Editorial: Garbarino helped Marin set the tone for recycling
In the 1970s, after already helping build Marin’s largest garbage-collection firm, Joe Garbarino Jr. saw a need for change.
The “throwaway society” our nation had become was on a fast pace of filling landfills and wasting resources that could be reused.
Mr. Garbarino saw a need to turn the trash business toward recycling and the pioneering advances he launched for his Marin customers blazed a trail of changes in the industry and a public awareness that reuse, recycling and recovery are wiser choices for our environment and future.
Mr. Garbarino, a longtime San Rafael resident and community leader, died on Dec. 19. He was 91 and had built a long legacy as a tireless pioneer who changed long held business practices of an industry and attitudes and practices of consumers.
Recycling wasn’t new in the 1970s. There were a few recycling centers around Marin, but Mr. Garbarino took it curbside, making it a lot easier for his customers to practice recycling and for him, as a business, to generate the volumes needed for it to make sense. He changed the minds of industry doubters, including those for whom diverting trash from their landfills wasn’t good for their bottom line.
Mr. Garbarino, a burly man who got his start collecting trash for his family’s firm – Marin Sanitary Service – never rested on his laurels, although his initiatives and innovations established templates for recycling and waste management across the state.
What most people saw as trash, Mr. Garbarino saw as an opportunity to recycle or reuse. Over the years, his Marin Recycling Center in San Rafael has been a center for innovation. Mr. Garbarino was a strong businessman, always focusing on coming up with ways – and industrial efficiencies – to reduce the stream of trash headed for landfills. At the same time, he strived to increase consumer awareness of the challenges his industry faced, whether it was changing international markets for recyclables or wasteful packaging of products.
He turned recycling into a local public ethic. He changed the waste stream that had been a three-step process: Consumers filled their trash cans, the garbage man collected the trash and it all wound up in the landfill. Today, consumers sort their trash, separating garbage and recyclables and the garbage company picks it up and sorts it again, finding more that can be recycled and focusing on reducing the trash stream into landfills.
Mr. Garbarino’s success and his Marin customers’ participation created a model that has been copied across the state and beyond.
Mr. Garbarino had a vision of the need to change and took the initiative and business risk to build a successful enterprise that proved to other communities that it could be done; that recycling was good for the economy and the environment.
A state entrepreneurial grant helped him build the Marin Recycling Center facility that helped curbside recycling grow.
Mr. Garbarino treasured his Italian heritage and celebrated the liberties and opportunities his family found in the United States. Part of that celebration was his collection of antique military vehicles, as many as 100, that he generously made available for local Independence Day, Memorial Day and Veterans Day parades and events.
He was honored at last year’s Marin County Veterans Day ceremony held at the Marin Center.
Mr. Garbarino’s heartfelt championing of recycling will be missed. He was an industry icon and a community leader. The vision, hard work and initiatives he advanced built an awareness and momentum that’s vital to our environment and a legacy of a man who made a difference.