The oil giant ExxonMobile is also in the plastics production industry, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta says they’ve been lying to the public for decades claiming that non-recyclable plastic was actually recyclable, just in order to sell more single-use plastic containers.

America’s largest oil and gas company ExxonMobile also happens to be the world’s largest producer of the resins that make up single-use plastics. But we feel just fine about using those single-use plastics, because we can just throw them in the recycling. Yet many things we throw in the recycling cannot actually be recycled, and California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Monday that less than 5% of the plastic from American recycling bins ever gets recycled into another product.

Bonta said this in a lawsuit against ExxonMobile for falsely claiming that non-recyclable plastics were recyclable, according to Reuters. And he alleges that ExxonMobile has knowingly been lying about this for years.

"For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn't possible," Bonta said in a statement picked up by KGO. "ExxonMobil lied to further its record-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health."

Reuters notes that Bonta also said, "Today's lawsuit shows the fullest picture to date of ExxonMobil's decades-long deception, and we are asking the court to hold ExxonMobil fully accountable for its role in actively creating and exacerbating the plastics pollution crisis through its campaign of deception.”

The heart of Bonta’s lawsuit is what Exxon calls its "advanced recycling" technology, which claims it transforms those used plastic products into fuel. Bonta’s office alleges that the technology is way behind where Exxon claims it is, and might not ever even work. But he says Exxon is continuing to promote it as effective, and in doing so duping the public into buying more plastic.

An ExxonMobil rep said in a response to Routers that "Suing people makes headlines but doesn't solve the plastic waste problem. Advanced recycling is a real solution.”

The lawsuit will likely take years to work out, or even produce a settlement. But otherwise, in the short term, Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday signed a law banning plastic shopping bags in California food stores, and that law takes effect on January 1, 2026. Of course, the plastic bag industry has sidestepped similar bans before.

Related: Why Not Everything You Recycle In SF Is Actually Getting Recycled [SFist]

Image: Waste plastic bottles in recycle bin on blue background (Getty Images)

You would think that overcharging SF residents by $95 million would lead to Recology losing its monopoly on local trash collection. It has not, and now it appears Recology will keep that monopoly after a competitor dropped their bid.

Recology has been the trash collector in San Francisco for more than 100 years, albeit under different names or organizations like Scavenger’s Protective Association, Golden Gate Disposal, Sunset Scavenger Company, and Norcal Waste Systems. A 1987 merger (and a 2009 rebrand) created the local trash-collection monopoly we now call Recology. But you figured Recology’s monopoly would not survive being ensnared in the Mohammed Nuru scandal, in which it was found that Recology overcharged SF residents by $95 million.

And so Recology’s long-held monopoly contract was put up for a competitive bid. The Arizona-based company Allied Waste Services put in a bid was named the “top scorer,” and was brought to the SF Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Finance Committee for consideration on February 28. Recology, naturally, brought up all manner of concerns like union representation and the number of trucks being their competitor might use.

But one of Recology’s concerns appeared to be legit. The Examiner reports that Allied Waste Services dropped their bid, amidst allegations that they intended to raise rates higher than what their bid indicated. And Allied Waste's statement to the Examiner indicates that may have been the case.

“With the city’s advisement that no changes to the rates can be accepted, yes, we confirm that we are withdrawing our proposal,” Allied Waste’s parent company Republic Services’s regional general manager Kathryn Tekulve said in a statement to the Examiner.

The SF City Administrator 's Office was not pleased with this result. "We are deeply disappointed by this outcome,” that office told the Examiner. “Significant staff resources were spent getting to this stage in the process with Allied so that we could present a contract to the Board of Supervisors for approval."

This may indeed be frustrating. But reading between the lines, one sure wonders if Allied Waste truly intended to stick with the rates they’d submitted. And of course, Recology is popping the champagne bottles.

“We applaud City leadership for taking the time to give this contract careful consideration,” a company representative said in a statement to the Examiner. “Recology’s proposal is better for the environment and will keep unionized jobs in the City, both of which align with San Francisco’s values.”

Recology is certainly tarnished by the Mohammed Nuru scandal. But they are not as despised as, say, PG&E. And now it may be in the can that they'll keep their monopoly on local trash collection.

