Our guest is Andy Gale, founder, president and general manager, BARC Bay Area Recycling for Community.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You got it right.

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Ryan
Is that okay? Typically, I check ahead of time and I just realize we went right in. But as far as the title and we’re going to get to the name, but you’re your title, is that correct?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. So. Founder. Yep. Executive director at this time.

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Ryan
Okay.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And also the president of the board, which is a little bit unique as far as organizations go, but I’m looking forward to like not being either one of those and maybe just being the guy that pushes the broom someday and don’t don’t have the stress of having to keep it all together.

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Ryan
Okay. See, that’s one of the best intros possible. And you got a metaphor going. So I started asking you a question recently that I just kind of like. So I’m going to try this again, sir. And it has to do with with you. You’re at a social engagement. You’re at a thing. You’re at a party. Yeah, right. We’re doing that again.

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Ryan
So you’re at a party? Yep. Could be social, could be business. And somebody comes up to you and says, What do you do? What’s the party virtue?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So if someone came up to me and asked me that question, I would say, I do recycling. And we have a recycling organization and our goal is to keep things out of the landfill. And as a nonprofit, we’re here to, you know, fill in those gaps where the community might not have the ability to recycle something like a couch or a, you know, construction materials like windows or things like that.

00;02;16;02 – 00;02;32;29
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And so we fill in those gaps. And then there’s companies that are for profit, you know, that might come in. Like when we first started, we were the only ones taking the three through seven Plastics. And then GFL, you know, big company used to be American Waste. They stepped in and started taking those three through seven plastics and then we just throw our hands up and say, Great, you know?

00;02;33;05 – 00;02;48;16
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I think I told my lawyer when we first started this organization, she said, What are your goals and objectives? And I said, someday I hope that someone will put us out of business because everyone else in the community is getting it done and we’re really not needed anymore. So that was kind of a weird way to.

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Ryan
So your goal was entropy? Entropy to the point of nonexistence?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, perhaps. But I didn’t really believe that that would happen. And I still don’t. I still think that there’s lots of places inside there, and I. I love the experiment metal process of it. You know, someone brings us corks, for instance, and we start throwing corks into a 55 gallon barrel, you know? And then what do you do with the corks, Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I don’t know. You know, and then when the corks are piled up too much, you know, or whatever it is, glass or food waste or whatever, then you’re kind of forced to find that market, that downstream market that’s going to take that stuff from you. Yeah. And then kind of let it develop itself.

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Ryan
Typically, I’ll follow up with, you know, after the party response. You’ve got a semicircle around you, so you’ve got a few folks engaged. And then what do you say? And I think like that is enough to be like, All right. So my next question is what kind of questions do you get? And are they typically good ones?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So they are there’s never a bad question when someone’s trying to find out more about recycling, if you ask me, because, you know, there’s lots of information out there in different ways and it’s always great to cross someone’s path that’s interested in it. So the main question is what do we recycle? What do you recycle? Interesting. And I say everything.

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Ryan
And this is true. And anybody doing a cursory look into what you do and we’ll get to that later, it’s astounding and inspiring my board.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
They’re absolutely crazy that we that were we were spread then, you know what I mean? We’re an organization that doesn’t operate always in the in the black and so as we go through, you know, there’s always like the question like, should we should we be trying to recycle this? And it’s like, yeah, we are, you know, let’s figure out how to make it work, create the business model out of it, you know, and then let it go into the next thing.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And we do say no to some things. Yeah, but there’s not a lot that we that people ask like, can you recycle this Like most things have, you know, a recycling market, right? Except for like videotapes.

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Ryan
The interesting Yeah.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We haven’t really been able to find that and anyone and I get a phone call that once a month can you recycle all our old VCR tapes or people have a lot.

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Ryan
Of us who still have them aren’t giving them up.

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Mark
Yeah that’s good.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, we have a recent.

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Ryan
Exists in a way that, you know.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
If you if you have something, you, you know, it’s like an old movie, like Little Snow White or something. You know, we have a retail store for reuse of it, but we haven’t really found a company.

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Ryan
There was value in some of them. Sure.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
There’s like this silver material that’s that’s in them. But you know, the chemical you know, to get it out of it isn’t really worth the the value of what you.

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Ryan
Well speaking of being in the black. Yeah this is fascinating and I love how you articulated that because from from the website I think a recent blog quote, The consistent generation of surplus revenue through recycling has proven to be a real challenge and this has led to and we’ll get it out of the way right at the top.

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Ryan
A new name? Yeah, because I was and I’ve been used to seeing a different see at the end of B.a.r.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
RC Yeah, you see charities.

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Ryan
So yeah, I, I speak.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Charities and it would confuse a lot of people. They sometimes we get phone calls like, do you only recycle for charities? And you’d have to go through the iteration of trying to explain it.

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Ryan
Okay, so the corniest question I’ll probably ask and the easiest one, what brought about the name change and what did it actually take to facilitate it? Because it was a just switching the lights.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, we definitely were lucky that we could find another name with a C in it because Bach is sort of our acronym there, you know.

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Ryan
Is that true?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
It is, yeah.

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Ryan
Were you okay.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So that was that was helpful that that that was there. But I always tell the story when I originally did my first Excel spreadsheet. You know, this is me sitting on my couch in 2007, like, and I’m plugging in the numbers, you know, of of what we can recycle and how much the value in the revenue stream and then trying to guess at the expense stream of it.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And then you carry it, you know, you take that first month and then you multiply it by 1.05 or something, you know, for a little bit of growth and then you start reducing it for a year or two to maybe 2% growth or something. And then you get down to the bottom of the spreadsheet at the end, the last page.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I thought, holy shit, like we have so much money. Like I’ll either be on a yacht somewhere if this works, you know what I mean? Or we need to be able to do something with this money. And some of the things that inspired me to do it as a nonprofit originally were these nonprofits that I was coming across, like Wings of Wonder was a great one, and that was one of the things when I moved from Chicago land to Traverse City and I used I quit my job and I was done with that industry.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
It was a construction industry, so they were kind of done in 2007 anyways. I thought, well, when I was a kid we used to raise falcons and owls, you know, and we sort of like were in the community. Yeah. So people would get an owl that would fall off of a tree and they would bring it to my house.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I’m the youngest of eight kids. And so we nurtured Owls and Hawks and sent them back.

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Ryan
So I was wondering why you would want to move here. Just start a nonprofit to help restore injured birds to the wild.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, that’s where it all kind of started. And I saw Rebecca from Wings of Wonder and I and I saw the measly amount of money that she pays herself, which was like a couple thousand dollars. And I thought, Well, here’s someone that’s doing this awesome work. Wouldn’t it be great if there was, you know, a way to generate revenue and give it back to community and give back to the charities in in whatever form?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, writing a check was our goal, right? Yeah, We’ve written some checks and we do support a lot of nonprofit organizations. You know, if they’re a startup and they they’re going to do a5k run, for instance, like, well, we’ll give them free services and free compostable wares. And it usually comes out to about $25,000 a year that we sort of, you know, push out there.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, but it never got to the place where we had, you know, the profitability. And I know we’re a nonprofit, but we never had that profitability to where we could sit down with the board. And I always thought it’d be find like, like the biggest thing we have to talk about the board meeting is who are we going to support the community?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, you know, And so, yeah, it just never transpired. And we kind of realized after 15 years that our place in community was community. And, you know, that was where we wanted to put our efforts and energy and we changed it to better recycling for community a few weeks ago. And yeah, that’s sort of how it transpired.

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Ryan
And not to sound trite, I mean, I’m sure if it if the last letter didn’t serve the air, I mean, I’m sure you would have.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
If it was an F, I was going to negate.

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Ryan
That. Okay.

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Mark
You know.

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Ryan
Foundation doesn’t work, But but it’s it’s it does sound like that’s very intentional and it should have been that way all along in community isn’t just a word that people throw around and what you do Yeah. Is and for and allows the community to participate which is inspiring. Yeah. And you do so much we talked about all the things and I love how open you are about that because the the blog and the website that talks about the name change is very transparent.

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Ryan
It’s very open. Yeah. And I like hearing that. Like, that’s not it didn’t work. We’re doing this and it’s a better fit. Yeah, because evolving is what you need to do.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Absolutely.

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Ryan
So you offer so much and it sounded like, you know, to get you onto the yacht. Right. And it should have been easy. Why not use you. Yeah. Like start because you’re, you do different things. What’s the reverse? Why, Why not?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Why not use.

