CalMAX Sustainability Summer 2004

CalMAX users are asked to report their successful connections when they occur. CalMAX staff members also check with users quarterly to see if they have had connections. Below are a few highlights from connections that happened in the first five months of this year which involve: Sacramento Regional Waste Water Treatment Plant's Bufferlands (dripline); Franklin Elementary School's Garden of Learning (dripline), burlap bags, plastic buckets; Elk Grove Community Garden (dripline and burlap);  Mills-Peninsula Health Services (office furniture and medical equipment); Emeezze Cloth Recycling (clothing); used fence boards for a chicken coop; and patio doors for an organic farm greenhouse.

Drip Line, Buckets, Burlap

In the past ten years, the Sacramento Regional Waste Water Treatment Plant has been restoring riparian habitat in the Bufferlands, a 27,000-acre preserve that surrounds their Elk Grove treatment plant. This restoration has involved planting about 15,000 trees, which needed irrigation during their establishment phase. As those trees have matured, Bufferlands staff has been removing the thousands of feet of half-inch poly tubing drip lines used to water them.

Roger Jones, Senior Natural Resource Specialist for the plant, got an email from someone about CalMAX about the time they began amassing the half-inch tubing at their facility. "We’ve used as much as 50,000 feet of tubing and decided to surplus about 15,000–20,000 feet," explains Jones. "Because we won’t be doing this level of restoration again we don’t need it for our own use. About a year ago we put an ad in CalMAX and have gotten lots of calls and people coming to pick up tubing. We have about half of the tubing left. We have some emitters too, but mostly tubing."

“Some people come in cars, and some in trucks to pick it up” continues Jones. “We have had individuals, small farmers, and people from schools, nonprofits and community gardens.”

Franklin Elementary School in Oakland also got some of the poly tubing to finish their Gardening of Learning project. The project, explains teacher Lisa Lam, included the building of five new beds with drip irrigation, an outdoor seating structure made of reclaimed wood, a used brick pathway, and native plants along the edge of the garden.

“Along the way, we also wanted to educate the children at Franklin Elementary about diverting waste and so set up a vermicomposting system using secondhand 5-gallon buckets,” notes Lam. “We got the buckets free from a CalMAX listing by an Alameda County jail in Milpitas which had lots of buckets previously used to store food. We’ve just started using the CalMAX catalog this year and are so grateful to have gotten a hold of it. Whoever came up with the idea was a genius.”

Another taker was the citizens group that is working on starting Elk Grove’s first community garden, a project of Elk Grove Food Bank Services. Since the garden is still in the development stage, Jones is holding some of the tubing for them. Garden coordinator Soleil Tranquilli learned about CalMAX by attending one of the Recycled Content Product Trade Shows. Through CalMAX, she also has gotten burlap bags that will be used for mulch in the garden paths as well as for moisture retention around plants and the compost piles. She now checks CalMAX regularly, looking for the many supplies, like the tubing, that the garden will need.

Jones is very positive about CalMAX. “If we had material like this again, I would certainly use CalMAX,” he notes. He says word about CalMAX has spread to his friends and co-workers: “There are a lot of people I know that are now regularly checking the online lists.”

Contact Information:
Roger Jones
Certified Wildlife Biologist
SRWTP Bufferlands
8521 Laguna Station Rd.
Elk Grove, CA 95758
(916) 875-9174
jonesro@saccounty.net
www.bufferlands.com

Franklin’s Garden of Learning Project
Lisa Lam
Franklin Elementary School
915 Foothill Blvd,
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 879-1160  
lisepise@hotmail.com

Elk Grove Community Garden
Soleil Tranquilli
(916) 685-8010
SoleilPaz@aol.com

Furniture & Equipment

Gail Lee, director of Environmental Health and Safety with nonprofit Mills-Peninsula Health Services (MPHS), started using CalMAX a couple of years ago. MPHS offers health care from two main facilities, one in San Mateo and one in Burlingame.

