Rescuing Materials and Building Community in Berkeley Thanks to “Waste” (Episode 43)

Dan came back from Australia in the early to mid 90’s, and brought with him the concept of zero waste that has been growing leaps and bounds. Both Dan and Mary Lou have described what’s going on in Berkeley, which has about an 80% recycling rate as the recycling ecology of commerce. A group of six different groups, companies, nonprofits, and government agencies that are pooling together to make Berkeley one of the best recycling cities in the world. And they’re also very deeply involved in many national and international issues concerning incineration and zero waste around the globe.

During the interview, I’m going to ask them about how they got started in the anti-incineration efforts. But now before we start our interview, I just wanted to tell one of my favorite stories, and I have to emphasize one, because I have many. That is when Dan drove east through the night to come to a very special meeting in 1980. Actually, it was January 1981, of about 120 recyclers and environmental engineers to talk about recycling, this was in the middle of the heyday of planning and building incinerators.

Dan walked to the head of the room, and he plunked down a big canvas bag with a big clunk, and he introduced himself saying, “I’m Dan Knapp, and I salvage landfills, and here’s my working capital. I recovered all these tools from the landfill.” And, of course, he gave a tour de force on recycling and reuse, both environmentally and economically. And there upon the waste engineers in the room revolted. And we had a wonderful discussion between the old paradigm dime and the new paradigm. So that was one of the many great memories I have of Dan.

And I have equal great memories of Mary Lou, who is just the most wonderful environmental writer you can imagine. And both of them have really been intellectual stalwarts of the recycling and zero waste movement.

So with that introduction, I’m going to turn it over to Nick to ask the first round of questions.

So without further ado, the two of us jumped on a bus and we went to Sacramento. The next day, I go to get a brown bag lunch, and there was Mary Lou in the audience eating her brown bag lunch. We went home together that night on a bus. There were so many people there from Berkeley that they had chartered a bus. So the two of us got together on the bus. I was so shy that I went and sat by myself, and she came and joined me.

So that was nice.

So they were about to take their vote, and Dan couldn’t stand it anymore. He hadn’t had a chance to comment at all. No public was invited to speak at that moment. So he couldn’t stand it, so he jumped up, and he stood straight up, and he’s 6’1″. So he stood straight up and he raised his arm, and he had his finger in the air, and he said, “Wait, wait! You don’t know. Has anyone told you?”

So he’s waving his finger in the air, uninvited to speak, and I’m thinking, “This is my date. What am I doing? What’s he doing?” And so the mayor said, “But there’s no public speaking,” and Dan kept pursuing. “Has anyone told you about the dioxins? Has anyone told you about the ash?” So that night, the city council did end up voting unanimously to move forward with the procurement for a mass burn incinerator.

They had not heard all that information, and they had not taken the public comment. In Berkeley, it’s the people’s republic, and they’re supposed to confirm with the public at all times, and they didn’t. Dan Just was upset, and they took their unanimous vote and they moved forward. That was the launching of the incineration opposition. That was our date.

I went out with him again anyway. And it turned out to be never a dull moment.

Our first capital investment was a $25 sign that said “Drop Metals Here.” Within a week we had an acre of refrigerators, and old dryers, and washers, and all kinds of other stuff, because the public responded right away. They started dropping off all their appliances right there, instead of in the pit where we couldn’t get them.

So we learned as we went. By 1983 … I started out at the landfill in ’79. I met Mary Lou in 1980 or ’81.

So Berkeley already had it in its plan that there should be salvaging for reuse at the city owned landfill. This is a very, very, visionary thing to do and provide, and it was contrary to the environmental protection agencies operating instructions for landfills. Their operating instructions were, “Oh, for heaven’s sakes, don’t let anybody salvage at the dump. It’s much too dangerous. You can work at a nuclear power plant or a chemical plant, but salvaging at the dump is too dangerous. Don’t let them do it.”

And there was some other reasons as well, but I just wanted to interject that, that’s the reason that Dan was able to come and salvage at the Berkeley dump. The city of Berkeley had already had that vision. So he was emigrating from a place where they didn’t have a vision, to a place where they did have a vision. That’s what allowed UrbanOre to begin at all, because the city of Berkeley allowed salvaging.

