Julia Chang

Julia Chang, City Government Recycling Coordinator415-355-3739julia.chang@sfgov.org

Artist Julie Chang

JULIE WEIWREN CHANG

Julia Chang is the City Government Recycling Coordinator in San Francisco and recounts her experiences trying to get a recycling program started at the Hall of Justice, the courts and jail building for the City.

Julia Chang, Environment's city government recycling coordinator, says that waste reduction and recycling have saved the city more than $345,000 in the last few years.

"If all departments fully participated, we could achieve hundreds of thousands more in savings," Chang added.

This month, Chang is collecting the departments' 2004 annual surveys, documenting everything they recycle, compost and reuse.
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Chang works with 125 department recycling coordinators and additional contact people in large departments, trains them, fields their questions and consolidates the information they send to her so the city can monitor its progress.

There's no punishment for not complying, and some departments have been thumbing their noses at the reporting mandate for more than four years.

"It's an ongoing task to get everyone to comply," Chang concedes."They say they don't have enough time or they don't have the resources to do it.It's clearly not a priority for some."

With the most recalcitrant departments, Chang says she uses a time-honored method: "Leverage - I try to get the Environment director (Jared Blumenfeld) involved in talking to the department."

The August 2004 supes resolution has one more way for DOE to slap the hands of departments: the city's whistle-blower complaint program."Improper professional conduct," states the resolution, "includes the purchase of unneeded supplies or equipment, and the failure to reuse or recycle major resources or reduce waste generation."

Chang said that she's received two whistle-blower calls in the last year, one for a police station that was not doing any recycling, the other fingering a privately owned building leasing offices to city departments that didn't provide adequate recycling bins.
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"Most departments are recycling at least paper," Chang said, "but they don't necessarily have a committed staff person to fill out the report, [and] most could do a better job of reusing and recycling, but it takes upper-management support and innovative practices to make that happen."
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DOE doesn't want to pit department against department, Chang said, but the annual report did give kudos to DPW as the city's top recycler, by volume.
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Chang also is working with the S.F.General and Laguna Honda's cafeterias to get composting going.Once in place, she estimates each can easily be composting 200 tons a year.
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"We divert 90% of our waste," Chang said.
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It's pesky things like plastic bags, plastic bottle caps and Styrofoam, Chang said."There's always a little something."
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"A computer in working condition that's too slow for a high-power user, such as an engineer, may be perfectly usable for an employee doing only word processing and small spreadsheet work," said Julia Chang, the Department of Environment's city government recycling coordinator.The same computer might also find a happy home at a nonprofit.

Chang says that 6% of city-purchased electronic equipment is reused by other S.F. government workers; the rest goes to Alameda County Computer Resource Center in Berkeley, Community Computer Center in San Francisco and Computer Recycling Center in Santa Rosa.

These nonprofits refurbish equipment, donate it to other nonprofits and recycle the unusable.The goal is to keep hazardous e-waste - the equipment contains mercury, arsenic, cadmium, barium, silver, selenium, chromium, lead - out of landfills.

"The nonprofits screen computers and parts for reuse," Chang said.

Julia Chang