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Ryan
Bach? Yeah.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, that’s good question. I think that we do certainly feel in a place within the community because of the fact that we’re not afraid to take on some some challenging items. You know, we grew a little bit by acquisition back, you know, 2010 to 2014 by purchasing a freight company. So we had our own control over the semi-trucks and trailers of material moving around.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We bought an electronics waste company and brought them into the fold and we bought a mattress recycling company. And that was really a game changer for us. When I found out that someone locally and there up in Gaylord could recycle mattresses, I would store them in my barn until my wife told me that I wasn’t allowed to do that anymore.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I think.

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Ryan
This is fascinating because you talk about this in detail. So, Mark, this is what happens. He starts store in Cedar.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, I’ve been seen. Okay. Have you heard this story before?

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Ryan
So you don’t.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Tell it very.

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Ryan
Often. Ten, ten mattresses. And his wife is just curious. It gets up to 60 and she asks the question. Yeah. So this is a wonderful human being.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, She’s.

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Ryan
Very with tolerance and and clear understanding of you, because at ten mattresses, I think a to my wife would have been like, What’s happening?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, what are you doing? What’s the.

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Ryan
Plan? So she asks the question at 60.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah.

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Ryan
And there you have it.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yep. And that was just about enough to fit into one of our longer trailers, and we would drive it up to Gaylord and offload it. And this guy had a team of people that would cut those mattresses open with a utility knife and pull the materials out. And he had some really interesting equipment to dismantle the mattress like this on pallets here, which is basically a hydraulic thing that that press, you know, on the box springs, there’s there’s metal springs that are attached to wood.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And so what it does is it shears those two things apart. And if you try to do it by hand, it’s like an hour to take just, just that you just that apart. And so he said, you know, I’m done. I’m I’m going to retire. I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m just going to give it up.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I said, okay, well, let’s talk about, you know, what what it was that you needed to have to get paid for it. And basically we bought his equipment, so we didn’t it didn’t cost us. And he gave us all of the customers and the information that he had as goodwill. And so we took over recycling. And then I think we got a call three years later of somebody doing a report that we were the third largest mattress recyclers in the United States.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I thought, Well, that’s kind of cool. And we do about 15, 12 to 15000 mattresses a year. Right now it’s a.

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Ryan
Zagorin.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Which is a football field, you know, stacked about 15 feet.

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Ryan
And there are only about 20 of them in the country, right?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yes, it’s about. But.

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Mark
Right. What’s the next gap? What would it take to become the number one?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So, you know, that’s a great question, because what it would take is some investment in the machinery of of taking these things apart. One person can take four mattresses apart an hour on average, 15 minutes, a mattress.

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Ryan
But there’s so much more inside, right?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, there’s there’s all kinds of great products inside. There’s steel, there’s wood for the box springs. And then inside of the mattress is a yellow foam poly foam. And that has a good market. We build that stuff up and ship out, you know, once every month or two, a whole semi load.

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Ryan
Well, it’s got to take a ton of it to be worth to send, right? Yeah.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
40 tons or 20, 20 tons on a semi-truck.

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Mark
Can you find how many of these other companies are nonprofits that are they have community in their name you know like you.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Know that’s a good question.

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Mark
You’re like we could make that push and get you to number.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
One. I think we I think we can do, especially since we just got a half million dollar.

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Ryan
Grant that would we just got to hope for. Yeah. If we could make that happen for anybody, that’d be amazing to help make that happen. But yes.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We got a half million dollar grant just now from Eagle, which is the old hue to modernize our mattress recycling process. So we just started a couple weeks ago in that process, and that will take us from 15,000 mattresses, potentially up to 60,000 mattresses a year, which is actually only 15% of what we dispose of in Michigan. So you’d need five more of these facilities with this equipment to just take care of what Michigan produces and use mattresses that go to landfill.

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Ryan
It sounds like I don’t know, for somebody who’s less motivated, the worst thing you’d want to deal with some of these mattress, some of these some of these stuff like that. Your mentality, what does it take? What is it, some grit, kind of.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Some hard.

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Ryan
Work to want to do that. I mean, but for yourself, it started there. Yeah. So why haul ten mattresses into your barn?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Well, each mattress, one cubic yard. So every mattress you put in your barn is a cubic yards. It stays out of the landfill. So there’s there’s a good reason to do it. There’s value in it. The landfills don’t want mattresses when they get like a whole bunch of mattresses at one time. They can’t compact it down and they actually lose equipment sometimes, like big, you know, 100, 200 and 300,000 pieces of equipment that will roll over in a landfill and and destroy the equipment.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And so they don’t want it. So, you know, it’s a kind of the perfect product for us to to try to recycle, even though it does have lots of different materials that are on the mattress. Right. I think we counted 15 liquids that can be on a mattress. But we don’t have to talk about that today. There’s I found out that there’s two types of people in the world, though.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
There’s people that like to talk about that and there’s people that don’t like it.

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Ryan
Well, I know that all all that they have on the outside is Mountain Dew and chocolate. Is that true?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly like Mountain Dew. Yeah, that’s what most of the guys and that’s what we call it. Like like this one’s got a lot of chocolate on it. Let’s get it, get it out of here.

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Mark
No frosting. But I did refrain earlier from asking when when it was like a barn full of mattresses. Like, how do we calculate how many skin flakes are in that mine?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, I’m sure you can do a.

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Ryan
Small several people worth are.

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Mark
Running this many people dead. So yeah, yeah.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
There’s a lot and and you know, it’s really a gross thing to do when you think about it. Yeah. And then, you know, the guys that do the cutting these hard workers that work for for bark, you know, the first week, you know, they’re out there with gloves on and, you know, a little bit leery of the whole thing After about a month, they’re not really wearing gloves anymore.

00;16;16;16 – 00;16;20;05
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And then I’m going to tell you, after about a year, they’re not really even washing their hands before lunch.

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Mark
And they’re just sitting there saying, what’s down on the mattress?

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Ryan
I was just going to say they’re in the nude maybe by that point. And yeah, they’re.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Taking naps on them.

00;16;27;09 – 00;16;48;20
Ryan
Very well. You you mentioned a little bit about your history and you graduated from Colorado State University degree in construction management. Yes. And prior to founding Bach, you were in commercial sales for a good while. We talked about that. Yeah, but at whatever point. So what was the dream, the plan and the reality?

00;16;48;20 – 00;17;08;11
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Well, that’s a good question to So when I was and I was just telling Mark this before we got started, you know, when I was when I was with Trust Choice and I was with them for 17 years, made a lot of money, it was a good job. And when you make money, you spend money and you buy crap and you put it in your garage and it becomes part of you.

00;17;08;25 – 00;17;21;28
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And my wife and I were planning on starting a family and we’re out in California at the time and we decided to quit our jobs. Here’s a whole nother side story. We actually took a year off and bought an RV and traveled around the country for a year before we landed back in Chicago.

00;17;22;03 – 00;17;27;10
Ryan
You did? Yeah. Albert Brooks and Julie HAGERTY style. Yeah. Have you ever seen the movie? Like, Yeah, I think.

00;17;27;10 – 00;17;28;03
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We watched it right.

00;17;28;03 – 00;17;32;15
Ryan
Before. It’s a cautionary. Okay. And you did it anyway. That’s awesome. Yeah. And you’re still together?

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, it was. Is my wife and I and two dogs. So that was our, you know, our our test to see if we would be able to survive a long term marriage. Right.

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Ryan
Wow.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So in 26 years.

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Mark
Now, most people just do like IKEA furniture together or something.

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Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, no, usually not.

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Ryan
Usually more than the.

00;17;47;22 – 00;17;49;05
Mark
Next level, right?

00;17;50;05 – 00;18;14;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. So we we got back and so that was the before. And, you know, when the construction industry started to taper off, you know, around 2005, you know, we were actually we traveled back here to Traverse City and we went on vacation for a week and we were driving back to Chicago and I said, here’s a thought. Why don’t we live in Traverse City where everyone retires and enjoys the the beautiful outdoors and all these amenities?

00;18;15;14 – 00;18;26;05
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And then we’ll go back to see my family in Chicago once one week a year. So that’s that’s what we did. We moved up here, didn’t have a job, kind of, you know, looked around, soul searched for a few weeks.

00;18;27;00 – 00;18;32;18
Ryan
Well, the bird situation didn’t work out because there was somebody else here. But it still inspired you. Yeah, It wasn’t the right way.