With office remodels and facility use changes occurring over time, MPHS had generated surplus office furniture, waiting room furniture, and medical equipment. The materials accumulated in an adjacent storage building. When Lee found out that the storage building was going to be torn down, she started to look for new homes for all of the furniture. She placed an ad with CalMAX and has been steadily finding takers. Schools, start-up businesses, and charitable organizations have contacted Lee and helped empty the building.

“We had 44 portable bedside tables. Someone from a local school saw them and figured they would make great stands for audio-visual equipment as they could be wheeled around,” explains Lee. “They took them all.”

“There was a man from the Stanford linear accelerator who came and took a lot of used medical equipment which they repair and resell. A couple of schools have taken a lot of the material. Recently a teacher from a high school in Fremont took some lockers.” Another company regularly collects medical supplies and equipment for donation to south and Central American clinics and hospitals.

Although Lee gets a lot of calls, “there is also a problem with people who say they are coming but don’t.” She has tried to deal with this by setting it up a time for several interested people to come at once; that way hopefully at least some will show up. “Overall it has been very successful. In 2003 we donated 17.3 tons of reusable furniture and equipment.”

After the storage building is emptied, Lee says they will have a smaller warehouse to store material so they will have to move the material out more routinely.

Contact Information:
Gail Lee, REHS, MS, HEM
Director, Environmental Health & Safety
Mills-Peninsula Health Services,
1783 El Camino Real, Burlingame, CA
(650) 696-5706
leeg1@sutterhealth.org
www.mills-peninsula.org

Clothing

Emeka Iwuji has been in the clothing recycling business for over twenty years. His company, Emeezze Cloth Recycling and Exports, started by buying used clothing from various charity thrift stores, bundling and shipping it to the Caribbean and Africa where a sister company would sell it.

Starting in 1992, Iwuji has expanded his business to include selling used clothing to factories that are actually recycling it. He is currently selling to two plants, one in Jamaica and one in Togo. At these plants, the clothing is separated by material type (cotton, polyester, wool, etc.) and ground up. It is then sold to other companies for making packing material, upholstery stuffing, padding for clothing, and carpet underlayment.

Iwuji has been using CalMAX since it started. His most recent connection was in March 2004 with a St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop in Oregon that contacted him after reading his CalMAX wanted ad. He bought about three trailer loads of used clothing from them, totaling about 50,000 pounds. Most recently, Iwuji was contacted by Salinas Valley State Prison about getting some of their used rags.

Although Emeezze gets some material from Oregon, Nevada, and other parts of California, most of the used clothing comes from the Bay Area because of the cost of transportation.

Contact Information:
Emeka Iwuji
Emeezze Cloth Recycling and Exports
3455 Collins Ave
Richmond, CA 94806
(510) 860-3233
ezzekanu@aol.com

Redwood Fencing

Mark Willstatter had two parallel fences on his property in Cameron Park, one closer to the house. When part of the closer fence fell down, he was faced with either rebuilding the fence or removing it. He opted to remove the fence and ended up with 100 linear feet of reusable redwood fence boards.

Willstatter did not want to throw the material away, so began looking on the internet for ways he might be able to get it reused. He found CalMAX, but at first thought he could not use the service because it was for businesses. Soon after, a co-worker at his wife’s office also mentioned CalMAX. Willstatter then contacted program staff and learned that, although the target audience of CalMAX is business, he could post his ad, which also provided a resource that businesses could use.

Within a few days of his ad going up on the website, Willstatter got a call from someone in rural Orangevale who was looking for scrap wood to build a chicken coop and tractor shed. “They had been trying to get scrap wood from contractors unsuccessfully,” explained Willstater, “so getting that wood was very helpful to them.”

Patio Doors

The Estipulars were replacing three 6 x 8 foot glass patio doors in their San Mateo County home and did not want to throw the old ones out. They called Habitat for Humanity and some construction businesses but did not find a taker for the doors.

One of the people they called told them about CalMAX, so the Estipulars placed an ad in November, 2003. During the following few months they received a few calls and then made a connection in May, 2004. The man who took the doors was starting an organic farm in Oregon and wanted to use them for greenhouses. “We haven’t had the chance to use CalMAX again yet,” reports Micki Estipular, but “we are happy to know this service is available.”

CalMAX Connections Home

Last updated: August 01, 2008