Wasted Author Tour | johnbyrnebarry.com

From Manteca to Mill Valley

by John Byrne Barry | Oct 1, 2016 | Page-turners with a Conscience, Wasted, Wasted Author Tour

Fall Tour Launches at Great Valley Bookfest

I’ve organized several readings as the clock ticks down to Election Day — the highlight being a featured author at the Great Valley Bookfest in Manteca on October 8.

My author talk — “Page-turners with a Conscience” — is at 1030 am, and I’ll be sitting at a table the rest of the day. Below is the 2′ x 3′ poster I’ll be displaying for my table, as well as my fall tour schedule and flyer.

MANTECA — October 8 (SATURDAY) @ 1030 am — Great Valley BookFest
BERKELEY — October 15 (SATURDAY) @ 4 pm— Mo’Joe Cafe, Sacramento & Blake
MILL VALLEY — October 23 (SUNDAY) @ 2 pm— Tam Valley Cabin, Tennessee Valley Road
OAKLAND — November 20 (SUNDAY) @ 2 pm — CWC-Berkeley, ConneXionJLP, Jack London Place, 520 Third St

The Blessing (and Curse) of Mild Success

by John Byrne Barry | Dec 8, 2015 | Wasted Author Tour

Anatomy of the Wasted Author Tour

When my recent book tour ended — “not with a bang, but a whimper,” to borrow from the Hollow Men — I was relieved it was over. Now I wish I had more readings scheduled.

The “Wasted Author Tour,” which included ten readings in Detroit, Berkeley, Mill Valley, San Rafael, Corte Madera, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, was stressful, turnout was disappointing more often than not, and it didn’t generate enough audience or book sales to justify the time I devoted to it.

But I would do it again.

I always enjoyed giving the talk. And the people who showed up seemed to as well.

My goal with this post is to share an honest account of the tour. This is not advice, because I don’t consider myself an authority. However, it may be useful for other authors who are wondering if a tour is worth the trouble.

When I launched my first book — Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher — I scheduled one reading, in February 2014, and more than 50 people crowded into Mo’Joe Cafe in Berkeley. I even ran out of books to sell because I didn’t want to tempt the gods and bring too many.

It helped that Mo’Joe was a block from where I lived for 25 years, and at least a dozen friends were able to walk to the reading from home. It was also my only reading, and I pulled out all the stops to get people there.

At Copperfield’s Books in San Rafael, my third reading on the Wasted Tour, the store manager had to unfold more chairs to accommodate latecomers. (No one sat in the front row, however.) The audience of 30 was the biggest turnout of the tour and, coming on the heels of a turnout of 25 in Detroit and 17 at the Ecology Center in Berkeley, I was feeling pretty good. Well, the Ecology Center was a disappointment, particularly given that the venue and my book, set in the recycling world, were a good match and the Ecology Center actively promoted the reading. Maybe it was just they set up too many chairs.

The week of my two readings in Berkeley, at Urban Ore and Mo’Joe Cafe, I managed to get an interview in Berkeleyside, and several strangers who attended the Mo’Joe reading told me they learned about it from that interview. (I also sold ten books on Amazon the day the interview was posted, my best day ever.)

Mo’Joe Cafe in Berkeley. Photo by Ned Felden.

Looking Big

In early August, I set my goal: Plan, promote, and execute six public readings in 2015. Sell 100 books.

I talked up my tour to everyone I know, sent out targeted emails to several hundred people; shared posts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; and listed the readings on craigslist, SFGate, Berkeleyside, and more. Several of the venues made their own posters and promoted the reading through their newsletters and social media. I also designed a bookmark with all the readings on one side and a brief blurb on the other, which I passed out throughout the tour.

I heard an ad on the radio for a website builder that promises to “make your business look bigger than you really are.” That was not my intention when I promoted my readings, but my emails and website and bookmarks did create that effect. To be honest, even I was impressed that I had lined up ten readings.

Setting Up the Readings

Setting up the readings was easier than I expected. All it took was persistence. And more persistence. I started with an email. Sometimes, I had a personal contact, like Mo’Joe Cafe, where I’d met the owner years ago and did the Bones in the Wash reading in 2014, or the Ecology Center, where I’d served on the board back in the 1990s. Most of the time, I didn’t get a response, but I followed up with another email and/or a phone call. There were also five or six venues that never responded or said no. Like the Berkeley Library, where I had met two of the librarians and I thought it would be a sure thing.

