In tight times, more people recycling to earn cash

<p>Dorothy Anderson was tired of flipping pancakes.</p><p>Looking for an easier way to raise funds for the Fircrest Mobile Homeowners Association, Anderson turned to recycling. Every week she helps load more than 60 of her neighbors' cans, bottles and plastics into the back of her pickup and drives it from outside of Sebastopol to the Redwood Empire Disposal buyback center on West Robles Avenue in southwest Santa Rosa.</p><p>The take? About $100 a month.</p><p>"It's painless," she said. "We used to have fund-raisers like pancake breakfasts and we would make about $50. (Recycling) is certainly easier than making pancakes."</p><p>In today's tight economy, more people are thinking twice before tossing out scrap metal and other recyclables that can be sold for increasing amounts of money. Couple that with the push to reuse and recycle for environmental reasons, and business is brisk.</p><p>Visits to the buyback center on West Robles Avenue last month were up 45 percent over a year earlier, said Pamela Davis, director of governmental affairs for North Bay Corp./Redwood Empire Disposal.</p><p>Shoppers are charged a redemption fee when purchasing many glass, plastic and aluminum products. Buyback centers pay customers for returning the materials in bulk.</p><p>"I think the economic downturn probably does have an influence on people coming in and wanting to get reimbursed on that (California Redemption Value) material," she said. "The value of that material coming into the buyback center is going up.</p><p>"Rather than put this in the blue can, they are getting something back for it," she said.</p><p>For those who don't want to haul their empties to the buyback center, the options for recycling in the blue can are growing.</p><p>North Bay Corp./Redwood Empire Disposal now accepts plastic nursery pots, laundry baskets, crates, plastic toys and outdoor play equipment. The company began accepting plastic bags in February.</p><p>North Bay Corp. handles 90 percent of trash collection in Sonoma County, where residents are diverting 64 percent of their refuse to recycling bins.</p><p>For Phebe Sorensen of rural Sebastopol, the money is secondary. She has been loading her pickup with cans, bottles, plastics and papers for years because her neighborhood does not have curbside pickup and the big blue cans.</p><p>"It goes back to my childhood in the Depression," said Sorensen, who declined to give her age, saying only that she's an octogenarian. "It is work, but it happens to be work I don't mind."</p><p>This week, Sorensen dropped off nine pounds of plastics, 32 pounds of glass and two pounds of aluminum. The haul netted her a check for $15.30, which she'll split with neighbors who contribute to the booty.</p><p>Jerry Wimmer, materials facility manager for North Bay Corp., said he's seeing all kinds of people showing up to get money back, from a woman riding a bike hauling cans in a trailer to the driver of a shiny, new Dodge truck unloading boxes of glass bottles.</p><p>"They are more in tune with the economy and their declining buying power," he said.</p><p>"More people are bringing newspaper and cardboard," he said. "In previous years, that had sort of fallen out of fashion."</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com.</p>