Turning trash into treasure

William-Arthur Haynes
Staff writer

SF State offers many classes and programs focusing on the reduction of waste and increasing awareness of environmental problems posed by the world's flourishing volumes of garbage.

Hans Miehoefer's Geography 666 class takes students to the source of the problem; the city dump.

As part of their curriculum, the class visited the Sanitary Fill Co. near Candlestick Park last week, allowing a first-hand look at what happens to waste once it leaves garbage cans underneath kitchen sinks and blue bins on the City's curb-sides.

Centered around the geographical study of garbage, waste prevention and recycling, the class analyzes of the problem of society's increasing amount of discarded materials.

"If we conserve, we simply pollute less," said Meihoefer, chair of the Geography & Human Environmental Studies Department. "We try to instill the three Rs -- recycle, reuse and reduce -- as alternatives to throw-away."

Anthropology major Amy Palmer was one of the twenty students who went on the field trip. She is the volunteer coordinator at the SF State recycling center.

"I've always been interested in doing things to help the world," Palmer said. "I want to eventually do outreach for a recycling organization."

Gene DeMartini and Leo Cummins, safety engineers at the plant, have a combined 70 years in the sanitation business. They led students on a tour of the facility, tracking the route garbage takes from household to landfill.

The site on which the plant sits was once a landfill itself, stretching 150 acres into the Bay. When space ran out, San Francisco signed a 10-year contract with Alameda County to transfer its waste to the Altamont Landfill in the Livermore Valley. The contract expires in 2010.

"We've got to educate people on how to use these blue bins," said DeMartini, referring to the curb-side recycling program introduced to San Francisco in 1989. "The city of San Francisco produces 3000 tons of garbage a day. And of that, 30 percent is recycled. That total must increase to 50 percent and rise, or soon there will be no facilities left to dispose of waste."

Fill Co. employees sift through the 3,000 tons of waste daily, separating cardboard, paper, glass, construction refuse and aluminum from the daily load. Twenty-six tons of garbage is loaded on each truck then hauled to the Altamont site.

After recyclable materials have been separated, they're put through compactors that produce bails of the separated material to be shipped to various reproduction facilities around the U.S. and Asia.

According to DeMartini, Asia buys most of the paper because of the continent's lack of trees. Each 1-ton bail of paper or cardboard saves the world 17 trees and three cubic feet of landfill.

In a year, this nation throws away enough steel and tin to build a pipeline from Los Angeles to New York and back, according to a study by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Palmer used the statistic for a research paper last year.

"It shows me we're very wasteful," Palmer said. "We use a lot of stuff."

Massive cubes of aluminum cans, plastic and steel -- weighing between 1,000 and 3,000 pounds -- are shipped to Tennessee, North Carolina, Arizona and Washington. All the glass brought through the Sanitary Fill Co. are sent to various processing plants in the Bay Area to be melted and reproduced.

In addition to being a recycling and transfer center, the Sanitary Fill Co. has a household hazardous waste facility where San Francisco residents can bring in everything -- from pesticides to latex paint, car batteries to aerosol cans -- all free of charge.

The facility promotes reuse and recycling as the most environmentally responsible way to handle hazardous waste, according to Russel Morine, environmental technician at the company and a 1992 graduate of SF State's Geology Department.

According to Morine, about 85 percent of the hazardous waste brought in to the facility is converted into reusable material or burned as fuel for other industrial processes. Incineration and hazardous waste landfills are an absolute last resort. Only 12 percent of hazardous materials are incinerated and 2 percent is placed in designated landfills.

"The City and Sanitary Fill Co. work together," Morine said. "We're both liable if hazardous waste gets into the landfills, so we make a conscious effort to keep that from happening."

[ Golden Gater - March 4, 1997 ]