00;18;32;18 – 00;18;48;08
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Absolutely. Yeah. And so I think I was taking Oh, yeah, this is what it was. I was this is the right at the transition point. So I had this extra time and we had to move out of Illinois in haste and we packed everything and like, some things were just in garbage bags, you know what I mean? Clothes.

00;18;48;08 – 00;19;09;12
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And we’re just we had to move out because our house sold so fast and we got here. So I spent the first couple of weeks kind of going through all those bags and sort of minimizing like, what do we really need? And I set up all these recycling bags, you know, with number one, I mean, having sorted out by the numbers, like, here’s all the number ones and here’s all the number twos and and then I took them out to the curb.

00;19;09;25 – 00;19;30;12
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And then when the garbage truck pulled up, I peeked out the window, you know, like we do. Right? And then he he threw a couple of bags into the recycling and then the other ones went into the garbage. And I went out there and I said, I don’t mean to be that person, but like, why is doesn’t this other plastic that has a little triangle on it, it has a little number on it says it’s recyclable.

00;19;30;26 – 00;19;38;12
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And that was the first person to explain to me that there weren’t markets for it. And so I went back inside and started to research, you know, on my computer.

00;19;38;12 – 00;19;45;00
Ryan
There weren’t markets for it. Well, that’s a pretty profound response, right? Just at that level. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it could have been like, I don’t know.

00;19;45;00 – 00;20;07;22
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You’re only as good as your downstream markets, you know? So the downstream is like, you know, you’ve got metal metals and old material. We’ve been recycling for a long time and think since about the Bronze Age, you know, and so that, you know, there’s there’s three places here in Traverse City, like Padnos is one of them. And you can take your metal there and get recycled, you know, paper being in Michigan with all the trees, you know, there’s paper mills around here.

00;20;07;22 – 00;20;31;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
There’s good markets for paper. That’s your downstream. That’s what we call downstream, that we ship it to a, you know, packaging company of America down in Manistee Plastic, though, you know, if you can get £40,000 of clean number five plastic which is your yogurt container but you got to have it like only that number and only yogurt containers and you got to get £40,000 on a truck to make it.

00;20;31;09 – 00;20;41;17
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And then you might have to ship it, you know, a thousand miles to get it somewhere and you get paid on it. But you just there’s you don’t have the labor or the ability to sort it out to that level.

00;20;41;24 – 00;21;04;03
Ryan
The intricacies of what you’re talking about are far reaching. You even talked about shipping. Yeah. Which I know has impact into how you can operate the mattress recycling. Recycling. But so it sounds like this is something you were propelled by and not just you’re comfortable with a falcon. By the way, I we just breezed right over that.

00;21;04;11 – 00;21;06;03
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, there’s a whole nother conversation.

00;21;06;03 – 00;21;18;12
Ryan
So. But you were inspired at a young age to this pursuit by your dad, right? Who would pick you up and take you to two to junkyards and you would sort out things? So this started early? Is that.

00;21;18;12 – 00;21;35;17
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, I think my dad was a general contractor and so he had a construction business and he would take my brother Danny sometimes out of school and tell the office we were going to the dentist and put us on the job site and say, okay, the electricians just finished up in the drywall and we’re coming this afternoon, so you need to get all this stuff cleaned up.

00;21;35;27 – 00;21;54;26
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And, and we would throw things in the into the dumpster that was there. And this is in Wheaton, Illinois, I remember. And he would come over and say, Oh, no, this two by four, you know, is longer than 12 inches. And so we’re going to keep all those for blocking. And then, you know, he we’d have a bucket of those little electrician, you know, and a little knockouts.

00;21;55;17 – 00;22;02;06
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And he’d say, okay, we’re going to recycle that. So I think my first experience of recycling was my dad helping me learn how to sort construction material.

00;22;02;08 – 00;22;27;05
Ryan
And not that you need to say when this was, but you were young. Yeah. And that was fairly forward thinking at a time. I think so, you know, because I’m from that area as well. Yeah. And in, in learning about all of this through, you know, a lot of nonprofit business, you do things for our earth and for our community.

00;22;27;05 – 00;22;33;27
Ryan
I can keep thinking, I don’t remember this, I don’t remember this, I don’t remember this growing up. Yeah. And I definitely don’t remember it from my folks.

00;22;34;18 – 00;22;36;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. You know, so that was the first start. Well.

00;22;37;04 – 00;22;45;17
Mark
Oh, I was just going to say that I’m really happy to hear that When you took the electricians, those knock out pieces, that they didn’t go straight to vending machines, too. I was going.

00;22;45;17 – 00;22;52;28
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
To say my dad used to pay us in those little knock offs and there were a lot of bubble gum machines that were jammed up in in Schaumburg, Illinois, you know, in.

00;22;52;28 – 00;22;55;20
Ryan
Arcades, too. So, I mean, I don’t know.

00;22;55;20 – 00;23;04;23
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
That’s that’s a good point. You there were there were some machines that got jammed up because he used to pass in those coins. He used to say, you can keep all of the you know, all the curbs on the ground.

00;23;04;23 – 00;23;05;22
Ryan
Yeah.

00;23;05;22 – 00;23;24;13
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But he’d take us back to school and give us five bucks and tell us not to tell mom that we we weren’t in school for half the day. Yeah, it was kind of an interesting way to grow up. And so he definitely had an impact on that part of it. And, you know, my dad grew up in an orphanage just north of near Niles, St Mary’s, and it was a Catholic orphanage.

00;23;24;13 – 00;23;43;18
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And, you know, being born just before the Depression, I think that that was sort of the culture of like the way it was, you know, that you kept everything and you use that little block of wood and made sure that you use the metal. And then I think somewhere around the, you know, the fifties, we kind of changed because it became more convenient and then plastic became very prevalent.

00;23;44;01 – 00;23;48;26
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, And so the technology was there and the garbage trucks started to show up in the world changed in that way.

00;23;49;12 – 00;24;16;29
Ryan
You used the word it’s going to come up in probably in frustration maybe from my end. But convenience will come up quite a bit. Yeah, but I want to shift if it’s okay to composting. Sure. Because it seems to be a point for you right now of pain, excitement, possibility, tension. You’re over it. I you know, you had to stop doing composting in May due to equipment staffing challenges.

00;24;17;08 – 00;24;23;16
Ryan
So you know what you’ve got wait lists for composting. What is what’s going on with composting right now?

00;24;23;16 – 00;24;44;15
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So food waste composting is a difficult thing to deal with, I’ll tell you that much. So talk about learning curve. You know, we had an excellent person. Alex Campbell, who came to work with us back in 2009, I think one of our first workers and was with us for a long time and had a real passion for, you know, keeping food waste out of the landfill.

00;24;45;09 – 00;25;05;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And we grew I mean, we started off, you know, using a pickup truck in a small trailer. And we kind of we got some grant money early on, but we kind of grew it on our own, on our own dime as it was. And then it just, you know, after COVID, it just got to be really difficult to deal with the contaminations that were in it.

00;25;05;11 – 00;25;29;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And so sometimes contaminations could be like the rubber gloves they get thrown in there, you know, or someone throwing a water bottle. But we introduced also compostable ware material. And composable ware material looks like plastic, you know, and it’s a paper cup. And then it kind of it and then when when you take it out to a farm and the wind blows and it goes over that line to the neighbor’s yard, then there’s complaints.

00;25;29;09 – 00;25;59;21
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And it just it’s fraught with challenges. It’s really difficult thing. I don’t know if we’ll ever get into composting again. What I want to get into is being a food waste processor. You know, I believe that the challenges, most of the challenges can be fixed in that process of collecting it, you know, being the hauler and then doing a quick sort of that material and getting it, you know, even the composable where materials and even plastic can go into a process where where it can be turned into a carbon material.

00;25;59;22 – 00;26;14;16
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Right. And then re-introduce back into the soil. And so there’s there’s all kinds of potential. You know, I was really saddened when we had to quit when Alex Ellis took another job at which he went to go work for Food Rescue, which is awesome. Oh, wow. Kind of a dream job for him.

00;26;14;16 – 00;26;28;26
Ryan
So and that’s just in not to stop you there. But, you know, we’ve talked about staffing a couple of times. Yeah. That is the an example of staffing impacting. Yeah, significantly a service. A service in a way.

00;26;29;07 – 00;26;36;01
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So definitely the composting, that is not something that’s for everyone. It’s it’s a difficult job and you got to pick that stuff up Monday, Wednesday, Friday and you.

00;26;36;01 – 00;26;39;27
Ryan
Haven’t talked about any easy jobs just FYI maybe for my.