Related: Recology's SF Companies Charged With Fraud In Nuru Scandal, Agree to Pay $36M In Penalties to Feds [SFist]

Image: Recology via Facebook

No need to dump your Christmas tree illegally, as Recology will simply take it for free and turn it into mulch if you put it with your curbside trash and recycling, as they have done for 30 years.

According to the Examiner, on Tuesday, Recology resumed their once-annual press event reminding San Franciscans that you can just put your Christmas tree out next to your recycling bin on your regular weekly trash and recycling collection, and Recology will simply take it away for free. It’s an annual event outside City Hall called the tree-chipping demonstration, meant to show how your tree will be shredded before it gets recycled into landscaping materials. Recology and City Hall have not held the tree-chipping demonstration since 2019, as obviously COVID precautions put the event on hold.

But this year’s tree-chipping demonstration looked a little different than the 2019 version. Namely, because it was missing its traditional participants Mohammed Nuru (currently serving a seven-year prison sentence for fraud and bribery), former SF Department of the Environment director Debbie Raphael (resigned in disgrace for soliciting $25,000 from Recology), and former Recology executive Paul Giusti (serving house arrest for bribing Nuru with $55,000 cash).

That said, Recology will still pick up your Christmas tree if it’s a real tree!

“We never want to see old Christmas trees left out on the sidewalk willy-nilly for extended periods of time where they can become hazards,” Nuru’s replacement, SF Public Works Director Carla Short, told KRON4. “San Francisco’s treecycling initiative helps keep our neighborhoods clean and safe by allowing residents to dispose of their old trees properly and put them to good use as mulch that can be used for landscaping.”

It’s easy. All you have to do is put your tree next to your blue recycling bin for your regularly scheduled weekly trash and recycling pickup, between January 2 and January 12, 2024. Do remove all lights, ornaments, and tinsel from the tree.

And do not place the tree in the compost bin, as pine is not good for compost. Trees six feet tall and taller should be cut in half for collection. And the SF Fire Department encourages you to put the tree out on the earliest day possible, to lower the risk of house fire.

“A dry Christmas tree that is dying, combined with any heat source, is a fire waiting to happen,” SFFD Captain Jonathan Baxter said Tuesday, per the Examiner. “Christmas tree fires are more common than you’d think.”

Recology generally collects one million pounds of Christmas trees each year in SF, all of which is chipped and mulched for use in landscaping projects.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Discarding Your Christmas Tree in SF [Joe]

Image: @RecologySF via Twitter

Just in time to probe through holiday wrapping paper and plastic packaging, a crew of new AI-assisted robots and optical scanning machines at San Francisco's Recology recycling center will help make sense of all the reusable bits some 800,000 San Franciscans dispose of daily.

As reported by KTVU, the SF recycling bastion deployed a string of sophisticated robots and scanning machines this past October that are now helping sift through the holiday rubbish, which amounts to a 17 percent increase over the 650 tons of trash the center already sees, every day.

"[One of the machines] is a robotic sorter," said Robert Reed, a Recology spokesman, to the media outlet. This year alone, the worker-owned company has invested more than $7 million in technology upgrades for the hub — four new robots and three new optical scanning machines — that'll aid the 175 workers at the location.

"It's the first of four robots that we've installed recently in this plant, this one is looking for plastic boxes like a salad clamshell container,” Reed says.

The new techy help at the facility — which costs Recology $1M for each unit — uses AI (artificial intelligence) and optical scanning that can be programmed to pick out certain kinds of plastic containers, based on their dimensions. Plastic is far more difficult to process than metals, because it can't be retrieved by traditional sorting magnets.

"Plastic is not magnetic so you can't pick it up with a magnet," Reed adds. "This does seventy, 7-0 selections a minute."

Still, about 80 percent of all recycled materials are processed by warm-bodied workers, even though the San Francisco Recology recycling center became the first in the nation to get those 3 state-of-the-art optical scanners, capable of automatically separating plastic bags from paper ones. Reed went on to say that the new machines are still necessary to more efficiently organize recycled goods for sale in the marketplace, crucial in a world that now "demands less than one percent impurities in the finished bales of recycling."

