Where you see concrete rubble, Ralph Gilbert sees gold. Or
at least gravel.
"It's one of Ralph's dreams to mine all the concrete out
by Rocky Butte," says his son Vince, referring to construction
debris left over from light-rail construction in the 1980s.
"There's just a huge pile of it," Ralph says. "That should
someday be used."
Welcome to East County Recycling, a father-and-son world
that local recycling officials consider a showcase of the
possibilities of rescuing trash from the landfill.
If the metro region is going to get serious about recycling,
it's not yellow bins that will make the difference, but
people like Ralph and Vince Gilbert. Their material-recovery
facility is testament to how much can be achieved in a type
of business that's thought to be big on labor costs and
short on profit. All it needs is a little help from the
government and a lot of hard work.
ECR employs 40 sorters and 26 other workers: foremen, equipment
operators and managers to cull through a large chunk of
the region's trash, from self-haulers, commercial and construction
sites. The Gilberts rescued 32,000 tons from dumps in the
first half of this year--about 10 percent of the Metro region's
total recycling.
Camp out for a day in the small parking lot just inside
the gate of East County Recycling, and you'll watch the
slow mutation of a living landscape of trash. Mounds of
garbage appear and fade away; piles of separated wood chips,
ground glass, gnarled scrap metal and chunks of concrete
swell up and down. A swarm of yellow payloaders, bulldozers,
trucks and dozens of men in hardhats circles around attacking
some piles and adding to others. All this on a donut-shaped
space covering the area of several large football fields,
arranged around a deep central crater--lined with brush,
blackberries, willows and cottonwoods--that's used to catch
storm runoff.
While the crews work, trailer trucks and pickups pour out
a goulash of garbage: old lumber, different-colored swathes
of plastic, chairs, toaster ovens, a black leatherette couch,
cracked windshields, carpets. Vince spots a bowling pin
and balls--some remains of Sandy Lanes, the campy Portland
bowling alley gutted by an Aug. 29 arson fire. This junk,
and more like it, is all sorted, ripped up, ground up, crushed,
shredded, squeezed and squashed into bales for sale. They
find buyers for the product, who send trucks to fill up
from a hill of dark, gravel-like aggregate made from ground-up
concrete, asphalt and brick that broods over one corner
of the site. It's the only material-recovery facility that
recycles windshield glass, which is ground into fine sand-like
bits for use as road fill.
Officials say operations like these are crucial to the
recycling effort.
What's most astounding about the Gilberts' success is that
in the garbage food chain, they are the bottom feeders.
They get the least-recyclable loads, the stuff already picked
through by haulers or unwanted by larger, hauler-owned operations.
City garbage czar Sue Keil says Gilbert is "making lemonade
out of lemons."
Still, the Gilberts say they could do better if they cut
costs. "If we were only interested in making money, we'd
have only about five sorters and we'd transfer all this
stuff out to the landfill," Vince says. "And we'd make a
lot of money."
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|
LEAD STORY SIDEBAR
Reduce,
Reuse, Regurgitate
This month, recycling got a whole
lot easier in Portland. But does that mean it got
better? Depends on where you're standing.
BY
KATIA DUNN
|
My career in the renewable-resources industry began at the
end of a hot, black, empty road outside of Wilsonville. My
instructions from the temp agency had been "Don't wear shorts,
and be there on time." Dressed in jeans, I pulled into the
gravel drive at 2:15 pm. My eight-hour shift at Willamette
Resources Inc. was to begin at 2:30. So far, I had held up
my end of the bargain.
Inside the chain-link fence, I was directed to a sprawling
warehouse where a stream of trucks overflowing with dusty
cardboard, glass shards and newspaper spilled their contents
into the dusty bin. WRI is one of several so-called "material-recovery
facilities" in the metro area, taking in truckloads of commercial
waste and construction debris each day to be sorted between
rubbish and resalables. Last year the company handled 48,520
tons of the stuff.
I wandered in, and my new boss gave me the once-over. I
handed him a piece of paper onto which the temp agency had
scrawled my name and Social Security number. In exchange,
he handed me a hard hat, gloves, orange vest, ear plugs
and a soft felt cup to strap over my mouth and nose.
He then sent me up two flights of metal stairs to a conveyer
belt. From my perch on top of the stairs, I could see the
surrounding warehouse, as big as two football fields.
Monstrous metal machines overwhelmed me, as did the ear-splitting
crashes and the constant, overpowering smell from several
50-foot towers of decaying recycling. Outside, the temperature
hovered in the mid-80s; inside the metal warehouse it felt
like 100. My clothes, like the smell, clung to my sticky
body. The shift leader barked instructions to me: "Newspaper
in here, trash in here, plastic here. Don't let the aluminum
go by. Try to get the big clumps of newspaper out, it makes
it easier on the guys at the end. Work as fast as you can."
The conveyer belt, spewing garbage in fits and halts, stretched
in front of me as it would for the next several hours. The
roar of the machine kept me from speaking with my fellow
sorters, but our eyes met and we nodded. I worked.
Within five minutes, my eyes stung and I was completely
nauseated. Looking around, I noticed the same bloodshot
eyes staring back at me from my co-workers. Breathing hot,
chalky air through my mask, I noticed that some people wore
theirs, some didn't. No one seemed to care. The shift leader
appeared several times to instruct me on my minimum-wage
job.
I concentrated on pulling the soggy, black newspaper from
piles of decaying cardboard, workers' manuals and forgotten
handwritten notes. Aluminum cans and smashed plastic yogurt
tubs floated by. Occasionally huge, heavy metal poles or
pieces of wood covered in tar lurched toward me. But mostly,
there was newspaper--and too much for me to pick up. I could
never do the job fast enough.
A few times, I started to ask about breaks, lunch, the
bathroom, but the shift leader was gone and the belt lurched
on and on. At 5 pm he lugged a giant pitcher of purple fluid
up to the top of the conveyer belt, and everyone quickly
abandoned their stations.
Dizzy, I walked outside, gulped air, grasped the concrete
wall and vomited. Either no one noticed or it was so commonplace
that it wasn't worth noticing. I wandered into the break
room, where my 13 co-workers hesitantly received me. Slumped
around the hot table, sipping soda and munching candy bars
alongside their dirty gloves, they glanced at me warily.
I introduced myself to José, a middle-aged, gentle,
dark man who grasped his Coke with browned and calloused
hands. I asked him about his life. "I live near here, in
Canby," he said. "I have five children. I have worked there,
at a small nursery, for 10 years. I work there 50 hours
in a week. Today, I work for extra."
Next I met José's friend, a small, thin man whose
face and chest radiated a deep, sunburnt red. "I worked
this morning at the orchard," he told me. "I started at
6 and finished at 2. Today, here, I work until 11."
"Why do you work here?" I asked. Smiling slightly, he replied,
"I have to do something, yes? I have two children."
For me, that job was a piece of reporting; I never thought
about coming back. José and his friend didn't have
such a luxury.
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Willamette Week | originally
published October 27,
1999
|