Urban Ore was a bit of a stretch, though I learned they had hosted a few poetry readings over the years. But the epigram of the book is from Urban Ore co-founders Dan Knapp and Mary Lou Van Deventer: “Waste isn’t waste until it’s wasted.” I had also interviewed Dan decades ago, when I was writing about garbage and waste for the East Bay Express and other publications, and I interviewed him again this fall as part of promoting the tour. (See From Sociology to Salvage.)

The Tam Valley Cabin is in my neighborhood, and familiar to me because I’ve been a food tent volunteer for Creekside Friday concerts the past two summers. I paid $25 to rent it for an hour. My wife and I brought refreshments — wine, cheese, and crackers.

My siblings hosted two of the readings, and while I designed flyers and postcards, they did all the work promoting it locally, and setting up the venue and food.

Ten Percent Better

My presentation evolved with each reading, but I gave the same general spiel. On my first stop, Detroit, I was surrounded by English professors. My wife and I were on a family-and-friends vacation in the Midwest, and I had tried to set up a reading at a bookstore or cafe in Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti, where my brother Michael lives. No luck on that front, but Michael organized a panel at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he’s an English professor and chair of the English Department.

Hemmed in as I was between two English professors — there were also several in the audience — I started by disavowing any presumption that Wasted is literature. “My goal is entertainment,” I said, “and if there’s any literary merit in the book, it’s a fortuitous accident.” That got a healthy laugh. I started having fun.

But that’s not really true. What I aimed for with Wasted was that sweet spot between literary fiction and trashy beach reading. Where the story races along and you can’t put it down, but the characters are three-dimensional, the writing is tight. Wasted, set in the gritty and malodorous world of garbage and recycling, is also rich with resonant themes of reinvention, transition, and discarding that which no longer serves us. “Still,” I said, “it’s not the kind of novel you’re going to study in literature class.”

Although I called these events “ readings,” I usually read for less than 10 minutes. I talked first about how I came to write the book, which took about 15 or 20 minutes, then read the first chapter, eight minutes long, before taking questions. I always had a second excerpt prepared, but read it at only two of the gatherings. I wanted to keep the readings under an hour, and there were usually enough questions to fill the time.

One story I enjoyed telling was about my singular experience reading Wasted as a reader, not an author. I started writing Wasted back in the late 1990s, and after finishing it and sending it to 60 or 70 agents and getting nibbles, but no bites, I set it aside and got on with my life. I wrote a second novel, Bones in the Wash, and published it in 2013. Then, in the spring of 2014, I read Wasted again, for the first time in years. I remember one day when I was about two-thirds of the way through the book, and I was hungry and it was lunchtime, but I couldn’t put the book down. I couldn’t remember what happened next, and I couldn’t wait to find out. That was pretty exciting, to read the book as if weren’t its author.

I always talked about the importance of the novel writing group I was part of for more than a dozen years. They read both my books, often in two or three chapter chunks, months in between chapters, sometimes many versions of the same chapters. I could never have completed the books without them, let alone had them turn out as well as they did. One of the group members came to my Urban Ore reading, and before we started, I assured him that Wasted was at least 10 percent better than when he read it last. “Oh, you cut 10 percent,” he quipped. (I repeated that line at every subsequent reading.)

Many of the questions were about the mechanics of self-publishing. 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. A lot of people were surprised by that.

How Much I Make

The economics of books are not straightforward. When I sold 11 books at Copperfield’s, I made less than $10, but the 13 books I sold at Mo’Joe Cafe netted more than $100. Like most bookstores, Copperfield’s purchases the books through Ingram, which wholesales books for bookstores and allows them to return unsold books.

I self-published my first book, Bones in the Wash, through CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon. That makes it all but impossible to get bookstores to carry it. So when I published Wasted, I did so through Ingram as well as CreateSpace. Now anyone can ask their local bookstore to order the book. (Hint, hint.)

At Copperfield’s and the other three bookstore readings, a store employee rang up the books through the cash register for $12.99, the same price as Amazon. I got 74 cents for each book.

At the non-bookstore venues, I sold the books myself, for $10 to $20 sliding scale, or two for $25. I had $60 in change in my pocket, plus a credit card reader I plugged into my phone. More people gave me $20 than $10, so I averaged about $16 per book. The books cost me $5.60 each, including shipping and handling, so I made more than $10 per book.