It was fundamentally incubating the business, because they let these guys go to the tipping face and bring back whatever they could, and put it down behind a fee gate. So from the customer’s perspective, you pay your dump fee, you pay your tipping fee, and then you encounter a recovery and sales area. So people would go to the tipping face and dump, and then they would come back, and they’d stop and buy.

But the only people who brought were people who had already paid to dump. So that’s not your biggest market, and not everybody goes to the landfill to shop. So that’s when the small investment that these guys were able to put together, they were able to rent a vacant property. Well, on a busy street, a commercial street in Berkeley.

So they rented this empty lot, and they sold their salvaged goods both at the landfill, and then also Dan ran the first, I guess, expansion unit, which was a vacant lot. So he opened that one, and they would provide some of the salvage goods to that new sales area. Then Dan would divert things from getting to … They would salt the inventory with that.

Then Dan would divert things from going to the landfill in the first place.

Then I got their stuff, and I could turn around and sell it. We expanded from there. So we were able to move from one place to another as we tried really hard to find stable commercial land to be on. Eventually we did stabilize, and eventually we bought property. Now we sit on a piece of property that we were told last year it’s worth about $9 million. So we own it.

So everybody works on a per-hour wage, and your compensation has two basic parts, really. One is your base wage, and that’s an individual wage. The base wages right now go from 10 and a quarter to 18.50, and where you are in that range depends on your rank, and responsibilities. Nothing depends on longevity. Nothing is seniority.

Because you have seniority, that just means you get to keep your job longer. Seniority doesn’t give you anything except for a better share as a profit sharing at the end of the year. On a per-hour basis we have the base wage, and then we have an incentive. The concept of the incentive is that you work for a couple of weeks, and you’ve put out, and you put your energy, and you put out your labor, and you cooperate with everybody, and everybody brings in money.

So on the next paycheck, you get some. The per-hour incentive is calculated by taking for that pay period, which runs from the 26th of one months to the 10th of the next month, and you get paid on the 15th. Then the next pay period is the 11th through the 25th, and then you get paid on the 1st.

So we get paid twice a month. So for any given pay period, we calculate 9.5% of the gross income. Not including tax. But gross income, 9.5%, and it goes into a pool. Then also, $15 a ton that is salvaged either from the transfer station floor … We still salvage at the dump. 38 years later we’re still salvaging at the dump. We bring in an average of three tons a day with three salvagers.

So that’s one ton per day per person they bring in. This is heavy work. They work really hard, and we have a very, very low injury rate. It’s $15 a ton that they salvage, and $15 a ton that the outside trader picks up. It’s a couple of guys in a truck, and we go out and pick things up from people’s homes and businesses when they call us.

So they were at six days a week, and the salvagers were at six days a week. So $15 a ton that all these guys bring in, that goes into the incentive pool along with the 9.5% of gross income. Then the incentive pool is divided up by pay period equally according to the numbers of hour you work. Actually, we’ve done very well.

In 2017 I think the average was $4.02, or $0.03 per hour for everybody who worked over the course of a year. It fluctuates up and down with income, but it averaged out at the end of the year at about $4.00 and $0.02 or $0.03 cents per hour. The beginning wage is 10 and a quarter, so you add 4 and a couple of cents to that, so that’s $14.27 an hour as the beginning wage.

Starting October 1, the minimum wage in Berkeley is going to rise to $15 an hour, so we structure that for October 1. When you work here, you get a base wage and a share of the gross income, it’s incoming sharing, which, of course, is different from profit sharing. You work here, you make money for the company, and you get some on the next paycheck.

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One other thing you can do is sign up for one of our newsletters and share it with your friends. Now, back to Dan and Mary Lou, co founders of Urban Ore in Berkeley, California.

I think for a lot of our listeners, they hear Berkeley, California, they think you see Berkeley, and maybe don’t know a lot about it outside of some activist base. My question is: how does your work at Urban Ore fit in to the local activist movement? It already sounds like you’ve started off this enterprise with some tension with the local government, and the county, and the city council. How was that shaped into what Urban Ore has become?

This is real stuff. This is really where the railroad meets the road, when you can stop land filling. 56% is how far down we’ve taken garbage in Berkeley over the years, and we’ve done that through six different major materials recovery enterprises. We wrote the zoning law that recognizes materials recovery enterprises as a business site that can exist on light industrial land.

