dumping recycling at the landfill would be cost-prohibitive, since Sonoma landfills charge a $127 disposal fee for each trip. Adding recyclables to the garbage load, he said, would increase how many trips drivers would have to take to the landfill.
“Plus, when we separate those bales, we can sell them,” Mr. Salyers added. “When you think about it, it doesn’t even make economic sense for us not to recycle.”
But those profits, he went on, have been down lately, slashed by declining worldwide recycling markets brought about by months of low oil prices that have incentivized the production of virgin plastic over reused plastic.
That down market has come at an inconvenient time for Redwood Empire, which will keep incurring thousands of dollars in cease-and-desist fines until its solid-waste permit application is approved—a process that could take up to a year to complete.
“It’s not helping us,” Mr. Salyers said. “We’re dealing with it by reduced profitability, but we’re going to weather the storm.”