00;26;39;29 – 00;26;40;15
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
There’s really.

00;26;40;15 – 00;26;41;07
Ryan
No easy jobs.

00;26;41;16 – 00;26;43;06
Mark
You said the word convenience.

00;26;43;06 – 00;26;43;16
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah.

00;26;43;23 – 00;26;53;28
Ryan
Yeah. We’ll get there and, you know, but but again, it’s not it’s maybe of the easiest jobs. It’s the least one of the least.

00;26;53;28 – 00;27;07;06
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I would say it’s the least desired. I think it’s not a bad job with the right equipment. You know, you put on a nice hat and go out there and you got beans. And when we used to do it by hand, very difficult on the back. And then we got a bin Tipper and we got a dump truck.

00;27;07;06 – 00;27;23;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And that really saves some time and energy and then the next thing that we’re fundraising for is, is an organic strike. It looks like a garbage truck with a side load. And and I think it’s not that difficult of a job at that point. But then sorting it, that’s a that’s another challenging thing that we have to do.

00;27;23;03 – 00;27;28;09
Mark
I like your perspective on that. You sound like my wife, who says there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing.

00;27;28;09 – 00;27;30;24
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You just got to dress differently.

00;27;32;01 – 00;27;49;05
Ryan
Practical. And so trying to gauge your your energy on the composting thing based on your answers. So. Okay, composting is something. What do you need? What would you need to take it to the next level If it’s something you you do want to do.

00;27;49;05 – 00;28;10;13
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So everything’s money, my friend. Yeah. And there’s great composers, you know, Kroll’s composting and he’s doing a thing today. A big event, you know, teaching people about food waste, composting, Kroll’s composting. Living on County nine, Bean Rose does a good job. There’s plenty of places of people that have that equipment and the desire to turn it back end into, you know, good humus, good compost.

00;28;10;14 – 00;28;23;07
Mark
I have a landfill QUESTION Yeah. Is there ever any issue of no organics getting to the landfills? Is there a balance that they need to break other things down or no?

00;28;23;11 – 00;28;45;06
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Nope. You do not need to have organics in the landfill. That organics, when it breaks down, turns into methane. And, you know, 80% of that methane is already off gas into the atmosphere before they get that cover over the top of the landfill, before they capture it. So it’s good that they’re capturing that last percentage of it. But nope, you don’t need, you know, landfills kind of designed to sort of be there.

00;28;45;06 – 00;28;59;19
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And it doesn’t really it doesn’t like help anything break down it that I know of. It’s best to keep everything organic out of there includes paper, cardboard, wood, you know, food waste. You know, most of the stuff that goes into a landfill is that level of organic material.

00;28;59;29 – 00;29;20;27
Ryan
Well, the challenge has to be that the composting does fit within what you do. Your model. Many things could almost everything could. Yeah. So you talked about being spread too thin and fining because I am talking to you and I’m seeing a lot of passion in you wanting to literally save everything and do everything. So how do you focus yourself?

00;29;20;27 – 00;29;25;07
Ryan
How do you Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community, how do you focus yourself? Oh, and then I don’t.

00;29;25;07 – 00;29;42;22
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Know if you call it focusing, you know, I focus myself by finding the right people to help me focus on those things. You know, we’ve got some great staff people and I read some some great books. You know, back when I was first starting this thing up and it was all about who you put on that bus, you know what I mean?

00;29;42;22 – 00;30;00;24
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Like the people that are on that bus, you know, are the ones that are going to make the difference in it. And and that’s what I’ve been focusing on. Mostly I kind of bounce like a little pinball off of things, and I take care of the things that I need to take care of, you know, as the executive director, you know, not 100% on it.

00;30;00;27 – 00;30;17;12
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
No one’s perfect. But we we do the best job we can. And then, you know, the staffing thing is definitely the challenge. You know, it was when we started, like I could find people that would do these jobs at nine bucks an hour and now, like it’s $18 an hour is what you kind of need to pay people.

00;30;17;24 – 00;30;32;21
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And part of it was, you know, most of it was just society and especially up here in Traverse City, you know, So that’s kind of what makes it difficult. And I’m proud of the fact that we’ve never missed a payroll, and I’m proud of the fact that we work really hard to try to get people paid more money.

00;30;33;01 – 00;30;51;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But it’s difficult to do when you operate. You know, on the other side of the line in the red. Right. So, you know, God bless them for sticking around with us. And most of the people that work for us, you know, they have this passion also. So I get some energy from them because they’re they they want to do it.

00;30;51;02 – 00;31;08;14
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And they yeah, maybe they take a couple of dollars less an hour to do it. You know, there’s limits to everyone’s right in it. But yeah, it’s I appreciate the fact that that the workers all have, you know some stake in the game. My goal is to get it to the place where we’re able to pay them the right amount.

00;31;08;14 – 00;31;15;03
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I want to be the the organization that pays people, right. You know, more than what the rest of them.

00;31;15;19 – 00;31;33;11
Ryan
Do. You feel that your approach and forgive me if this is too presumptuous, but your your approach of trying as much as you can and being honest about what you can do and moving forward that way is the best way to succeed and to get to that end of paying people more and having more revenue.

00;31;33;19 – 00;31;51;08
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, I don’t know. So that’s a that’s a good question. You know, that’s what I hear from staff and from board is like, maybe we shouldn’t try to do all of these different things and narrow it down. But then when you look at the, you know, the profit and loss statement, like everything kind of makes, you know, breaks even amount of money, you know what I mean?

00;31;51;19 – 00;32;09;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So like, then you have to make a decision like, what are you going to get rid of, you know, and what has the impact on the community. Like if we start picking up from the rural, you know, parts of the county, you know, with our archaic, you know, pickup truck and the guy out there throwing bags of recycling into the back of a.

00;32;09;10 – 00;32;11;14
Ryan
Train, Archaic. Yeah. Isn’t that funny.

00;32;11;14 – 00;32;31;24
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, that’s, that’s the archaic way of doing it, you know, and but then what happens is that recycling now they have recycling services on the county, but some of these people, they’re, you know, disabled or elderly and they don’t have the ability to always make it down to the recycling stations. And you know and so there’s, you know, you have to kind of weigh it all out and see which ones are the best way.

00;32;31;24 – 00;32;44;12
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So we’re kicking around different ideas of, you know, I remember one time that our my board actually did have a vote that I wasn’t allowed to start any more new businesses within Bayer Recycling. So that was.

00;32;45;08 – 00;32;46;07
Ryan
Well, there you go.

00;32;46;07 – 00;32;47;20
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Like, okay, we’re doing too much.

00;32;48;05 – 00;33;06;22
Mark
It’s hard to not see a need and want to fill it. Yeah, I have a question about I see your bins around the area and there’s three of them. Right. So you have like a compost garbage and recycling?

00;33;06;24 – 00;33;07;05
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yes.

00;33;08;08 – 00;33;18;20
Mark
How problematic is it when people don’t understand those three bins and they just conveniently throw whatever into whatever one they feel like throwing in?

00;33;18;27 – 00;33;41;07
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, education is as part of our mission to and it’s difficult to educate people, especially in these times when you have a plastic cup that’s made out of, you know, play plastic, which is corn and next to a solo cup, you know. Yeah. Looks and they both look like plastic cups. And I don’t think that the solution is really to educate them to the level where they can, you know, understand all of the different things that are happening right there at the bin.

00;33;41;18 – 00;33;59;29
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I think if they get pretty close to throwing the recycling and the recycling and the compost, the food waste into the compost, but that’s where there needs to be that sorting level, you know, and the recycling we pick up, it goes over to GFL. We used to try to do it by hand, but it would just became impossible with with our systems of trying to do it by hand.

00;33;59;29 – 00;34;25;07
Mark
So one more thing to point out when they did the archeological dig in Charlevoix, huh? Years and years ago, the archeologists there can pinpoint when clay production stopped with the end. It’s now back up there for pots and whatnot. And when they figured out where to use copper now just better, just easier durable. Move it around with this.

00;34;25;10 – 00;34;43;17
Mark
Yeah. Clay pots break. Yeah. It baffles me that compostable plastics today we didn’t just stop like the solo cup still exists. Yeah, like, why I think we as a people not just be like, Oh, well, this will break down. This never will was.

00;34;44;02 – 00;35;11;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. I mean, plastics made out of petroleum and there’s there’s lobbyists that want to keep that petroleum flowing. That’s one of the reasons I think you know switching, you know huge systems like that takes a lot of you know, supply and demand issues. And and I don’t know if there’s enough, you know, of the ability to make that plate plastic at this point, you know, because that’s going to start to put pressures on the food industry, because now you’re competing with the corn that might be used for grain.

