John Byrne Barry | johnbyrnebarry.com

From Sociology to Salvage

by John Byrne Barry | Oct 16, 2015 | Wasted Author Tour

Dan Knapp’s Relentless Pursuit of Zero Waste

“Waste isn’t waste until it’s wasted.” So says Dan Knapp and his wife, Mary Lou Van Deventer, who own and manage the three-acre salvage yard in West Berkeley called Urban Ore.

Near Ashby and Seventh Streets, Urban Ore sells doors, windows, sinks, bathtubs, furniture, cabinets, housewares, hardware, appliances, even jewelry. Thirty-eight people keep the place open ten hours a day, seven days a week, and thousands derive at least some of their incomes from trading goods and services there.

That’s quite an accomplishment, which is why I used Dan and Mary Lou’s quote as the epigram in my new book, Wasted, and got in touch with Dan to check on his latest thinking. Below is an edited transcript of our phone and email conversations.

Tell me about how you came to be part of the recycling world.

In the 1960s and 70s, I was a VISTA trainer and then a community organizer for Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” After getting my doctorate, I spent eight years as a professor of sociology, first in Eugene, Oregon, then Springfield, Illinois.

The first time I got involved in garbage was when some friends I was working with in Lane County, Oregon, hosted an annual fair, the Oregon Country Faire, and I took a part-time job collecting trash for the event.

Every morning four or five of us got up early, fired up a old flatbed, and drove past all the campsites and food businesses, stopping to accept their trash — they handed it up to us in bags and boxes.

Nearly everything went to the dump and got buried. We didn’t do much recycling, but our crew talked about how an alternative disposal system might work. (Today, the Oregon Country Faire today generates almost no waste at all.)

I was astonished at how much waste there was. Especially food. All the useful stuff at the dump was crushed and rendered useless, under the banner of “the sanitary landfill.” This compulsory wasting looked like a much bigger problem than I had ever known, and addressing it appealed to me.

Later, at Sangamon State (now University of Illinois–Springfield), my teaching morphed into 20th Century homesteading — building greenhouses, planting orchards, that kind of thing. I bought an old farm truck, recruited students to crew it, and we would crawl slowly down Springfield’s alleys, picking up wood, windows, and doors that we could build with, and hauling in other discarded things we could sell or trade.

But I was increasingly unhappy being a professor, and I moved my family back to Eugene. I went every week to the dump for the Growers’ Market Food Cooperative on distribution day. I also worked one day a week as a truck driver for Garbagio’s, a pioneering curbside collection company that picked up discarded food as well as the usual recyclables. I learned how to process and sort materials.

All of us on the crew thought that sorting discards had therapeutic properties. I still do.

How did you get to Berkeley and found Urban Ore?

I would probably have stayed in Eugene if I had been successful with the Office of Appropriate Technology, my first major outing as an applied sociologist. But I, and we, crashed and burned , and when I left, it felt like exile.

The county solid waste manager never bought in to what we were doing. “Dan, you’ve got to understand there’s nothing valuable in garbage.” He paused to let that sink in. “If it was valuable, it wouldn’t be in the garbage.”

I hitchhiked to Berkeley, where I met Bob Beatty, who hired me as a metal scavenger at the dump, out on San Francisco Bay north of the Berkeley pier. (It closed in 1983, and is now Cesar Chavez Park.)

I opened a little metal recovery depot by the side of the road on the way to the tip, and people started stopping to unload or to chat. Several times a day I would cruise the tipping area, picking up anything I thought I could sell for scrap, or for reuse. I set up tables and created displays. Income increased.

I learned to generate “clean” material by separating steel screws from aluminum frames, breaking glass into bins, and sorting accurately. Selling for reuse was a steadier source of income, better than selling for scrap, so my metal handling depot quickly became a reuse store specializing in hardware and parts.

I turned any money earned over to the nonprofit that had the salvage contract, Bay Cities Resource Recovery Depot. When it went bankrupt, we kept going, and I registered Urban Ore. The Board of Equalization gave us a sales tax number, and we started collecting and paying sales taxes. Our first year’s revenue was $170,000. Last year, in 2014, it was $2.6 million.