San Francisco hopes to reduce its landfill waste by half come 2030, with Recology San Francisco playing a critical role in seeing that goal to fruition.

Related: Why Not Everything You Recycle In SF Is Actually Getting Recycled

ATTN SF: You Can Now Recycle Bubble Wrap, Plastic Bags, And More In Your Blue Bins

Image: Flickr via protohiro

As American cities go, San Francisco is very good at recycling, we just aren't as good as we think we are — and most people still haven't gotten the memo that pizza boxes belong in the compost bin. The trade war with China, Recology's shady dealings, and the prevalence of non-recyclable plastic all contribute to a green delusion that we're keeping most of our waste out of landfills.

You may have seen the dire story two months back about how China had stopped buying America's plastic from recycling centers, causing a lot of it to end up in landfills despite consumers' best intentions. Now SF Weekly looks at the issue specifically through a local lens, via Recology, and where our green- and blue-bin stuff actually ends up.

You'll be heartened to hear that one of the biggest issues that causes recyclable material to go into dumps — "contamination" caused through mixed recycling like grease and coffee stains on paper, and sticky food residue on plastic — is less of an issue for SF than other places. A Recology rep tells SF Weekly that our city is "internationally known" for producing bales of recyclable paper, plastic, and aluminum with less than 0.5% contamination — a level that most cities consider impossible to achieve. This means our recyclables are more competitive to be sold to mills in Indonesia and elsewhere, now that China won't take them any more.

When it comes to glass, much of our city's recycled bottles and jars head to a facility in San Leandro that cleans it all, and then out to Modesto where it gets melted down and turned into new glass containers — a full-circle process that the Weekly says can take as little as six weeks.

Also in the good news column: We're getting better at composting. The city now composts more material than it recycles — 800 tons per day vs. 700 tons — and a new transfer station that opened in December will allow for as much as 1,000 tons of compost material per day.

Plastic is still the biggest culprit for our recycling woes, though, and the San Francisco Department of the Environment has adopted a new slogan of "Reduce/Reuse," given that so much our plastic can't be recycled at all. As department spokesman Peter Galotta tells the Weekly, the message they want to get out to consumers is that they should be refusing to purchase items in plastic containers in order to reduce this amount of plastic going to landfills.

The other bad news: A much ballyhooed figure of several years ago, touting that San Francisco was diverting 80% of its trash away from landfills, turns out to have been false, as you may have heard. Recology fudged their numbers to include completely non-recyclable construction waste, and in reality, we're now diverting about 60% of our waste — a figure that SF Weekly says has been flat for about a decade.

As the Examiner reported in late 2017, SF has been way behind schedule in reaching its 2020 "Zero Waste" goal, originally announced by the city in 2002.

But between banning plastic straws, Recology accepting bundled plastic bags, and venues like the Fillmore serving water in cans instead of plastic, maybe we're inching ahead.

Previously: ATTN SF: You Can Now Recycle Bubble Wrap, Plastic Bags, And More In Your Blue Bins

Some new Recology recycling guidelines that have been outlined here by sfrecycles.org but have not yet appeared on the Recology website, give us a whole bunch of new things to remember when it comes to what goes in what bin.

In the good news column, for those who enjoy sending less to landfills, Recology will now accept plastic bags of almost all types (preferably bundled together inside another plastic bag), bubble wrap (also stuffed into a plastic bag), plastic wrap (same), plastic over-wrap like from a tray of water bottles (same), inflatable air pillows used in packing (deflated, stuffed into a plastic bag), juice boxes, empty paper milk cartons, and paper coffee cups along with their lids. (Just to confused things, milk cartons without plastic spouts, and all waxy cardboard, are technically still compostable, but they want them recycled now.)

Also for the blue bin: bottle caps, spray cans, clean pizza boxes (greasy ones go to compost), empty and dry paint cans with no wet paint, and fabric and clothing of all kinds — it just has to be clean, and placed in a clear bag.

Black bins, headed to landfill, still get all polystyrene packaging and packing "peanuts," broken glass and ceramics, diapers, light bulbs (incandescent only, not fluorescent), pet litter, shiny wrappers, disposable gloves, disposable razors, and "mixed material" bags and packaging like the bags that roasted coffee comes in.