00;35;11;25 – 00;35;17;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So, yeah, a lot of variables playing into it. But that’s interesting. I didn’t know about the Shah Lavoy.

00;35;19;03 – 00;35;27;01
Mark
The channel up there when I was like. Doug in a Yeah, so, you know, you got to wonder back then, was there somebody lobbying for Clay?

00;35;28;03 – 00;35;29;24
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, there’s a clay lobby. Clay Yeah.

00;35;30;06 – 00;35;32;04
Mark
We made these pots like this for 100 years.

00;35;32;05 – 00;35;37;19
Ryan
Like the horse lobby. When the automobile was invented. Yeah, there had to be somebody.

00;35;37;19 – 00;35;38;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
The horse guys were in there.

00;35;39;02 – 00;36;05;20
Ryan
Well, we’ve danced around this subject a little bit, but I was first introduced to you in a in a resort setting. Yeah. And you were talking about at the time, I don’t even know if it was zero waste events, but. And now I think you’re talking about zero landfill events. So I was very captivated by that. You had these products and you had these different offerings, and it was it felt very inspiring.

00;36;05;20 – 00;36;25;10
Ryan
It’s we want to do something different. I was definitely on board and it was really easy to to sell. But the reality is it can be expensive if there are things that are challenging. So are you still focusing on zero landfill events? And we are. Is that something that you want to speak to?

00;36;26;06 – 00;36;58;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. So so zero waste events, zero landfill events. You know, those are the ones where you do have to go out there and and deal with a lot of single use stuff. So you can kind of see where society’s going. Right now, single use things are starting, you know, Europe kind of starts it, right. So they’re starting to ban certain types of plastic single use containers and so the composable where still single use but how else are you going to, you know like we’re going to do a beer festival down in Grand Rapids this weekend for the Michigan Brewers Guild and there’s 6000 people that are going to come there.

00;36;58;25 – 00;37;19;01
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, you know, they don’t have a dishwasher to wash, you know, 6000 beer cups. So, you know, there’s going to be a need for it, I believe. And we like doing those things. Again, it goes back to composting. We’re able to compost the special event waste that we’re doing right now. We still do sort through that and and get it either recycled or composted.

00;37;20;04 – 00;37;43;21
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But the more support that we have to be able to get that next level of sorting and, you know, dehydration, like if we want to take this composting thing into like the city of Traverse City, like every household has the ability to compost, like what Carters compost is doing by bike power right now. Yeah, if we wanted to expand that and get more composting to happen, you really need to have a way to to deep water.

00;37;43;21 – 00;37;58;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
That material, you know, food waste is 80% water. You know, 80% of the volume is from that. You know, you reduce the amount of truckloads you have to take out and the weight of those trucks, right? Yeah. So there’s a lot of different things that can happen.

00;37;58;25 – 00;38;07;29
Ryan
This may be so remedial, but incineration. Yeah. Is that is that industrial incinerators, personal incinerators you see in movies.

00;38;08;08 – 00;38;10;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Star Trek just has the one where you just hit the button.

00;38;10;15 – 00;38;10;26
Ryan
Right?

00;38;10;26 – 00;38;12;01
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Right. The food and the dish.

00;38;12;02 – 00;38;20;04
Ryan
It comes. Exactly. But is that is that a solution communities are using for for waste and avoiding these landfill?

00;38;20;17 – 00;38;39;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So there are you know, Detroit has incinerators and that’s a straight burn. They’re not trying to get energy off of it. There is a way to get a little bit of energy back off of it, like the one in Kent County. That one is a waste energy facility. You know, you’re not getting a lot of energy out of the food waste.

00;38;39;25 – 00;39;05;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You’re not getting a lot of energy off of the other things that are inside there. You know, it’s an expensive, dirty process. And so it might have the the ability to, you know, rid of a lot of volume of material, but it might not be the right solution. Right. I still think the way to sorting it out and finding those right markets for it and, you know, reducing the amount of waste that we produce, that’s that’s an important thing.

00;39;05;09 – 00;39;11;25
Ryan
Well, the first event you did as as a zero waste event was Film Fest. Is that.

00;39;11;25 – 00;39;12;22
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Correct? That is, yeah.

00;39;12;22 – 00;39;31;08
Ryan
And that’s a pretty big festival to start with. And we’ve got a lot of festivals. And where are you and your focus right now in generating these? Are you proactively generating these are you to the point where you have people coming to you and what kind of help do you need in either awareness or anything?

00;39;31;08 – 00;39;57;19
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, so we we have our Web site, our, our marketing folks at La LA does a great job of making sure those things are up to date. So the process, if people come to us, we direct them to our website. And if we see a big event, you know, I mentioned Michigan Brewer’s Guild, Scott Graham from there, he’s an environmentalist and wants to make sure that his events produce the least amount of waste as possible.

00;39;57;21 – 00;40;13;20
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. So I think that that’s just sort of the goal and objective of the people that are doing the event. You know, you can go and approach other places that the reason that they’re doing the event isn’t to like figure out how to like, keep the waste stream down. Yeah. And so there’s, there’s events that are like that too that we might not touch.

00;40;13;21 – 00;40;35;16
Ryan
But there are also small events, you know, weddings, even rehearsals. That was a trend I know in hospitality for a little bit and hopefully to still where you can even get your your clothing secondhand if you want to take it that way and that sounds like maybe a lifestyle situation at that point for your wedding but these are things that you can do.

00;40;36;00 – 00;41;01;16
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, I think the driving factor there is when you know a bride and groom, they’re going to get married and it’s very important day in their lives. They want to have the least amount of impact. You know, they’re thinking environmentally about whether you know, whether about, you know, global climate change or or their waste stream. There they come to us and we help them figure out, you know, I think we did like 100 weddings last summer, you know, and it starts in the spring, ends in the fall.

00;41;01;16 – 00;41;02;26
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But for the most part, yeah.

00;41;02;27 – 00;41;14;27
Ryan
So now this is is this a day that you could have dreamed of where a bride and groom high on the priority list? Dress invites how to make it as sustainable as possible.

00;41;15;00 – 00;41;16;14
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
That’s their goal and objective, you know.

00;41;16;22 – 00;41;22;06
Ryan
And that’s clearly happening. 100 weddings is not a small feat. That’s a that’s a yeah.

00;41;22;23 – 00;41;27;14
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. I’d say it might be like 20% of the weddings that happened around here, maybe less.

00;41;28;00 – 00;41;48;22
Ryan
In. I’ve personally attended a function. It was at the village, at the Commons, at the lawn area, at the commons that you’d done. It looked great and I remember at the time it was only to have generated one bag of actual, I guess what you’d call MSW, right? Yeah. Municipal solid waste. Yep. One bag.

00;41;48;26 – 00;41;49;05
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah.

00;41;49;11 – 00;41;53;19
Ryan
That would go to the landfill. Yeah, it is that essentially. Can you quantify it that way still.

00;41;53;23 – 00;42;17;20
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. I mean you get it down to that, you know in a controlled setting, you know, if it’s an event where people can bring their outside food into it, that’s more difficult. You might hit it like only 75%, you know, recycled composting. But but if you get the control over the event, you know, like there’s a fence around, it’s a food fest or something like that and use and composed of lawyers and everyone’s on board.

00;42;18;01 – 00;42;44;23
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, we would do the wine fest up there in Leland every year We, I think we still do. And that right there we would have our one bag would take a picture of it. I got a picture of me standing next to Carter poster house and Amy smart them in their tuxedo and bridal gown and me standing in between them with one bag of garbage, which was actually one of the very first special events that we did after film festival, I should say, was the first wedding we ever did.

00;42;45;00 – 00;42;54;18
Ryan
Really. And speaking of bragging of things that you’re proud of, could you still do a 2500 person event by yourself that was once claimed by you?

00;42;54;26 – 00;42;55;18
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
By myself?

00;42;55;18 – 00;42;58;04
Ryan
Yes. I Believe in 2500 somewhere.

00;42;58;05 – 00;43;02;17
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We’re going to do 6000. It’ll just be Jordan and I.

00;43;02;18 – 00;43;13;29
Ryan
Well, but okay, that was it kind of meant to be a sillier question, but you just set back with some truth there. So a 6000 person event to people. Yep.

00;43;14;06 – 00;43;24;11
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But clean up on the day after. We’re going to have our guys come down with a truck and a trailer so there’s more people involved and then the sorting of it, there might be people involved in, you know, other businesses.

