CleanScapes is thus likely to become ever more like the conventional companies it's attempting to displace. Martin says he knew he needed some "gray hair" to make his bid credible, so he recently lured away five employees from giant Waste Management, including Jerry Hardebeck, a 35-year Waste Management veteran who oversaw that company's municipal contracts in the region before becoming CleanScapes' new chief operating officer. Martin has hired a PR agency as well.
But Martin claims there remains a crucial difference between himself and his competitors: He doesn't own a landfill. In contrast, Waste Management and Allied own 450 landfills between them nationwide. (Waste Management owns the Oregon landfill Seattle uses.)
Steven Miller
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That means, according to Martin, that the big corporate behemoths have an incentive to put as much trash into the ground as possible. He doesn't. "We've got to pay to dispose of garbage," he says. Whereas recyclables can be turned into a sellable commodity. "If we get paid $10 to $15 a ton on recyclables but we have to pay $120 a ton on garbage, we're going to actively get out and get people to recycle," says Martin.
Nels Johnson, Allied's municipal marketing manager for the region, scoffs when he hears that logic. "The argument [to the contrary] there is that we own the biggest recycling plant in the state. We're into recycling big time." Susan Robinson, Waste Management's regional director of public sector services, also notes her company's many recycling plants nationwide. "We're the biggest recycler in North America," she says.
Allied's industrial-sized facility sits in SoDo. The squat, blue, block-long building processes 17,000 tons of material a month, about 8,000 of which come from Seattle. It's a huge, noisy, messy place, with masses of crumpled, shredded, and battered materials everywhere. Conveyor belts carry the stuff through almost-ceiling-high sorting machines, then past workers in masks and hard hats, who furiously sort through the refuse a second time, pulling out whatever can be sold as raw material.
Yet about 10 percent of the plant's intake ends up landfilled, leaving through the rail yard at the back of the building to go either to the King County landfill in Maple Valley or Allied's own landfill in south-central Washington, according to Pete Keller and Don Zimmerman, managers at the facility.
Keller and Zimmerman insist that they work hard to keep the factory output destined for the landfill to a minimum because, even though Allied owns the landfill, it still costs their division money to send material there. But they say some landfilling is inevitable for two reasons: People put all sorts of stuff into their recycling bins that they shouldn't (a coconut, a toilet seat, and black ballet shoes lay among the items Allied workers found on a recent day); and legitimate recyclables like glass, which can break into shards, sometimes damage other materials.
Zimmerman, a tall, mustachioed man who started his career as a "helper" on a garbage truck at age 14, emphasizes the point as he walks through the plant. He stops by a heap of stuff visibly containing paper, tin cans, and other recyclables, but which somehow the sorters have failed to pull out. "Because I don't want to landfill this, I'm going to scoop it up again and run it through a trommel [a sorting machine]," he says.
Still, Allied works with the materials it is given. Martin, on the other hand, asserts he can take recycling to a new level by educating people to stop throwing away recyclables as garbage. He talks of partnering with the city to create memorable advertising that would do for recycling what Smokey Bear did for forest safety. And then there are those incriminating photos he'd take.
Yet another idea included in his bid for the city's business is to run a contest among neighborhoods to reduce their overall waste. Whatever is saved in collection costs would go toward funding community projects in the neighborhood that won.
But it's unclear how much the city wants its garbage collectors to act as anti-waste crusaders. In his downtown office, SPU's Croll notes that the "lion's share of the marketing" around recycling and waste reduction is done by his agency. SPU has even put the brakes on contractors who wanted to send out material about recycling. "We want to send out a consistent message," he says.
Even if CleanScapes is not on the list when the city announces contract winners next month, it may well have lasting influence on how garbage is collected here. The city is currently considering whether to implement mandatory Dumpster-free programs in broad swaths of Seattle, such as the downtown core and the University District, according to Croll. The agency has asked all bidders to submit proposals for such a policy change, which would require approval by the mayor and the City Council.
Whether the city will authorize pictures of garbage scofflaws is another question, but you never know with Martin. Even if it doesn't, he may just decide to do it on his own.
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