You can download and print the new August 2017 guidelines for your whole building right here, and you can now be that San Franciscan who lords over your neighbors and says, "Uh uh uh — the recycling rules have changed. That goes in this bin."

I know some of you secretly enjoy that.

There is no stronger click-bait than the words, "FREE SHIPPING."

San Franciscans (and Americans in general) don't have time to go to the General Store anymore and chit-chat with the old guy at the counter about last year's blueberry harvest. We shop online; from our clothes to our bulk toilet paper to our multi-package, prepare-at-home, pescatarian delivery meal plans. As a result, San Francisco's recycling company Recology plans to raise our rates this coming July.

The Chronicle's Rachel Swan reports in detail on Recology's shipping box woes. "People here work long hours, so instead of cooking, they're ordering online meal kits," Recology spokesman Robert Reed told the Chron. Recology calls this phenomenon, "The Amazon Effect" — starring Jennifer Lawrence, coming Fall 2018.

Swan explains, "The increase in cardboard and other forms of packaging — cellophane, polystyrene, clamshell containers, puffy plastic shipping pillows — is part of what's driving Recology to seek a 14 percent hike in the city's garbage rates in July, which already has approval from Public Works. Residents have until Tuesday to appeal the increase to the three-person Refuse Rate Board before it is made final."

(We've lamented our shady recycling skills before.)

Basically, Recology was set up for what we used to recycle — bottles, cans, and newspapers. Now they're picking up bulky cardboard delivery boxes, in greater volume and size than they've ever dealt with before. Materials we recycle are also more complicated, like plastic bottles with one kind of plastic cap and another kind of plastic label. Recology needs to revamp how they gather and sort recycling, and they need to pay people to do the job. Hence, rate hike. KPIX 5 thrilling calls this a "less-than-lovely side effect of convenience."

According to the Chronicle, Recology would use part of the money from the increase to reconfigure its trucks, which now use one single chamber for compost and split chambers for trash and recycling. Moving forward, compost and trash would be placed in split chambers, and our massive amount of recycling with get its own chamber.

"Recology actually had to flip the system on its head, because having half a truck to carry recyclables wasn't good enough any more," Heidi Sanborn of the California Product Stewardship Council told the Chron.

As for what we can do about this, options remain limited. Those opposed to the hike (although its our own fault) can protest of course. And also, we can start shopping at stores and using our arms to carry purchases home — or at the very least, try to combine your orders from Amazon so that items don't all arrive in separate boxes, whenever possible.

(Fun fact: A postal carrier came to my door with a delivery from Amazon as I was typing this.)

Related: More Of San Francisco's Trash Went To Landfills Last Year, Not Less

The answer to the question of whether our garbage overlords do any sorting of recyclables from our trash is NO, everything in the black bin goes to landfill automatically, and yes, that's a huge problem. This being our self-proclaimed San Francisco Appreciation Week, take a quick moment to familiarize yourself with one easy way to help green the city we love.

The question about the black bin came up for me a few weeks back while I was taking out the garbage (and the recycling, and the compost) with my roommate and our downstairs neighbor. I brought up the recent revelation from the team behind San Francisco's ambitious (and very unlikely) goal of creating just compost and recycling — zero waste — by 2020.

50 percent of the contents from black waste bins in SF is technically recyclable or compostable, which is why we produce 650 tons per day of waste and just 600 tons per day of recycling and compost put together. Those numbers, then, should be 325 tons of waste per day and 925 tons of recycling and compost per day.

Who cares, our neighbor said: Recology will sort through the black bin for us. Sure, he added, that's more work for them. But mistakes you might make come out in the wash, so to speak. A bit of recycling here and there that's in the black bin by accident will make its way back into use, right?

**record scratch** "WRONG.

As Peter Gallotta, the Public Relations and Information Coordinator for the San Francisco Department of the Environment explained to SFist, it's just one pernicious rumor that keeps San Francisco from being the green city we'd all like it to be.

"Everything you put in the black bin is taken to 'the pit' (Recology’s transfer station), and then driven to the landfill," Gallotta explains. "The black landfill bin does not get sorted by someone else. This is actually our responsibility as residents or businesses in San Francisco."