00;43;24;11 – 00;43;48;10
Ryan
That’s still very impressive. Yeah It’s I’ll just I’ll be impressed enough for for both of you when you think about the different kinds of waste and you touched on this earlier, acquiring elements that allowed you to, you know, expand on the mattresses, electronic waste. And there is the you know, the Jim Gaffigan bit about stockpiling computers. Yeah, in mostly because of photos.

00;43;48;20 – 00;43;51;14
Ryan
There is my wedding computer. There is, you know, kids.

00;43;51;21 – 00;43;52;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Now you see.

00;43;52;10 – 00;43;52;20
Ryan
If I.

00;43;53;01 – 00;43;57;11
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
To have, like computers at home. Yeah. I only have them there because there’s like pictures on them.

00;43;57;11 – 00;44;18;14
Ryan
We’re there, you’re doing it and we’re terrible offenders. Meet us personally, and I apologize, but I know that that’s what’s going on with with most people. They’re they’re worried about security. What is happening for you in electronic waste? And this is something in a couple of the many of these areas are that we as people can take steps to do ourselves to.

00;44;18;21 – 00;44;30;23
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Absolutely. You know, electronic waste is one of the fastest growing waste streams still, although everything is getting smaller. You know what I mean? Like the phones are getting smaller and the computers are getting smaller, so.

00;44;30;27 – 00;44;33;07
Mark
It takes less to store. Yeah.

00;44;33;07 – 00;44;51;19
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. And the so the volume of electronic waste is but even the overall volume TVs are smaller. You know, the overall volume, it’s still a very fast growing waste stream and very dangerous, you know, cadmium and lead and mercury and all of the nasty things that are, you know, lithium. And so good markets for a lot of those materials.

00;44;51;29 – 00;45;00;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We are collector of electronics, so we’re a drop off in the community, you know, year round. You don’t have to wait for the change w the household hazardous waste day.

00;45;00;10 – 00;45;02;05
Mark
Where where I get.

00;45;02;05 – 00;45;25;04
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
The plug and play well So we’re over in Trump’s corner right next to the ball field over at Turtle Creek Battlefield. And yeah, people come in, drop off electronics, you know, wires and things like that. In talking about the business side of it, our model is that we charge a little bit for everything, but that kind of is what it takes to cover those salaries of people to keep the whole ball moving down the road, you know?

00;45;25;04 – 00;45;31;21
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Right. Well, I don’t know why you have a ball going down the road though. Sorry I well I makes my cliches on sometimes, you know.

00;45;31;25 – 00;45;32;22
Mark
A of ball bearings.

00;45;33;09 – 00;45;35;20
Ryan
Going down I think intrinsically.

00;45;35;21 – 00;45;40;17
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But I kept saying, well burn that bridge when we get to it. And I found out later on that that was actually two different.

00;45;40;17 – 00;45;42;03
Mark
You’ll cross the bridge. Well yeah.

00;45;42;03 – 00;45;43;00
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We cross, then we burn.

00;45;43;00 – 00;45;47;00
Mark
It, then they burn in the terrible part you might need to get back.

00;45;47;00 – 00;45;57;03
Ryan
That’s while you’re somebody who likes to do things the hard way, you’re going to burn the bridge first to figure out how to cross it. Burn it second. And that’s repurposing. It is Maybe is.

00;45;57;03 – 00;45;57;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
What if we don’t burn?

00;45;57;25 – 00;45;58;26
Mark
It sounds like CrossFit.

00;45;58;26 – 00;46;24;21
Ryan
Is speaking of repurposing something that’s really fascinating. And I just I kind of wanted to tease your interest in talking about it is the tiny home piece. Yeah. In this when you think about reclamation and bringing things full circle, there is a nine and ten news story with a local realtor about, you know, and that created the term upcycling thing and was really doing a project and reclaiming a home.

00;46;24;21 – 00;46;33;26
Ryan
And it was interesting to see that, to see somebody really doing this. Yeah. So how did you conceive of this and is it as difficult as it sounds?

00;46;34;17 – 00;47;03;07
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Oh, it’s it’s not difficult at all. It’s a lot of fun. Again, there’s nothing that Bach does that doesn’t require grit and and hard work. And it’s definitely one of those things for sure. So, you know, being from that field, we talked a bit about my dad in construction, you know, being from that field and getting my degree in construction management and working in that industry, you know, I always thought we’d wind up and I love the fact that we matched, you know, recycling and and buildings together.

00;47;03;10 – 00;47;24;13
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, to me, right after especially after COVID, we started just before COVID, what we call D reconstruction. So we deconstruct things and we reconstruct them into things. And so that that brought a little bit of energy back to me, you know, where I was needing to get some some some movement again after COVID. But I just love, like tearing things apart.

00;47;24;13 – 00;47;29;23
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We work with Youth Works here in Traverse City through Child and Family Services.

00;47;29;23 – 00;47;30;04
Ryan
Oh, that’s.

00;47;30;04 – 00;47;45;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Awesome. And yeah, and they’re the ones that do a lot of the the hard work of taking the drywall off. But we’ll take a building. We’ll go in there. A lot of times the building’s furnished. We get we just been on one here on 10th Street. We hope we get in, we take everything out of it and it goes down to our resale store that’s in Calabar.

00;47;45;02 – 00;48;08;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So, you know, the light fixtures, the microwave oven that still works, all the refrigerator, you know, all that stuff we put back into resale. And then Youth Works comes in there and deconstructs all the drywall off of the walls and pulls all of the electrical wires out of it and recycles it. And then all the plumbing in the back and the siding off of it, which goes off to, you know, resale.

00;48;08;24 – 00;48;28;20
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And then we’re left with a rough framed house. So you’re reverse engineering this whole thing. And that’s an interesting thing in itself, because some of these houses are 100 years old, some of them are 20 years old, you know, these buildings. And so you get to see like kind of how the construction practice goes and how they built things, you know, and how many layers some of these things.

00;48;28;20 – 00;48;32;09
Ryan
Are you finding often that they don’t build them like they used to in a good way?

00;48;33;01 – 00;48;44;13
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Oh, my. I think our codes have gotten stronger and the builders have gotten smarter about how to build things and the materials have definitely gotten better. Right? So I think our construction these days is probably better than it was.

00;48;44;13 – 00;48;48;12
Ryan
Interesting. Yeah. Fascinating side result of that kind of job.

00;48;48;13 – 00;49;05;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I’d say that we’re doing a pretty good job. You know, we’re building things. You know, all regions in the U.S. are considered sized right now. And so an old house, a hundred year old house might have ballooned frame the walls and and stuff you don’t see anymore, like, you know, a 26 foot two by four like you can.

00;49;06;07 – 00;49;12;26
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
They don’t make those anymore. Right Right. You know or a one by 18 for siding. You know just just I.

00;49;12;26 – 00;49;24;16
Ryan
Think people are going to want to know what’s the policy of, you know finding the menu from the Titanic. Yeah. You know, $100,000 and rare bills in a wall.

00;49;24;16 – 00;49;26;20
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We’re always looking for the, you know, the bag of gold.

00;49;26;22 – 00;49;33;28
Ryan
That’d be a good thing. That’s a good infusion for our Navy. I’ll get that view in. Yeah. How did you get there? Well, gold in a house.

00;49;33;28 – 00;49;35;04
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
How did you get the Lamborghini?

00;49;35;04 – 00;49;37;04
Mark
So no. No time capsules yet, though.

00;49;37;04 – 00;49;38;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
No time capsules.

00;49;38;10 – 00;49;39;15
Mark
You know, there’s one in my house.

00;49;39;21 – 00;49;40;16
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
There are some actually.

00;49;40;23 – 00;49;41;09
Ryan
Is there.

00;49;41;17 – 00;49;55;02
Mark
Yeah. When we when we read the announcement, we raised the basement. My son wrote a letter that said to him. Ontario Wilson, born February seven, 27, in this house. Cool. Here’s here’s a newspaper from today and a few other things You know we.

00;49;55;02 – 00;50;01;29
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Do find our homes that were built between the early 1900s, you know, before before World War two.

00;50;02;06 – 00;50;02;25
Mark
Newspapers.

00;50;03;03 – 00;50;09;17
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Old newspapers. Yep. One house had, you know, Chicago fire, you know.

00;50;09;25 – 00;50;10;06
Ryan
Paper.