We still don’t know what the top of the market is. So much more is being conserved than in the past, but there’s always more stuff.

What do you feel most proud of beyond your own successful salvage yard?

I’m proud of what we’ve done for the language of recycling, which is very different from the language of solid waste. I still love the theory of Total Recycling, or Zero Waste, starting with the 12 master categories I came up with in the mid-1980s. By then, I’d been working for more than six years at dumps and outside them, and I saw everything that came into the landfill before the compactors came along to push and smash everything. Every day in Berkeley, about four hundred vehicles came to the dump, from pickups to trailers to 18-wheelers.

With my wife Mary Lou Van Deventer, who I’d met when I showed slides about salvaging at a brown-bag lunch in Sacramento, I started writing a book called Total Recycling: Realistic Ways to Approach the Ideal. Mary Lou came up with a single slide for me to use in presentations — a classic pie chart — that showed the 12 master categories of salable commodities.

If you build facilities that divert all of the 12 commodity types, you’ll be set to approach Zero Waste in incremental steps.

Thirty-five years later, we’re still salvaging at the Berkeley transfer station every day with a three-person crew. We divert an average of three tons a day from the transfer station alone, one ton per scavenger.

In my book, Wasted, a multinational named Consolidated Scavenger scoffs at recycling when it first comes on the scene, but then once it becomes popular, the company tries to take recycling over and kick the little guys off the field. It appears that that has happened. There don’t seem to be as many small recycling operations today.

I think it’s a well-cultivated myth that small-biz recycling is no more. Many start-up operations sold out, but many, many more opened across all commodity types. Take one example — concrete recycling, which started in earnest during the mid-1980s.

When I started at the Berkeley landfill, 18-wheelers full of broken concrete or asphalt were there every day.Last year, according to C & D Recycling, their collective throughput was 190 million tons!

In 2004, a big engineering firm, RW Beck, found that the recycling industry included 56,000 businesses, employing 1.1. million people, and generating $220 billion in revenue — that was comparable in size to the U.S. auto industry.

There are people operating niche enterprises all over the place. Right across from Urban Ore is Artisans Burlwood, which has been making furniture out of urban-grown redwood tree trunks since 1971. Just one of those tree trunks can weigh thousands of pounds, and this little company handles hundreds a year.

There were a lot of powerful ideas back when the modern recycling movement came on the scene, and many have never fully realized their promise. What did you hope would happen that hasn’t?

No one ever said it would be easy. Even so, from start-up in 1970 to something as big financially as the U.S. auto industry in 2004 is quite an accomplishment.

One of my biggest disappointment is that even now, it’s difficult to get many of our colleagues to go along with the word “disposal.” Disposal, in their mind, equals landfill or incineration.

I would argue that that the word disposal belongs to all of us in the resource recovery business — reusers, recyclers, and composters. The wasters don’t own the word.

Why not call it reuse instead of disposal?

Reuse is only one of several forms of disposal. Recycling is another. Composting, too. Wasting as well. They are all forms of disposal, all competing for supply, and competing for the disposal service fees, too. That’s the key dynamic. A free market for disposal service fees is what government should be protecting, not incinerators and monopolistic takeovers.

At Urban Ore we call it disposal, because we know in our bones that we’re providing a valuable service. We make things “go away,” legally. For awhile we even got paid disposal service fees by the city — back when we were moving across town and were stretched financially, Berkeley was paying us $40 for every documented ton we took off the transfer station floor. It still left the the City with $86 per ton of profit, because they didn’t have to haul our stuff to landfill even though they got paid $126 per ton to do so. But then the city hit a financial wall because of declining waste, and they stopped paying us.

What’s happening locally these days? In Berkeley or the Bay Area? What would you say is the most interesting or important development recently, or on the horizon?

There are several developments that show promise. One of the best is a state measure ensuring that a manufactured form of waste designed to be landfilled, called “alternative daily cover,” will no longer be counted as recycling. This will stimulate the aerobic composting industry.

Another is the realization that recycling is not now, and never has been, without significant cost. It is a superior disposal service, after all, and it requires investment and people. There’s a cost flap going in Oakland and Berkeley right now, one that is long overdue in some ways.