Though some will float another tall tale regarding the black bin — that scavengers or homeless people will sort through for recyclables, the Chronicle busted that one this week. They quoted Recology spokesperson Robert Reed, who assures them that "the vast majority of bins Recology empties in San Francisco 'are not poached.”'

While it's easy to see the wastefulness in a glass bottle that goes to the landfill because it didn't get sorted, Gallotta adds that most people don't see the harm in bit of compost — a banana peel or whatever — that ends up at 'the pit.' But "when you put food scraps (like banana peels and meat bones) in the landfill, they break down without oxygen (anaerobically) and produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas and major contributor to climate change," Gallotta and his team explained.

A few more quickies: Coffee cups are compostable, worn out clothes can be recycled here, and plastic food containers only need to be *mostly* clean to go in the blue bin.

Remember to compost, kids **record scratch** it's the law, and it's free to request a kitchen compost container from the city.

Previously: 50% Of Contents From Black SF Waste Bins Is Recyclable Or Compostable

How do we put out so much waste in San Francisco, about 650 tons per day compared to just 600 tons of recycled and composted material combined? Simply by throwing away compostable and recyclable material, of course, stuffing our black bins about halfway with items that should logically have been placed in the green or blue ones.

That's according to Guillermo Rodriguez, Department of the Environment spokesperson, and comes from an article in the Chronicle checking in on a lofty goal set in 2003 for the city to do away with waste altogether, producing nothing by recycling and compost by 2020.

"We haven’t hit our targets," Rodriguez confesses, adding that the zero waste plan was a "big, audacious goal” and that to get anywhere near it "we need our businesses and residents to do a much better job.”

Two years ago, Nate Silver and his FiveThirtyEight data wizards crunched the numbers regarding San Francisco's much-praised system of trash diversion. After 12 years of decline in the number of tons of waste sent to landfills, in 2013, the trend reversed, they found. That and more prompted the city's zero waste manager to confront the 2020 goal and say "we want to get as close as we can to that," implying that it would be nearly impossible to meet.

At Recology’s Transfer Station on Tunnel Avenue (or, to the layman, the dump), Rodriguez told the Chron, "This is the sad place — it should be empty... This is where we need residents to do a better job."

Can we put blame on new residents haven't learned the ropes about what to compost and what to recycle? Perhaps. (Please see this guide at WhatBin.com if that includes you.)

While SF is the only city in the country to compost more than it recycles — the practice was mandated in 2009 — for the city to truly be the environmental exemplar it's sometimes held up as, it's going to take a bit more work from all parties. Until then, the grass really might be greener, at least proverbially, among our urban rivals.

Previously: More Of San Francisco's Trash Went To Landfills Last Year, Not Less

For a recycling scavenger whom CBS 5 is calling by the pseudonym "Daniel", it all boils down to the weight of his haul. The cans and bottles he scores from dumpsters in alleys behind San Francisco's downtown offices all hit the scale when he cashes them in at local redemption centers, and if he's doing it right, Daniel can make $1,000 a week, and about $48,0000 a year, or so he tells the station.

Daniel and scavengers like him might be unique in the current statewide California Redemption Value deposit system, instituted in 1987 — they're making money. The system is what Recycling Today calls "an outdated compensation method" that's lagged as scrap values for PET (polyethylene terephthalate), glass, and aluminum have spiraled downward for the past four years.

As the nonprofit Container Recycling Institute tells Recycling Today, certified redemption centers handle almost 90 percent of the state's 18 billion recyclable bottles. However, in the last year, 269 of them have closed, leaving 1,800 remaining.

“When it comes to falling scrap prices, these small redemption centers are the proverbial 'canaries in the coal mine,'" Institute president Susan Collins tells Recycling Today.

To subsidize the redemption centers, the state's recycling program, CalRecycle, issues “processing payments” to them. Even with those, “It’s really, really, really, difficult to stay in business,” the owner of Our Planet Recycling in San Francisco tells the station.