00;50;10;26 – 00;50;23;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But you see a lot of liquor bottles up. And this was, I guess, the way it used to be when the bricklayers, they would leave a liquor bottle up on the plate, you know, before they put the drywall or the laughing plaster in. Right. So a lot of houses have a couple of liquor bottles. And then.

00;50;23;10 – 00;50;24;01
Ryan
That’s why.

00;50;24;06 – 00;50;30;26
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, it’s sort of a it’s sort of like a little time capsule, like we were here type of thing. And then hammers like and we.

00;50;30;26 – 00;50;31;09
Mark
Drank on the.

00;50;31;09 – 00;50;31;20
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Job.

00;50;31;20 – 00;50;33;07
Ryan
There’s a that’s where I was going.

00;50;33;11 – 00;50;34;00
Mark
Yeah, Yeah.

00;50;34;15 – 00;50;36;28
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So that’s why construction practices got a little.

00;50;36;29 – 00;50;37;23
Ryan
Right, Right.

00;50;37;23 – 00;50;48;00
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
No, no, you can’t drink on the job. But yeah, hammers and tools that were left behind. And so some interesting stuff out there, but never, never seen the time capsule. That’s pretty cool.

00;50;48;09 – 00;51;13;04
Ryan
A very compelling part of this whole story as it relates to you is nine being Rose. They have this public call for housing relating to staffing. And this is huge, huge issues here. Yeah. And this kind of concept looks like it could handle at least helping to serious challenges we have, which is housing and housing and housing and housing.

00;51;13;04 – 00;51;14;17
Ryan
Yeah. And then affordable housing.

00;51;14;20 – 00;51;33;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, affordable housing, you know, temporary housing and seasonal housing and those types of things. And so one of the things we were talking about Sano from Seeds and she was awesome. She introduced me to an architect an Eco Phi is the name of the company and just Clokey is the architect. Yeah. You know, just.

00;51;33;11 – 00;51;34;07
Mark
Went to school with them. Oh.

00;51;34;20 – 00;51;53;21
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Great, dude. Amazing, amazing designer. Very, you know, green minded, looking for those solutions. And so when he and I met, you know, we were just getting started into the degree program and taking buildings apart and I like to, you know, do what I call reverse panel ization where you chop a building up into, you know, things that we can fit on our trailer.

00;51;53;21 – 00;52;14;07
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So eight foot wide, 24 foot long roof trusses. And not only do you get to save the lumber, you know, but you save all that energy it took and all the nails that it took to put those things together and then we pull them apart. We just did a house with a very nice lady here in town named Candace Ramey, and we moved the house that used to belong to Thunder Day and Marley or his parents.

00;52;14;07 – 00;52;38;07
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I think he bought it for his parents when he went to the Phenix Suns, and it was his house over on Hammond Road. And we we transported it all the way up to Leelanau County and Candace had some property, wanted a house on it, and we were able to get that house up there. And in 22 pieces I think it was put it all back together, stitched it back together, had a great engineer, you know, local guy named Jason TONER, which was, I’m sure, the weirdest thing he engineered this year.

00;52;39;22 – 00;52;45;28
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
But it’s like, yeah, we’re going to rebuild the house and helped us, you know, figure out the bracing and the things like that that needed to make it so it met code.

00;52;46;06 – 00;53;10;17
Ryan
Well, not to be too sentimental, but, you know, we’re we’re dancing around, that is. And this upcycling concept is a way maybe for people to hold on to something of a loved one, you know, grandparents house, maybe you can’t relocate it like you said, maybe you can’t do, but you can do something with it. It’s just a different way than selling it to somebody and having it leveled and become a 7-Eleven.

00;53;10;24 – 00;53;36;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, exactly. And not go to the landfill. And that’s that’s important. I think I was down at the MF by the Michigan Forest Products Conference that they had down in Lansing, and right now Michigan in the state of Michigan. In the state of Michigan, we consume about a billion board feet of lumber for new construction, and we landfill about a billion board feet of material from demolition.

00;53;36;16 – 00;54;09;24
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So so there’s a billion board feet that we’re using billion 42 feet that we’re disposing of. And so the goal is to get that out there. And again, meshing it together with my background of construction is awesome. But I really just like chunking out houses, You know, we did one for DC and Jody Hayden up there who have the grocer’s daughter Chocolate, and you’ll see when you go up there they took the land where we had the property where the old hardware store was, and we took a chunk of it and just moved it off to the side and then they moved the back on and rebuilding it into like a little educational center.

00;54;10;05 – 00;54;31;04
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So those are the cool things in trying to like connect that mission of the reconstruction, but connect it to something like the affordable housing. Yeah. And you know, we just met with Larry Mosby and talked to him about his land trust that he has, you know, and he’s developing a way to have land. That’s their specifically in Lenore County for affordable housing.

00;54;31;09 – 00;54;34;13
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We haven’t found our spot yet, so we’re still searching for that.

00;54;34;26 – 00;54;44;24
Ryan
Do you feel like we are not yet near enough of a critical mass for this to be a big enough issue for it to give you enough resources to make a bigger impact?

00;54;44;25 – 00;54;49;05
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Oh, I think we hit critical mass when it comes to affordable housing. Years ago.

00;54;49;05 – 00;54;50;04
Ryan
But you know what I mean.

00;54;50;04 – 00;54;50;14
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah.

00;54;50;15 – 00;55;13;11
Ryan
No, like it’s We’re talking about it. Yeah, we’re talking about it. Yep. Tiny homes are popping up here, and they’re not getting a lot of traction. And then it’s more about homes. Use for Airbnb is in this conversation. Yeah, but something like what you’re doing seems like it should be able to make big enough noise where somebody should be like, All right, this makes a lot of sense.

00;55;13;15 – 00;55;14;01
Ryan
What’s happened?

00;55;14;01 – 00;55;16;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
One billionaire to get behind us. Give us this.

00;55;16;03 – 00;55;17;21
Ryan
One. Yeah, just only one.

00;55;17;21 – 00;55;19;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Just one. Oh, we’ll take multiple billionaires.

00;55;19;27 – 00;55;22;25
Ryan
Okay. You want to toss that one out the door? Oh, no.

00;55;23;18 – 00;55;29;12
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
They’re not. They’re few and far between. You know, you got to try to recycle as many as you can. You.

00;55;30;02 – 00;55;42;16
Ryan
You know, just thinking and reflecting on the conversation. You know, it’s a it’s a huge enterprise. What’s your undertaking and what you are undertaking? What is something about your day that would surprise people to hear.

00;55;45;04 – 00;56;09;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Something about my day that would surprise people. So I didn’t during COVID. So going off subject here a little bit, but sure, yeah. Recycling for charities, 15 years old, you know, we’re about ten years into it. We got an embezzlement thing that happened with us with one of our employees and it almost sank us. And then we moved and we moved down to Calabar and we had a building down there that caught fire in 2018.

00;56;10;02 – 00;56;32;10
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So it felt like like multiple disasters. And we’re very resilient as an organization. That’s one thing I would say about the workers. Yeah, we’re pretty resilient. We bounce back. We’re like that. What’s the Abominable Snowman guy that is in the cartoon where he bounces back? Yeah. So. So when COVID hit, it was like, this is nice. Like, here’s a disaster everyone’s going to enjoy.

00;56;32;10 – 00;56;55;17
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know what I mean? And it wasn’t just a bad recycling for charities, you know, thing happening. So I kind of enjoyed it because, you know, we were able to disconnect a little bit from the the day to day and in and reconnect with some nature. That’s what I did. So I think what would surprise people is that I you know, I kind of found my my, my philosophy of Daoism inside there in that moment.

00;56;56;10 – 00;57;14;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
I’ve always had that philosophy, I think. But I was able to embrace it. And I go up and I do a both staff exercise with a wooden stick in the woods and spin it around and and it gives me energy. And I’m not an exercise kind of guy where I go to the gym and lift the weights or or run.

00;57;14;13 – 00;57;15;04
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know what I mean?

00;57;15;05 – 00;57;17;25
Ryan
When you’re repurposing houses and yeah, you know.

00;57;18;06 – 00;57;25;09
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, there’s definitely some exercise involved in that. Yeah. And some pulled muscles and probably a rotator cuff or two.

00;57;25;11 – 00;57;41;20
Ryan
Well, when you think about your pursuit of this, your journey along this way, you’ve had a lot of inspiration. Was there any advice along the way that at the time sounded insane but sense has come true or been relevant to you?