When customers purchase the e-book online for $2.99 (from Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble or iTunes), I make about $2. When someone buys the trade paperback (from Amazon or Barnes & Noble) for $12.99, I make $2 for Bones in the Wash and $3 for Wasted. (Wasted is 324 pages, Bones is 418.)

It’s a good thing I’m not in it for the money.

New Mexico — it’s Not New and it’s Not Mexico

Two years ago, my sister and her husband, who had lived their whole lives in Chicago, within three miles of where they grew up, moved to Santa Fe to retire. We had been planning on visiting them, and settled on November, which was after my book tour. But then I scheduled more Bay Area readings in November, and since my first book was set in New Mexico, I thought I’d try to add a New Mexico stop to my tour. I asked my sister if she’d be willing to host a house party, and I also scheduled a reading at the Flying Star Cafe in Albuquerque, where I knocked on doors for Barack Obama in 2008. Not only did I hang out at the cafe seven years ago, I set two scenes in the book there.

No one came to the Flying Star. Not for the reading, that is.

I invited a number of people I knew in Albuquerque, from working with them in 2008, and the Flying Star had posted notices in the print and online edition of the Alibi, the local weekly. I also designed and posted a flyer on the cafe’s Facebook page.

My wife and I sat in an visible corner behind a stack of books. Anyone looking for the reading could have easily found us. As 7 o’clock came and went and no one showed up, I began hoping no one would. Reading to one or two people would have felt more like a failure than just slinking out.

We struck up a conversation with a couple at the next table and even sold them a book. They had tickets to a concert, so they couldn’t stay for the reading. The café food was excellent, so it wasn’t a total waste.

Fortunately, the house party two days later at my sister’s in Santa Fe made up for the Flying Star flop. It was wonderful — not only did I meet a bunch of new people, it was so comfortable to do the reading in her house. Plus I had a lot of engaging conversations before and after the “official” reading. Anne did a great job promoting the party, which was open to the public — they had to RSVP to get directions — but as with most of my readings, everyone who came were people she knew.

Attendance and Sales

In retrospect, the early readings of this tour, where I was unhappy with turnout, like 17 people at the Ecology Center, or 20 at Urban Ore, well, that was pretty damn good. What I know now, what I knew already, but conveniently forgot, is that small audiences come with the territory, unless you’re a name author. And no matter how well an event is promoted, few strangers show up. At every gathering, except the two hosted by my siblings — the panel at the University of Detroit, and the house party at my sister Anne’s in Santa Fe — I knew almost all of the people who came.

Here are the raw numbers — reading dates, locations, attendance, and sales. (The links are to blog posts or photos.)

Date	Venue	Attendance	Book Sales
Sept. 11	Detroit — University of Detroit Mercy	25	5
Oct. 8	Berkeley — Ecology Center	17	6
Oct. 17	San Rafael — Copperfields	30	11
Oct. 22	Berkeley — Urban Ore	20	8
Oct. 24	Berkeley — Mo Joe	20	13
Nov. 1	Tam Valley Cabin	10	12
Nov. 12	Albuquerque — Flying Star Cafe	0	1
Nov. 14	Santa Fe — House Party	17	10
Nov. 19	Mill Valley — The Depot	5	1
Nov. 14	Corte Madera — Book Passage	20	1
Total	10 Readings	164	68

So I exceeded my goal for scheduling readings, but not for sales. (Unless I count online sales during that period.) I didn’t set a goal for attendance, but it would have been higher than 164 if I had.

What’s Next?

One of the most common questions at the readings was “What’s next?” At the Santa Fe house party, I I felt like I spent as much time talking about the book I haven’t written yet as the two I have.

The next novel follows Lamar Rose, a secondary character in Bones in Wash, as his father, who has cancer and dementia, demands that Lamar help him end his life. Lamar refuses at first, but then does the deed, and is accused of murder by his sister at their father’s memorial. What follows is a high-profile public fight, pitting the death-with-dignity movement against the right-to-life movement, with each sibling an unwilling front person.

I’ve written half a first draft, and I have already churned through three working titles — Edgewater, Quality of Life, and Cheeks as Smooth as Ice. (I welcome feedback on the titles.) You can read a draft of the first chapter here.

Copperfield’s Books in San Rafael. Photo by Nanette Zavala.

Urban Ore reading. Photo by Marilyn Tuilius.