According to Collins, "If the current downward commodity pricing trend continues without structural adjustments to the state’s processing payment formula, recycling centers’ cumulative net losses will inevitably force more of them out of business." The cost of that? "Additional closures will mean not only more job losses and lost recycling opportunities, but a real loss to the people of California, to the sustainable economy and to the environment,” Collins says

Experts like Jennifer Mangold of UC Berkeley’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability agree that the status quo isn't sustainable. But something's got to give. #8220;It’ll have to be funded somehow, by consumers or legislation, or government agencies," she says. "[Somehow] it will have to be funded to make economic sense,”

Still, for the Daniels out there, commodities prices and subsidies be damned. That CRV refund stays the same: 5 cents for every container under 24 ounces, and 10 cents for ones of 24 ounces or more.

Recology instructed San Francisco school officials to not recycle the recyclable plastic trays the district uses daily to serve students food. So reports the Chronicle, which details the policies of the city-contracted waste company that began in 2013 and may have only stopped when questions started being asked about the bizarre instructions given to school officials.

“Recology has told us they don’t want any plastics because they’re too soiled,” the principal at Commodore Sloat Elementary Schoo, Greg John, told the Chron. “It’s now institutionalized.” Of course, the trays are perfectly recyclable — covered in food or not. Food scraps mixed in with paper, which is recycled in the same bins, lowers the resale value of the paper for the company, however, and this is the main problem.

In response to what is clearly a PR nightmare for the company, spokesperson Robert Reed dug a little deeper and attempted to shift the blame to school children too "lazy" to rinse off the trays before disposing of them.

“If you were just lazy and tossed a plastic tray into the recycling that had spaghetti sauce on it, you would be diminishing the quality of the paper that’s getting ultimately recycled,” Reed said.

Recology later attempted to backpedal.

“We accept all hard plastic food trays for recycling,” noted Reed. “We only ask that students who do not finish their meals shake any uneaten food into the green composting collection bins that we provide.”

What about that whole zero landfill waste by 2020 thing, though?

Related: More Of San Francisco's Trash Went To Landfills Last Year, Not Less

Nate Silver's swell number-crunching blog FiveThirtyEight just did an exposé of sorts about San Francisco's long-held status as the nation's mecca for trash diversion — specifically the oft-cited figure that, as a city, we successfully began diverting 80 percent of our waste to recycling and compost as of 2010. We remain ahead of most cities in the nation when it comes to this, and we're one of the only ones with a citywide composting program, yet the amount of waste that S.F. sent to landfills in 2013 was about 6 percent higher than the year previous at 456,764 tons, ending 12 straight years of consistent declines in this number.

This could be explainable because of the major population boom we've experienced that's yet to be precisely quantified — it's thought to be somewhere in the vicinity of 30,000 to 40,000 new people since 2010. But it's also likely that amidst this glut of new residents we have some people who don't really know their way around the green and blue bins — I have some new-transplant neighbors who regularly throw clothing and other misguided items into the recycling, and they don't even bother with the compost.

The biggest thing in the new piece is that FiveThirtyEight gets the city’s zero waste manager Robert Haley on the record saying that the announced goal of sending zero trash to landfills by 2020 is probably not realistic, but "we want to get as close as we can to that."

Also, that 80-percent diversion figure is kind of a PR trick — San Francisco counts construction waste like rock and crushed concrete in that figure, bumping up the number above what most cities who don't count that stuff can claim. If you don't count construction waste, S.F.'s diversion rate is more like 60 percent, according to Samantha McBride, an assistant professor at New York's Baruch College School of Public Affairs. The SF Bay Guardian has also gone after the city's waste management company, Recology, noting that the 80 percent figure was fudged, and that other figures have been fudged as well in order to win the company some incentive payments totaling $1.36 million.

Also interesting: There's an explanation of how exactly the composting process works at Recology's Vacaville plant.

We're fast on our way to playing second fiddle to Seattle or Portland in the recycling game if we don't turn things around. So educate your neighbors! Get annoying about composting! Or don't if you prefer not to embarrass yourself.

[FiveThirtyEight]

There's been an ongoing fight for several years between neighbors in the vicinity of Dolores, Duboce, and Market Streets and homeless advocates over the eviction of the outdoor, nonprofit recycling center at the upper corner of the nearby Safeway parking lot. It's a business that many have seen as a blight on the area because of the noise and the clientele it attracts, namely homeless or poor people pushing shopping carts full of recyclables. Safeway served eviction papers to the recycling center a year ago, but the center has refused to vacate, and now they're more than two weeks past an agreed-upon deadline to leave.