The problem is that people thought wasting would never go away, but it is going away. Raising the cost of wasting to pay for curbside recycling no longer works, because wasting has declined so much. In Berkeley, the amount of waste going to landfill declined 44 percent in 11 years by 2013. Now that there’s less waste, the waste managers have to figure out how to pay for curbside recycling.

Recycling and wasting continue to compete in the disposal marketplace, both for the materials and for the service fees. That’s not going to change anytime soon.

Author’s note: I’ll be reading from Wasted at Urban Ore on October 22 (Thursday) at 7 pm.

Reading Wasted as a Reader, Not an Author

by John Byrne Barry | Oct 12, 2015 | Wasted Author Tour

Before I read the first chapter of Wasted to an small, but engaged crowd at the Ecology Center, I talked about how I came to write the book. My favorite part was describing how, last year, I had the opportunity to read my own book as if I were a reader and not its author.

In the 1990s, in addition to serving on the Ecology Center board of directors and working at the Sierra Club as a writer and designer, I was covering recycling and other environmental issues for a variety of publications, including the East Bay Express, where I wrote a cover story titled “The End of Garbage.”

I visited the Altamont Landfill, the San Leandro transfer station, Urban Ore and other salvage yards, and interviewed dozens of people. I had so much material that my first draft was like spaghetti, strands of pasta twisting all over the place.

Eventually, I wrestled that monster draft into submission and distilled it into something suitable for print, and got lots of kudos for the story. Some folks suggested I turn it into a book.

I had enough material for half a book already. Probably more. And the idea of writing a book had always appealed to me. The thing is, I rarely read nonfiction books. I read magazines and news stories, sometimes even the really long ones in the New Yorker, all the way to the end. But a nonfiction book, beginning to end, not that often. A couple I loved come to mind — Cadillac Desert, Fast Food Nation. Both had great storytelling. They were written like novels.

What I wanted to write was the kind of book I liked to read. Fiction. Fast-paced, with a dramatic story and compelling characters, well-written, but not necessarily something you’d study in literature class.

So I took a couple classes at UC Extension, one on mystery writing, another on writing a novel. Somewhere along the way, I decided that a mystery set in the gritty and malodorous world of garbage and recycling might be fun to write and read.

Through the UC Extension class, I connected with some other writers and ended up becoming part of a critique group that lasted 12 years. Some of my fellow writers read Wasted many times, often in two- or three-chapter chunks, with months in between, sometimes multiple drafts of the same sections.

Then, in the early 2000s, satisfied that I was “finished,” I sent out query letters to about 60 or 70 agents. I got about eight or nine nibbles, two who read the whole book, and one who I was sure was going to take me on, but didn’t. She said she really liked it, but didn’t think she could sell it. She may say that to everyone she turns down.

I put the book aside, got on with my life, and a few years later, wrote and published Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher, a thriller set during the 2008 presidential campaign in New Mexico.

I had intended from the beginning to self-publish, because it was easier than ever, and because I knew that not only might I once again not be able to find an agent, but if I did, getting the book to print could take a while and I wanted to be done in time for the 2012 presidential campaign.

I only missed that by a year.

Finding readers has been challenging, but response has been heartening. Enough so that, in the spring of last year, I decided to go back and read Wasted again, rework it one or two more times and get it out onto the marketplace.

One day in the spring of 2014, when I was about three-quarters of the way through the book, and it was lunchtime and I was hungry, but I couldn’t stop reading. The story was racing along, and I could not remember where it was going. I was totally hooked.

It had been maybe five years since I’d last picked it up, and I read the book almost as if I were reading it for the first time. I’d forgotten enough of the details that I couldn’t wait to find out what happened next. That was a pretty thrilling feeling. The only time I experienced Wasted as a reader and not as the author.

Of course, I also saw plenty of potential for improvement, so I spent another year, rewriting it, sharing it with beta readers, and making it at least 10 percent better.

You can read the first three chapters at greennoir.com.

My next reading is on Saturday, October 17, 7 pm, at Copperfields Books in San Rafael.