You can see more photos on Pinterest. And like my greennoir.com Facebook page.

Men Don’t Read?

by John Byrne Barry | Oct 20, 2015 | Wasted Author Tour

Toughest Question from my Copperfield’s Reading

A few minutes after 7 pm, when my reading at Copperfields was scheduled to start, people were still streaming in, and the store manager was unfolding more chairs to accommodate them. After an event a few weeks ago when there were too many empty seats, this was a promising sign. Of course, the front row was mostly empty, but that’s to be expected.

Copperfields did an excellent job promoting the reading — signs, inclusion in newsletter, Facebook page, events listings in the Pacific Sun and elsewhere. Even so, most of the 25 to 30 people who came were people I knew and invited. Nagged even. And everyone who said they’d come did come, which is not usually the case.

I opened by talking about how I came to write the book, and then read the first chapter. I had a second reading prepared, but didn’t get to it, as there were plenty of intriguing questions.

There was one I did not have a great answer for, which was: Men don’t read books, so how does that impact what you write? From a man I know who does not read much fiction.

Obviously, that’s a generalization, but it is true that women make up the majority of readers, especially of fiction. A decade ago, English novelist Ian McEwan and his son waded into a London park at lunchtime and gave away books, including some of his own. Nearly all the takers were women and most men reacted with suspicion. HIs conclusion: When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.

This is backed by statistics. According to one study, women account up to 80 percent of the fiction market. Other studies show a similar gender gap.

There are various theories about why this is the case, including that women tend to be more empathetic and emotional than men, which makes fiction more appealing to them.

My response to the question was forgettable, which is why I am writing about it here. A second chance to come up with something better.

I did say that I am sensitive to not wanting to offend women readers. Because my wife is my most important and thorough editor, I don’t believe I could get away with that.

In Wasted, my protagonist is a Berkeley man who thinks he’s somewhat enlightened in regards to women, but he’s immature and insecure and engages in some clumsy blunders in his pursuit of women. But perfect characters and political correctness are the enemies of strong stories. Flawed people are much more interesting and dramatic.

Flawed or otherwise, I think that the most important consideration for women readers is that the female characters are three-dimensional. I’ve read more than a few books by male authors where the women were fantasies. Projections. I’m careful not to do that — I want all my characters to be realistic, not be caricatures. The main female character in Wasted, Barb, is pretty damn complicated — she’s a smart and impressive woman who acts more confident than she feels, to the point that others think she bleed like everyone else. (Not so uncommon, if my experience is any barometer.)

I recently learned about the Bechdel Test, named after American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man.

I don’t have a lot of that in Wasted, mainly because it’s written in first person with a male protagonist. There’s some.

In Bones in the Wash, which I wrote second, but published first, I follow two protagonists, one a precocious young woman who’s running the Democracy Project campaign for Barack Obama in New Mexico in 2008. I’m happy to report that there are dozens of scenes that pass the Bechdel Test.

Berkeley Recycling Veteran Offers His Take on Fictional World of Wasted

by John Byrne Barry | Oct 19, 2015 | Wasted Author Tour

For Urban Ore co-founder Dan Knapp, a mover and shaker in the Berkeley recycling world for 40 years, reading Wasted, my novel set in that very world, albeit fictional, was an eerie and unsettling experience. Here’s his take on the book.

Murder. Betrayal. Aluminum

A review of Wasted, a new novel about recycling set in Berkeley, California.

By Daniel Knapp

In John Byrne Barry’s second “green noir” mystery (the first was Bones in the Wash: Politics is Tough. Family is Tougher), a recycler in a company called Recycle Berkeley (Re-Be) is found mashed inside an export bale of aluminum cans at Berkeley’s transfer station.

The recycler, one of Re-Be’s most passionate defenders, is dead. He didn’t get there by himself. Someone had to operate the baler, put him in it. Was it about Re-Be, or was it personal? Who killed him? Who operated the baler?

At the beginning of the story, out and about on Berkeley’s gritty flatland streets at 5:00 AM, Brian Hunter temporarily escapes his boring day job as a contract bookkeeper to become a freelance reporter. His friend Doug, who drives a collection truck for Re-Be, has told him a small army of people are out every night stealing aluminum cans from Re-Be’s curbside routes. The financial impact is large.To follow the story, Brian decides to become a poacher himself. Doug gives him a route map.