A group of about 30 protesters gathered at the San Francisco Community Recyclers yesterday, as SFGate and KRON4 reported (see video below), on a day that the center did not open. Protesters say that the closing of the center deals a huge blow to homeless people who depend on the place for a meager income. It is one of the few recycling centers in the city that pays cash in exchange for recyclables.

About 1900 people have signed a petition at MoveOn.org to keep the center open, however it appears to be a done deal. Supervisor Scott Wiener has been pushing for the center to close since he first took office, having fielded many complaints from the neighborhood, and now he says, "It is time for the center to close down."

In early 2013, another community recycling center in the Haight was bulldozed, leading to similar protests.

The center at the Safeway complex dates back a couple of decades, after the 1987 California Bottle Bill made it mandatory for grocery stores to provide recycling centers near their premises or else accept bottle drop-offs in-store. Wiener and others have been pushing for the city to revamp its recycling program and install new recycling centers in less densely populated areas, but no such effort has yet taken shape. Nonetheless, recycling centers like these have become obsolete for everyone except the homeless in the age of curbside recycling.

A last-ditch effort by activists is to ask that Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi take a political stand and refuse to dispatch deputies to carry out the eviction. Following the signed agreement to vacate, the recycling center may just be leaving of its own accord. According to Hoodline, the Sheriff's Department has the eviction "scheduled and in the queue."

[SFGate]
[KRON4]
[Hoodline]

Previously: Market Street Safeway Evicts Recycling Center, Expands Starbucks

You would think Oakland cops had better things to do than arrest frail elderly people who are sorting through trash and trying to make a few nickels by collecting cans and bottles. But, apparently, that was not the case last Saturday night when police had to respond to a "citizen's arrest" of a 70-year-old Chinese-speaking man who was doing just that. And they incarcerated him. And because he couldn't speak any English or ask for a phone call, his family thought he'd gone missing.

A friend of SFist alerted us to the situation saying:

I'd really like to give a piece of my mind to the unknown neighbor who called OPD to make a citizens arrest of one of our hood's nicest recycling collectors ... Since the ancient man has no ID and can't spell his name for the officer, OPD can't just give him a citation and get back to work. No. Instead OPD has to take him downtown to fingerprint him. The cop literally just asked me if I could store the old man's push cart for him.

The cops had no name to put on the citation, and no way of recording him in the system, so when his family tried to figure out what happened they were told the police had no record of the arrest. A couple of days later the Missing poster above showed up on neighborhood lampposts, which explained that the 70-year-old missing man only speaks TaiShanese. Allegedly, according to police, the man was carrying a makeshift trash-sorting stick with a prong on the end that "looked scary," and this was something mentioned by the arresting citizen. He was taken and held on $5,000 bond at Santa Rita County Jail on some alleged "assault" charge.

Thankfully, after a court hearing on Wednesday, the man was released into the custody of his family, but HOW RIDICULOUS IS THIS? Sure, stealing recycling is a crime and results in citations. But really, people? Five days behind bars for an elderly man? Awesome job with those quality-of-life crimes, OPD.

Update: An official report from the police describes the alleged assault that the citizen described to police on November 9.

Our officer was called by a citizen who claimed [the man, mistakenly referred to here as "Mr. Yu"] was dumping garbage on the street while looking for cans and bottles in a dumpster. When the citizen confronted him and asked him to put the garbage back in the dumpster, "Mr. Yu" allegedly attacked him with the stick he had. The citizen insisted on a citizen' s arrest and the officer took "Mr. Yu" into custody. The officer, who speaks Chinese, was trying to get enough information from "Mr. Yu" to write him a citation for the assault, but was unable to identify him sufficiently, so he was required by policy to transport him to the jail to be fingerprinted. The officer tried for over 20 minutes to use our law enforcement data systems to identify him, but was unable to based on the information provided by "Mr. Yu". The officer even went so far as to ask two concerned citizens who stopped to ask what was going on if they knew "Mr. Yu" or where he lived. Apparently, he told the officer he was homeless and did not provide him with an address to check.

Apparently the entire incident was recorded by the officer's audio/video recorder.