We had to do that in order to move to our personal location. We’ve managed to whether all this somehow. We’re still in the midst of it, though, we’re still fighting. 

They’re also got a large corporate parents from Texas, for example. Their lawyers just don’t understand it. They’ve never had experience with it. They think it’s way too dangerous, and they’re not about to let us go salvage things, because they have the same waste management attitudes that Dan was talking about that stopped anything from happening up in Eugene, Oregon.

We’re allowed to operate because it’s municipally operated.

And among the projects that UrbanOre is helping to support now are the recycling archives project. It’s currently housed in the University of Illinois Springfield. It’s a project that the institute in UrbanOre started, but Dan and Mary Lou have really been carrying it along with some other people. Susan Kinsella and Wynne Coplea.

But I wanted to point out that the activity of Urban Ore is the best definition of a business neighbor. A neighbor that cares not only about its bottom line, but its workers and the surrounding community. We’re really talking about a unique enterprise.

And we’re going to become a social benefit corporation. And that means that we will have a statement of purpose, and every year we have to file a statement with the state of California that describes what we did in a previous year to meet our mission goal that we said we were going to have.

So we’re going to establish ourselves as a corporation that has a social benefit mission. The second step we’re going to take is we’re going to sell this business to the staff. They’ll become a worker-owned corporation in a slightly different format from some worker-owned co-ops, because the worker ownership co-op will be a shareholder in the for profit benefit corporation.

So we employ somebody to do that. We employ a salvager, we employ a salesperson, we have also employed somebody to wipe it off and put a price tag on it, and a salesperson takes it on to the display floor and they display it as merchandise. And that transforms trash into treasure right there just by wiping it off and putting a price tag on it, and putting it up for sale, and saying, “Look, it’s merchandise.” That transforms it. Then people come in and they buy it.

So we provide low-cost goods to the community that will raise the standard of living for people. If it’s a building product … Say you’ve got an old sash window. The buildings out here in this climate, we don’t have snow, and we don’t have cold that causes shrink swell effect in people’s homes. But we sure have a lot of sun. The sun will kill your cell spacing windows so fast. So people’s cell spacing windows tend to rot out.

So if you have an old home, a Victorian, say, and you’ve got a ratted out cell spacing window, you can come to UrbanOre and find a replacement for $35 to $45, rather than having a reproduction made for a couple of hundred. So you get to fix up your home with a low cost window.

Now, if you’re a low income person, that means that you will buy the window to fix your house up with, rather than say, “Oh, I can’t afford that. I will let my home continue to deteriorate.” So because we have these kinds of materials available to people with lower incomes, they can retain their property values. They can fix up their properties the way they really want to, and they can retain property value.

So for the community, it retains property value. That’s part of our economic impact, is retain property value. We also provide materials for craftspeople to work with, with a handyman who puts that window back into your kitchen for you, or does your kitchen remodel, your bathroom remodel. We provide the materials that they work with. If they buy a window from us that is painted orange with purple polka dots and they’re putting it into a home that’s painted white, they’re going to have to take some time to refinish the window.

So they get paid to refinished the window, so that’s adding a little bit to the crafts person’s income. When they put the window back in, it’s an original window. So people who are doing historic preservation, and historic conservation, come in and buy things from us, because we have the original materials, not reproductions. 

But then–

I asked them, “Did you just buy a big house and you need … ?” And they said, “No.” But they run a secondhand store. So it occurred to me, I didn’t even realize it, that Urban Ore was a supplier to a network of reuse stores throughout the Berkeley region.

The project that Dan and Mary Lou, and I, to a lesser extent, have been working on, have actually documented through interviews and many other sources of documentation, the stories of our colleagues over the last 50 years. Gretchen Brewer, wonderful organizer who unfortunately passed away. Mary Appelhof, the same thing.

So for those of you who really want to follow this wonderful movement, democratic environmental movement that’s been highly successful, stay in touch with UrbanOre and the institute, and we will be able to guide you to very relevant documents to how this movement got together, and how it’s sustained itself. 

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Nick Stumo-Langer. I hope you enjoy us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.