The first poacher he meets is unfriendly one moment, violent the next. Thinking Brian is a liar threatening his stash of cans, the poacher whacks the would-be reporter with a board. Brian howls in pain but doesn’t fight back. The two men take a break from these exertions for some talk over two cans of warm beer the poacher has scored. Brian learns that poachers must have “sponsors.” This poacher offers to sponsor Brian. Brian accepts.

From then on, we’re in a strangely fictionalized but recognizable hall of mirrors that is the lot of people who actually do the work of collecting and processing all those cans and bottles. The author knows his stuff; he used to be on the board of directors of the nonprofit that does Berkeley’s curbside collection, although another nonprofit proesses the materials. In Wasted, they’re merged.

Structural conflicts abound both in the novel and in real life. Poachers take the valuable aluminum and leave the rest for Re-Be. Income-deprived, Re-Be is sliding toward bankruptcy. Brian learns that Re-Be has fallen behind three months in rent to the City. He finds the politicians embarrassed and scared because Re-Be holds an exclusive City contract for curbside collection services. But City staff haven’t paid Re-Be’s service fees for months. A City Council member wants to hand Re-Be’s contract to another company. Re-Be’s managers and board battle desperately to keep the nonprofit afloat. Supporters, some armed with dubious tactics, flock to Re-Be’s defense in a press event, and later in a big demonstration.

Consolidated Scavenger, a multinational waste company with a transfer station in a city to the south of Berkeley, is a big presence, willing and able to take over Re-Be’s contract. Consolidated, or “Con,” has friends in Berkeley’s high places but not so many on the street.

Just before Brian discovers the body of his friend Doug, he tells his editor how his story about poaching has morphed into something much bigger: “One power struggle mirrors another. At stake, a million-dollar contract, the city council majority, and the soul of Berkeley. Add sex and stir.” She says, “That’s not the story you turned in.” Brian replies, “That’s right. But it’s the one you’ll get in two hours.”

Besides losing the aluminum to poachers, Re-Be is losing some of its best workers to Con. Con pays better, but that’s not all. Some staff are fed up with the “kitchen-table collective” culture of Re-Be, so there are divided loyalties even before Doug’s death. The murder cleaves these loyalties into ever smaller bits.

Doug also creates an upset by crashing and ruining a big celebration intended to help Re-Be. What he does leaves everyone embarrassed, confused, and hating him. The unrest makes headlines around the world. As Brian tells it, “The media loves to trivialize Berkeley….many of the embryonic movements and trends nurtured here—from free speech to recycling to divestment from South Africa— have become mainstream, but the ‘only in Berkeley’ gibe never seems to go out of style.”

Brian keeps following leads and trying to protect his sources while cooperating with the police, and we are carried along at a gallop. He loses lots of sleep staying just ahead of other writers who flock to the story. He falls in love with one of female suspects and reflects on the proper relations between observer and observed. Cool detachment is impossible. He’s inside the story and outside it at the same time.

When the City tries to evict Re-Be, and when Re-Be refuses to go, the City breaks into its site at night and disables its baler. That break-in is one of the events that actually happened in Berkeley’s history. Moreover, a woman whose name begins with “K” (Kathy Evans in reality; in the novel she’s Kisa) finds a replacement part during the night, and the baler is up and running defiantly the very next day.

For fun, I made a list of all the direct parallels to the real story of Berkeley’s recycling. So far there are more than 20.

One note from reality: beyond property damage, Berkeley’s recycling has not been marked by violence. Recyclers have often had to defend their contracts and businesses, and to resolve issues they have written recycling-friendly laws and regulations that voters or City Council have approved. For example, the first citizens’ initiative of three written all or in part by Berkeley recyclers stopped procurement on a garbage-burning power plant that City Council had already approved in concept unanimously. This citizens’ victory put Berkeley at the forefront of city or county burn-plant rejections that eventually totaled seven in our region alone, and hundreds around the USA. It also started a real-life multi-year no-holds-barred local political struggle. But no humans were harmed.

The skeleton of facts that Wasted assembles have been taken out of their actual context, rearranged, renamed, tilted, and jumbled to serve the needs of the mystery, not history. For those already familiar with Berkeley’s tangled relations with its recyclers, Wasted can be an eerie and unsettling read. Others will enjoy learning a lot about recycling’s dark side while our hero reasons and guesses his way along a twisted trail to find the culprit.

See interview with Dan Knapp — “From Sociology to Salvage.”

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.

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