Surrounded by English Professors

by John Byrne Barry | Sep 24, 2015 | Wasted Author Tour

My first reading and signing for Wasted came in Detroit, Michigan, where I was surrounded by English professors — physically and mentally. I was one of three authors on a panel at the University of Detroit Mercy, called “On Telling a Story and Getting Others to Read It,” with UDM Professor Nick Rombes, and retired UDM Professor R.J. Reilly. (My brother Michael Barry, who introduced us, is also a professor, and chair of the UDM English Department. Our father was an English professor at Loyola University for more than 30 years.)

Hemmed in as I was by English professors, I began by disavowing any presumption that I was writing literature. “I’m writing entertainment,” I said. “If there’s any literary merit in my books, that’s an fortuitous accident.”

That said, I added, I did set Wasted in the gritty and malodorous world of garbage and recycling, which is rich with resonant themes of reinvention, transition, and discarding that which no longer serves us.

I also mentioned that I was in Minneapolis recently and attended a friend’s book reading. He recounted asking a bookseller what was the difference between literature and genres like mystery, suspense, or thriller. The bookseller responded that people read the genre books.

UDM

Early on, I asked for a show of hands. How many of the two dozen or so participants had thought about writing a novel?

Almost everyone.

How many have started writing one?

About half.

Completed one?

A handful.

Published one.

I think there was one person in addition to the three of us on the stage.

R.J. (Bob) Reilly is 90, and retired from UDM before my brother started there. Though he’d done plenty of academic writing while teaching, including an acclaimed essay on Henry James, he didn’t begin writing novels until he retired. With the help of his daughter, Mary McCall, who teaches technical writing at UDM, he’s published two novels and a volume of short stories. His daughter read a moving passage from The Prevalence of Love about how war dehumanizes everyone in its wake.

Nick Rombes, seated on the other side of me, is a film buff, whose novel, the The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing, follows a film librarian who watches a stockpile of unknown films by acclaimed directors, burns them, and then describes them to a journalist from memory. Rombes talked about the appeal of misremembering.

I read the first chapter from Wasted — you can see the first three chapters here — and then mostly talked about the process of publishing.

What seemed to resonate most, if the questions were at all representative, was how much publishing has changed. Bob Reilly said the hardest part wasn’t the writing, but preparing the book for publication. For me, I said, it’s the marketing and finding readers that’s so challenging. (Of course, I have been an editor and designer for decades, so while I hadn’t gone through the specific steps of publishing a novel before, the publishing process was familiar.)

I talked about how self-publishers used to have to print up books in advance and ship them out from boxes in their basement. But now, the book is not even printed until it’s ordered. There’s no inventory sitting on a shelf. The online retailer, Amazon or otherwise, has the template in its database, and when you buy the book, then they print it.

The ebook is another huge change. They are easy to publish, but it’s increasingly difficult to find readers, because there are more books available than ever before.

Several students asked about formatting for the different versions. “When you publish a print book, what’s on page 23 is always on page 23,” I said, “but an ebook doesn’t have page numbers because what each page looks like is dependent on the device you read it on. Like a web page, the text flows to fill the screen as you widen or narrow your browser, so you have to strip almost all the formatting except for styles before uploading an ebook. But if you do it right, it can be published within 24 hours of your upload.”

The UDM panel was a wonderful start to my “Wasted Author Tour.” I even sold a few books. (You can buy one here.)

Thanks to my brother Michael Barry for organizing the panel and to my two panel colleagues, R.J. Reilly and Nick Rombes. (You may be interested in seeing the UDM Varsity News report on the panel. )

Politically Correct Dating

by John Byrne Barry | Apr 1, 2015 | Will Ask for Directions When Lost

Here’s a silly piece I wrote a long time ago and dusted off last year for an audition.

I pride myself on being a sensitive enlightened feminist man. I’ve read Our Bodies Our Selves twice, once in hardback, and I never exploit women by opening doors for them.

I have a tough time at dances, however. I love dancing, but asking a woman to dance without compromising my integrity is where I get hung up. I can’t ask a pretty woman to dance because I’d be imposing my patriarchal standards of beauty on them. So I look for a woman I’m not attracted to. It’s even better if she doesn’t like me. Or men.

