San Diego Nursery Receives Waste Board Award

SACRAMENTO -- The California Integrated Waste Management Board—the state's primary recycling agency—honors the unique reuse and recycling efforts of City Farmers Nursery of San Diego, by presenting owners Bill and Patty Tall with the eighth annual CalMAX Connection of the Year award.

"City Farmers Nursery is an innovative company whose creative solutions to the problem of excess waste have become a win-win for San Diego, the CalMAX program and the environment," said Waste Board Member Linda Moulton-Patterson, who will make the award this Sunday. "On behalf of the State, it's a great pleasure to honor Bill and Patty Tall for finding new uses for the many kinds of materials that California business generates and then must dump."

City Farmers Nursery, a nursery, deli, composting facility and environmentally friendly company on many fronts collects wood, cardboard, metal, plastic, and other salvageable items putting them to various uses on the nursery property, or using them in planter boxes and worm bins.

Owner Bill Tall estimates he has received more than 7.25 tons of materials and saved over $5,500 by using the Waste Board's CalMAX program.

Published by the Waste Board in catalog form and on the Internet (www.ciwmb.ca.gov/CalMAX), CalMAX is a directory that lists surplus equipment or materials that businesses and organizations from throughout the state want to get rid of. The directory also offers listings of organizations seeking specific surplus materials.

Listings are arranged by types of materials with contact names and phone numbers. The CalMAX motto is "Don't trash it, trade it!" More than 1,600 active listings in the database are available to help private companies, nonprofit organizations, and public agencies market their discards or find materials they need. Since the catalog was established in 1992, approximately 6,800 exchanges have taken place, finding homes for nearly 650,000 tons of reusable materials.

The CalMAX Connection of the Year award has been made annually since 1993 to a business or organization selected by the Waste Board for outstanding achievement in diverting materials to new uses, rather than disposal in landfills. The award program promotes successful exchanges of materials in an effort to motivate more businesses to list their discards with the CalMAX catalog, and to encourage more use of the CalMAX service.

The six-member Integrated Waste Management Board is responsible for protecting the public's health and safety and the environment through management of the estimated 56 million tons of solid waste generated in California each year. The Board's mandate is to work in partnership with local government, industry, and the public to achieve a 50 percent reduction in waste disposed by the end of the year, while ensuring environmentally safe landfill disposal. Currently, California is diverting an all-time high of 37 percent from the state's landfills.

The Waste Board is one of six boards and department within the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA).

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