00;57;42;12 – 00;58;05;06
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Um, yeah, absolutely. Along the way, in a lot of different ways, positive and negative, you know, things I think the guy that told me early on like this will never work. He was a lot closer to that than I was saying. Oh, no, like I’m a I’m Irish German, you know what I mean? So it’s like, you know, we’re either going to drink together and then fight or we’re going to fight first and then drink together.

00;58;05;06 – 00;58;24;28
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So but I’m very stubborn and really hard headed. And so if someone tells me like this, like this will never work, I’m like, Oh, that’s all I needed to hear. But I think the words where like, there’s not, you know, there’s no money in recycling, like you’re going to really struggle with this. And and that was advice that was given early on that I disregarded and I’m glad I did.

00;58;25;09 – 00;58;48;01
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
We wouldn’t be here today talking about it if I would have just sidestepped that, you know, and gone in and did something else. But but it is a struggle. Running an organization is is is a struggle. And but there’s lots of great advice. I can remember we talked about it right before, but there was this nice old man that supported our organization in some tough times named Arno Von Wall.

00;58;48;01 – 00;58;55;06
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Tauzin Mm hmm. Yeah. And he gave me some sage advice that was, you know, Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community and I can’t do his accent or.

00;58;57;10 – 00;58;58;09
Ryan
Where is he from? Give it the.

00;58;58;09 – 00;59;01;00
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Justice. I’m going to say that sounds like a German guy.

00;59;01;00 – 00;59;04;23
Ryan
Right? Right, right. Okay. Yeah, he he didn’t want to say that.

00;59;04;27 – 00;59;23;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And his son and I are friends, and and he he would always support and just an amazing person by himself. I could go in all kinds of details about him, but he gave me some advice that said this world doesn’t necessarily need anyone to shove it in one direction or another. What it needs is just a gentle nudge in the right direction.

00;59;24;09 – 00;59;48;00
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I guess that’s just probably the best advice you can hear, because, you know, when you’re trying to recycle things and, you know, change the world in that way, you know, you can get eco anxious. I call it eco anxiety. So imagine you’re starting a nonprofit recycling organization and you’re putting your shoulder into it for five years. And and you just see garbage trucks driving past you and like, what the hell am I doing?

00;59;48;00 – 01;00;06;05
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Like, is this even making a difference? Like, we probably only recycle maybe, you know, five or 10% of what this community creates as a waste stream. And so that can take a lot of wind out of your sail, you know, if you look at it from that perspective. But the sage advice of Arno Van Vliet has always stayed in my mind that.

01;00;06;05 – 01;00;13;02
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You know, you don’t have to change the world as long as you push it in the right direction. Yeah, there will be someone else there to push with you down the road.

01;00;13;03 – 01;00;27;06
Ryan
That’s wonderful advice. And that. That’s. That’s reasonable advice, I think, because it’s fascinating to find out from people the things that sounded nuts but have come true. But it’s also good to know that sound advice. Yeah. Came along the way also.

01;00;27;08 – 01;00;35;11
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. And that’s really the kind of advice that, you know, anyone really needs is the stuff that just kind of keeps your energy up, right? So you can keep doing the things you do.

01;00;35;11 – 01;00;50;10
Ryan
Well, looking back, are you glad you decided to be the guy and ask? Yeah, the the fairly informative person. Well there’s not a market for this. And would you do anything different along.

01;00;50;10 – 01;01;08;18
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
The way or do a million things different, you know, but as far as it goes, I’ve got no regrets, you know, for doing it. You know, took a pay cut and stressed out my family and my, you know, didn’t didn’t have all the time I wanted to have with my kids. So there’s there was sacrifice inside there for sure.

01;01;08;18 – 01;01;28;18
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. But at the end of the day, I feel like, you know, my family’s stronger for it. You know, my kids see that it’s not all about making money and trying to, like, you know, compete with the Joneses and achieve this and have that, you know, on so many levels. I feel like this was the right thing to do.

01;01;28;18 – 01;01;47;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I and that’s what gives me the energy to keep going. Yeah. You know, there will be a day, though, where I’ll step away from it. And I think one of the things, you know, when I first started this, because legacy is an important thing, right? We have we want to have legacy. We want to have something that carries on beyond our life here on this planet.

01;01;48;15 – 01;02;14;03
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Legacy for a lot of people is money. You know, you put a bunch of money in the bank and then your legacy is that, you know, and maybe you can use it philanthropically and you can help organizations, or maybe it’s something that your family just, you know, creates the wealth and stuff like that. But this is this is what I intentionally did as my legacy was to just be out there, try to get this thing flowing in the right direction and then, you know, someday I’ll step away from it.

01;02;14;13 – 01;02;22;25
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And I just hope that, you know, 100 years from now that there’s, you know, a Bach truck coming up here and maybe a Bach flying car, you know, it’d.

01;02;22;25 – 01;02;23;18
Ryan
Have to be close to.

01;02;23;19 – 01;02;24;16
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Landing on. Yeah.

01;02;25;01 – 01;02;46;15
Ryan
Well, it’s like you said, you hope to be irrelevant, and that would be your version of it. Yeah, in a way, is to not be needed. And and what’s really remarkable is that the website has so many resources. So this is something that you are doing on a broader scale, but you’re also enabling all of us to take up the crusade.

01;02;46;15 – 01;02;47;21
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
And thank you for saying that.

01;02;47;21 – 01;03;05;22
Ryan
Well, I mean, if you just have to look at the website because you know that board who’s talking about getting into the black, there’s a whole lot of free stuff. Yeah, advice, articles, how to compost. Yeah. I mean, there’s so much on there that they could be saying. You should charge just to go on to my Bach talk.

01;03;05;23 – 01;03;07;11
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Oh, that’s a brilliant idea. I’m going to bring that up.

01;03;07;11 – 01;03;12;15
Ryan
But just, you know, a dollar, you know, Wikipedia always tries to just keep, you.

01;03;12;15 – 01;03;14;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Know, like, we’ll give them one blog article or something like that.

01;03;14;27 – 01;03;27;22
Ryan
I but in all honesty, there is so much there. So is that the best way to support to potentially donate, to even volunteer? What’s the best way to support Absolut to get where.

01;03;27;22 – 01;03;56;29
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
You just use names. Yeah there’s a donate button on the on the my Bach dawg website there’s you know a place to fill out information for if you can come in and volunteer. That’s a great way to support not just this organization but any nonprofit. You know, doing good work around here. So volunteerism in because we kind of built this thing up like a business in such a way where where we have revenue streams that come from people dropping off, you know, recycling or buying compostable wares or using our services.

01;03;57;15 – 01;04;12;11
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
So that’s a way to support to, you know, and people find those things and if it benefits them to have us at their event, for instance, you know, picking up the garbage, that’s great. But however you however you can do it, Yeah, it’s it’s been a ride.

01;04;12;16 – 01;04;26;03
Ryan
That’s incredible. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being with us and for talking. Thank you. Today, is there anything that we may have missed as far information sharing, anything that you’d want people to know in anything upcoming?

01;04;26;12 – 01;04;47;13
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Not really. But we are going to have an expo down in Calif. I think it’s in May. You can check out our website. I would say if someone wants to. We’re not super intrusive with our newsletter. It’s a once a month newsletter, but go to the website and sign up for the newsletter. And then every month you’ll just see like what’s happening next in where we are looking for volunteers.

01;04;47;19 – 01;04;57;18
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
A lot of times where we’re looking for volunteers is to pour beer at a beer festival like, the Empire Asparagus Festival. So, you know, it’s not really too hard to work in. The ratio is one beer for them, one beer for you.

01;04;57;18 – 01;05;06;23
Ryan
And Oh, that’s great. Yeah. And again, I know you’re really good to two volunteers and you tend to give them the easy job, so they want to come back.

01;05;06;23 – 01;05;08;07
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah. Yeah. There’s some things.

01;05;08;07 – 01;05;09;15
Ryan
Which I think that’s a good strategy.

01;05;09;15 – 01;05;12;27
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, I think that we haven’t had a lot of volunteers wanting to go composting with us yet.

01;05;13;23 – 01;05;26;07
Ryan
But you’re open to it. Open to it. Beautiful. Well, Andy, thank you so much for your pursuits and to all of those who pursue along with you in sharing a more sustainable community and quite frankly, a better earth. Thanks for being our guest.

01;05;26;08 – 01;05;27;00
Andy – Bay Area Recycling for Community
Yeah, thank you, guys.

01;05;27;00 – 01;06;15;23
Ryan
Our pleasure. And to all of our listeners, thank you all for listening and thank you for pursuing the positive.