Leftover paint from S.F. brightens towns far away

April 22, 2006 (Earth Day)
Paul Kilduff
The Chronicle/SFGate

Clearing out unwanted, rusty half-empty gallon buckets of house paint from your garage can really get the old spring-cleaning juices flowing.

For San Francisco residents, getting rid of that pink paint used to brighten up the main bathroom two owners ago is easy. They can just drop it off at the San Francisco Recycling Center's Household Hazardous Waste facility for free. But what happens to the paint after that?

"I thought they buried it somewhere," said San Franciscan Robert Tom, who pulled into the collection center recently to rid himself of some paint and aerosol spray cans. In fact, much of the city's leftover paint ends up in places around the world where tossing perfectly good paint is unheard of.

The center receives hundreds of paint cans every day, many rusted or paint-splattered beyond recognition. Nevertheless, virtually all of them are recycled. The oil-based paint is shipped off to companies that burn it to generate electricity. About 20 percent of the latex paint is too moldy or rusty to recycle and winds up as a binder for cement. Latex paint deemed salvageable gets a second chance to brighten someone's day.

Depending on its color, the paint is poured over a screen into one of three 55-gallon drums. Blues, grays and greens go into the "Cool" drum. Beige hues make it into the "Off White" barrel, and reds, tans and browns are destined for the "Warm" container.

"If you didn't do any sorting, you'd always get a light brown that gets a little boring," says Paul Fresina, who oversees the center. "If you separate it and play with it, you can come up with more of the colors that people want." With the three distinct color classifications, center workers can mix the paint into just about any color they want, from pinks to yellows. According to Fresina, the center's reclaimed product is of a higher quality than new store-bought paint because as the paint ages it develops a higher solids content, allowing it to cover walls better.

The end product, hundreds of 5-gallon buckets of remixed house paint stored in a shipping container, is available free for San Francisco residents, who use it for everything from covering up graffiti to painting their basements, but the supply always exceeds demand. In an effort to spread the reclaimed paint farther, 10 years ago, the mostly immigrant employees at the center proposed sending some of it back to their home countries.

Just like the Italian immigrants from Genoa who started San Francisco's refuse companies more than a century ago, today most of the employees at the center do not hail from the United States, but from Mexico, Mali, China, Laos and other countries where a bucket of paint is considered a valuable commodity.

With this in mind, in 1995 the first shipment of more than 700 5-gallon buckets of paint was shipped to Tonga. Since then, similar shipments have made their way, free of charge, to San Salvador, El Salvador; Tepatitlan (or Tepa), Los Cabos and Santiago, Mexico; and Mali, where the paint has been used for schools, churches and other community buildings. The recipients in these countries generally prefer brighter colors, so the paint is remixed from its drab American origins into more vibrant hues.

The shipping costs are about the same as sending the paint to a Los Angeles facility to be blended into cement. SF Recycling picks up the extra costs of sending paint to Mexico or any other countries.

The company notes that ratepayers aren't subsidizing the cost of shipping donated paint because, when it sends such large shipments, the cost is less. And because it doesn't incur a $130 per barrel "disposal" fee charged by the L.A. facility, that can make donating the paint abroad less costly than having it mixed into concrete.

While sending free house paint to needy parts of the world would seem to be fairly straightforward, the process, especially in Mexico, involved jumping over quite a few bureaucratic hurdles. It's a maze with which San Francisco Recycling Center staffer Humberto Quinonez, a chemist who tests what's dropped off at the center to make sure it's disposed of properly, became intimately acquainted when he tried to send a shipment of paint to Los Cabos in 2002.

While the paint was a donation, Quinonez says Mexican officials wanted San Francisco Recycling to pay $7 in taxes per bucket on top of the $3,000 it was already spending to ship the paint.

Luckily, Quinonez's brother-in-law was familiar with the Mexican state's secretary of education, who got the government to "pay" the taxes out of its own budget, allowing the shipment to arrive. "That's how Mexico works," says Quinonez.

Now that Quinonez, 41, who emigrated to the United States to study at San Francisco State University in 1988, is an expert on sending donations to Mexico, the whole process has become second nature to him. "It's just like calculus. You get it once, and after that it becomes so simple," Quinonez says.

S electing where the paint shipments will go is a group decision made by employees at the center, but it's Quinonez who deals with arranging the shipment. A native of Santiago, in the state of Durango, Quinonez arranged for paint to be sent to his hometown last summer.

To ensure the paint was used on needy structures and not somebody's mansion, Quinonez and a co-worker took vacation time and arrived in town at the same time as the shipment. The pair were feted in a ceremony with teachers. Paintbrushes and rollers were distributed to volunteers who had gathered to paint various schools in town.

"It's a great feeling. I wanted to make sure they do something good with it," says Quinonez, who may also go to Los Cabos to follow a paint shipment delivered to the southern Baja city last month.

Because he's seen as a can-do guy by locals, on his last visit to Santiago Quinonez was approached by many in town about getting much-needed medical supplies. Rather than brush off the request, Quinonez contacted Emeryville's VIDA-USA, a philanthropic group, and now X-ray machines and wheelchairs are also headed to Santiago. "He's a hometown hero now," says Fresina as Quinonez shrugs.

Whether it's the smiles on the children's faces or the gratitude expressed by local townspeople viewing their freshly painted buildings, Quinonez knows that those in the communities getting the paint are grateful. Posted in his work locker is a certificate, from the mayor of Tepa, Mexico, which recently received paint. The certificate reads: "Que Dios se los pague." According to Quinonez, in Spanish this means, "God is going to pay you."