But then my body language gives me away. She can sense I don’t find her attractive, and I end up oppressing her by judging her with my internalized sexist standards, and we both feel terrible.

Fortunately, when I met Jenny, the music was loud, and we were dancing before I had a chance to think through all the socio-political implications. We made a date for the next night.

She came over to supper, because it’s hard to find a restaurant that can accommodate my diet. I used to eat meat and other oppressed foods. But now I don’t eat anything that requires the killing of any animals — or plants. I only eat fruits and vegetables that have already died of natural causes. (Of course, I also include onions in my diet because cutting onions is how I learned to cry.)

I was sobbing over the cutting board when Jenny arrived. One look at the wilted carrots on the table, and she said, “Let’s just catch a movie.”

But I had already made plans—to ride our bicycles to a civil disobedience against fracking. The perfect first date, I thought, getting arrested together for a good cause.

But on the way, she ran over some glass and got a flat tire. “It would be patronizing of me to offer to fix this,” I said, “so I’ll let you do it.”

“I’ve never been treated like this before,” she said.

I explained that that was because most men put women up on pedestals and don’t allow them to achieve their full potential as human beings or, in this case, bicycle mechanics.

“I don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“I forgive you for that,” I said, “because I understand that your mistrust of men is based on centuries and centuries of brutal oppression of women by white men, like myself. And—”

“You are one of a kind,” she said, “And why are you putting that broken glass in your pocket?”

“To recycle it course,” I said, but by then, she had hailed a cab and vanished. She didn’t even write or call me in jail.

I guess I’m just not as sensitive as I thought. So I’ve recently started a support group for men—the White Man’s Burden Support Group—because it’s crucial we men become more attuned to the plight of women.

Our first act of solidarity—since we’re not able to menstruate—is to go down to the Red Cross once a month and donate blood.

One Year Since Launching Bones in the Wash

by John Byrne Barry | Feb 24, 2015 | Bones in the Wash

I hosted a book launch a year ago today in Berkeley for Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher.

My first book, my first launch. Pretty exciting. And nerve-wracking.

More than 50 people showed up—standing room only—and though most were friends and family, there were a few strangers in the mix, which was heartening. (It helped that the Mo’ Joe Café, where we did the launch, was a block from where I lived for 25 years and walking distance for a bunch of my friends.)

My friend Bob Schildgen, author of Hey Mr. Green, served as M.C. and read a passage. My wife Nanette and my son Sean also read excerpts. I delivered a brief intro about how I came to write the book, read a few pages, and answered questions.

I was thrilled with how well it went—it felt like a smash success. (Scroll down to see some photos.)

I even ran out of books to sell. I sold 22 books, including the one I was reading from, which had a couple of pencil marks. (I thought I would be tempting the fates if I came to the launch with too many books.)

That book launch was my single best day for selling the book, but sales since have been disappointing. A year later, despite continuing to get positive response and reviews, I can sometimes go a month without selling a book. I did a better job writing my novel than I have marketing it, but I believe that even if I were a marketing superstar, it would be an uphill climb.

I expected that marketing my self-published first novel would be hard, and I was right about that. I thought, however, that I had managed my expectations pretty well. Looking back, even my modest projections seem overly ambitious.

The actual publishing wasn’t too hard—I mean, other than rewriting the book a dozen-plus times and incorporating suggestions and corrections from many readers and editors. Getting the book formatted for Kindle and trade paperback took at least a month, and a lot of careful proofreading, but it was straightforward.

I am close to completing my next novel, Wasted , a “green noir” mystery set in the world of garbage and recycling in Berkeley. I wrote Wasted before Bones in the Wash, and am now rewriting it one more time. Response so far has been positive—most everyone has enjoyed it and three people said they raced through it in a day or two. That’s what I like to hear. And that was the advance reader copy. It’s now at least 3 percent better! 🙂

My hope is that when I launch Wasted this spring, response will continue to be favorable and maybe I’ll sell a few copies of Bones in the Wash along the way.