By Ed Dunn, San Francisco Community Recyclers

The fall of HANC Recycling has lead to a series of recycling center closures across the City. Up until last year, San Franciscans enjoyed access to twenty recycling locations dispersed fairly evenly across town. This was by no means accidental, because the California Bottle Bill requires that recycling centers be located near large supermarkets, which are also dispersed fairly evenly across town.

But after HANC closed, three other recycling locations were illegally shut down, and a fourth is faced with imminent eviction. The Nexcycle operation at the Fulton and Masonic Lucky’s; the Webster and Geary Safeway recycling center which was operated by Replanet; as well as a Nexcycle reverse vending machine at the Marina Safeway have all been closed. Safeway has sent San Francisco Community Recyclers (SFCR), which is the operator of the recycling center at Church and Market, an eviction notice effective October 4th.

This wave of evictions comes as no surprise. In the course of the HANC eviction campaign, sunshined City Hall documents, along with with statements by key City Hall staff, have made it clear that a sea change has occurred inside the Gold Dome with regard to recycling policy. Rather than supporting a convenient dispersed network of recycling centers as it had for the last thirty years, our city government is now actively trying to shut it down. In a stunning example of Orwellian Doublespeak, the elected official most closely associated with this eviction campaign, Scott Wiener, claims to be seeking the creation of a dispersed network of recycling centers, while actually working to shut them down.

I think it's worth quoting him here at length. This is from a written statement to the press, so he is not misquoted,

Recently, Safeway served a 30 day notice to vacate on the recycling center at Market/Buchanan. Safeway previously served a notice on the recycling center at Webster/Geary, and that center closed its doors before the notice expired. Although I'm sure there will be some controversy around the closure, I'm very supportive of it and made that clear to Safeway. In fact, I've been asking Safeway to consider alternatives to the recycling center on Market Street since I took office. With the advent of curb-side recycling, we can offer recycling redemption that is less impactful [sic] to surrounding neighborhoods. We can still allow low-income people to redeem recyclables without enabling the recycling theft criminal enterprises that plague our city and that often pay less than full value to the poor and homeless people who collect recyclables. The Department of the Environment has been advocating a more dispersed model of accepting recycling, with reverse vending machines and the like spread throughout the city and not concentrated in just a few neighborhoods. It's not fair that these neighborhoods have had to bear the brunt of the recycling centers' impacts. I support a dispersed model of recycling redemption and am working closely with the Department of the Environment to move us toward that model.

His wording is so convoluted it's difficult to tell if he is dissembling, or just confused. Based on his track record on other fronts, I think it’s the former, not the latter. He seems to be saying that folks can get their money back by means of curbside recycling, which is absurd on its face. He implies that the Market Street Recycling Center is a criminal enterprise, even though he knows very well it's a State certified entity which is inspected regularly. The Department of the Environment is only now realizing that hundreds of reverse vending machines will be required to replace San Francisco’s lost network of recycling centers, while the operator of the reverse vending machines, Nexcycle, is telling anyone who will listen that the machines are intended to augment the existing network of recycling centers, not to replace it. In fact, the reverse vending machine business model calls for the conversion to a staffed operation should the volumes exceed the capacity of two machines side by side. By way of comparison, the HANC Recycling Center handled the equivalent of twenty-seven of these machines.

If Safeway continues its illegal recycling center eviction campaign across the rest of the City, it will stand their own twenty-five year, pro-recycling track record on its head. The only recycling centers left will be in the industrial part of town. This is completely at odds with the reality of a “dispersed recycling network” that we used to have until the HANC domino fell and the grocery chains began following the City’s lead by shutting down the recycling centers on their own parking lots. Unless, of course, if when Mr. Wiener says dispersed, he really means eliminated. Because that’s what’s really happening. And it all started here in the Haight when then Mayor Gavin Newsom evicted HANC and pushed over the first domino.

Why did Gavin Newsom want to shut down recycling centers in the number one recycling town in the nation, if not the world? Class warfare plain and simple. “Care not Cash” has morphed into “No Cash for Cans” in a scorched earth policy against the poor, no matter the social, environmental and economic consequences. The rationale is that by depriving the homeless of a source of cash they will be more likely to transition into services, and off the streets. This is erroneous for many reasons, but it's worth pointing out that most recyclers are already housed. Its also worth noting that the loss of the City’s “dispersed network of recycling centers” based on supermarkets (Safeway, principally) will in no way impact the illegal activity they say they want to address. The illegal activity generally involves trucks carrying large volumes of recyclables that the supermarket based operations are not equipped to handle. The truck operators sell their loads across the bridge or in the industrial part of town anyway, so no change in San Francisco recycling center policy will change that pattern of activity.

Another huge consequence is that without recycling centers located nearby, all stores which sell single-serve beverages, including corner stores, will be required by the California Bottle Bill to redeem those bottles and cans in store, or pay a $100 fine per day. The stores surrounding the HANC Recycling center already fall under this requirement. CalRecycle, the State agency responsible for recycling, takes about six months to go through their process and notify the affected stores. HANC Recycling ran a pilot program which studied the economics of serving a corner grocery trying to redeem in store. There are significant barriers to doing so cost effectively.

Little known, but often seen, is the fact that those recycling pyramid-tops are not recycled by Recology when they pick up the trash underneath, but have actually been put there for people to empty them and redeem the contents at a nearby recycling center! What happened to the City’s goal of achieving Zero Waste by 2020? The majority of California Redemption Value containers i.e. soda cans, water bottles etc, are consumed away from home and those nifty blue bins, hence the need for a recycling system that serves public areas.

Finally, this campaign to shut down recycling centers will cost the City dozens of green jobs. Remember those?