De Anza College students who diligently sort their garbage and recycling on campus may be in for a surprise: custodians mix the two and send it to an outside facility to resort, said Manny Da Silva, the custodial operations manager at De Anza.

“I get a lot of calls asking why the custodian is putting the recycle with the garbage,”
he said.

For the past year, De Anza has used single-stream trash with campus garbage. The custodians don’t separate the garbage, but the college sends everything to a materials recovery facility in Morgan Hill that sorts the recyclables from the garbage.

“Most of our stuff is composted; the other part goes to recycle,” Da Silva said. “Less than 5 percent goes to landfill.”

Joe Cooke, De Anza grounds supervisor, uses the compost returned from the center to enrich the soil on campus, Da Silva said. Cooke also used chips from the compost as tan bark for De Anza’s grounds, he said.

De Anza will still keep the separate bins on campus since “people like having the two bins,” Da Silva said. The bins would take energy to recycle, which makes no sense if the bins are being used, he said.

Following De Anza position cuts, each janitor will have an additional 15,523 square feet to clean, totaling 51,744 square feet, according to the Finance and Educational Resources budget reduction plan for 2012-2013.

Da Silva said he incorporated other new programs to make the custodial time more efficient in response to the cuts.

One new program started three months ago is the Keep Stock Program which cuts time on gathering orders and dispensing supplies, he said.