May 3, 2007
Trash into treasure is Kaufman’s goal
Pat Kaufman began his career picking up waste, and now his time is spent trying to divert items from the trash to more productive uses. In his mind, it all comes down to “taking care of our environment.”
Kaufman, who has been the UW’s recycling manager for four years, spent 13 years before that in a similar job at Seattle Center. But it all started when he agreed to take a summer job in his uncle’s landscaping business after his first year in community college, where he was studying photography. Summer stretched into fall, and he wound up shifting his focus to landscaping.
“I just love landscaping,” Kaufman says. “I like taking care of facilities. I like ensuring that things look right. I began to see how one person can improve the environment.”
So, as he studied horticulture at Edmonds Community College, he continued to work in jobs involving grounds maintenance. He was hired at Seattle Center as a grounds laborer in 1990, just about the time that recycling programs were getting started. When the center was ready to get on board, they turned to the grounds crew because “we hauled the trash,” Kaufman says. “I ended up doing a lot of the collecting and sorting, and by 1994 I had carved out a job.”
It was a job that suited his caretaking sensibilities. It was also an exciting time to be involved in recycling, as ways were developed to recycle more and more products. Kaufman got to know other recycling coordinators, including the UW’s, and helped to form the Campus and Institution Recycling Council where they all compared notes.
By 2000, Kaufman’s mentor at Seattle Center was urging him to go back to school, telling him he needed to see “how things are connected.”
“He was so right,” Kaufman says. “I entered the UW’s Community and Environmental Planning Program, which is interdisciplinary. I was able to sit at the same table as architects and urban planners and folks from the food industry, from hospitality, engineering students. We’d all work together to tackle an environmental issue.”
When the UW’s recycling manager job opened up in 2003, Kaufman felt ready to tackle the larger and more complex program here. He’s quick to give credit to his predecessors, saying he’s just picking up where they left off, and he also acknowledges his co-workers, emphasizing that it’s a team effort. The program continues to expand as the means for recycling new products become available. Within the last two years, for example, the program has been able to recycle food waste because regional compost facilities were granted permits to receive food along with yard waste. Most recently, the program added electronic media to the list of items for which recycle bins are provided.
“If we can find a vendor for a product that costs us less per ton than having it hauled away as garbage, then we’ll use that vendor,” Kaufman says. “Our goal is to capture as many materials as we can for reuse and recycling, and the University can be proud of that.”
Right now, 44 percent of the University’s waste stream is being sent to recycling facilities; Kaufman and his staff are constantly working to increase that amount. It all comes down to a simple transaction, he says: “A person doesn’t want something; it’s in his or her hand. It’s our job to get a recycle bin near that person and remind him or her to use it.”
Using that strategy, the Recycling Program has been able to convince the many patrons of Husky football games to increase their waste diversion rate from 13 percent to 28 percent in three years — just by having convenient containers nearby and visible.
It’s efforts like that that make Kaufman’s job satisfying. “I really truly see, with the tonnage we recycle on campus, that our department does help the environmental footprint of the University,” he says. “That’s a great sense of accomplishment, especially when you look at our annual reports and see, wow, that item was just thrown in a hole in the ground a couple years ago and now it’s recycled into a new product.”
