There’s Gold in Them Thar Trash Bins : Recycling: A mall general manager has figured out a way to turn used cardboard into a profit-making sideline.

SANTA ANA — Until last year, MainPlace mall had always tossed the mountains of cardboard boxes discarded by its retail tenants into the trash bin. And the merchants picked up the tab--tens of thousands of dollars annually--for the service.

In recent months, however, the mall’s management has turned cardboard dumping into an environmentally sound and profit-making sideline.

The program, initiated by MainPlace General Manager Tanya Thomas in May, 1990, has caught the attention of other Southland malls. MainPlace isn’t unique in recycling its waste: Most big commercial and retail centers have some sort of recycling program and more will come. A year-old state law requires businesses to recycle at least 25% of their waste by 1995.

If similar recycling programs continue to catch on, it could ultimately remove hundreds of tons of space-gobbling cardboard from area landfills, recycling specialists say.

At South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, all office paper, plastic, cardboard, glass and aluminum is dumped into large compactors that are taken to a recycling center. But the giant mall makes no money for its efforts. Only the trash company that hauls the dumpsters away and the recycling company that resells the materials make money on the deal.

At MainPlace, the cardboard recycling program has resulted in a dramatic reduction in disposal costs, plus a profit from direct sale of the cardboard.

In its first year, the program netted $17,000. That money is being used to offset an anticipated 20% increase in the mall’s annual trash bill.

CR&R; Recycling Center in Stanton handles about 30,000 tons of material a month, but cardboard represents only about 8% of the total--or 2,500 tons, said Mike Silva, the firm’s vice president.

He said MainPlace, the company’s only retail mall client, recycles about 12 tons a month. Other big cardboard recyclers, he said, include discount stores such as Costco and Home Club and the World Citrus Corp. packing plant in Fullerton.

The only use for old cardboard, Silva said, is to be reprocessed into cardboard boxes again. CR&R; and other recyclers sell cardboard to mills overseas and locally.

“We are the forest for a lot of foreign mills because they don’t have trees they can use and are entirely dependent on the cardboard we sell to stay in business,” Silva said. Local buyers of recycled cardboard include Container Corp. in Torrance and Inland Container Inc. of Corona.

But getting the material still is a chore.

Because it is lightweight and bulky, cardboard is difficult to store and expensive to haul, unless it can be consolidated into very large loads. Because of that, many cardboard users find it less costly and troublesome to discard the stuff rather than recycle it.

“The Brea Mall has approached us on several occasions, and we have given them facts and figures about cardboard recycling,” said John Dalton, owner of Dalton Recycling Services in Anaheim. “But they wanted to use small, 3-cubic-yard containers, and that just isn’t financially feasible.”

Dalton said his company has about 3,500 commercial clients in Southern California but has found few that are interested in recycling cardboard “because by the time they bail it and pay to haul it away, it is not cost effective.”

Thomas was aware of that problem when the mall’s management began designing its recycling plan. To increase the cost effectiveness, she decided to use the largest containers available--huge 40-cubic-yard cargo bins that hold about three tons of cardboard.

But the large bins would only fit in two of the mall’s six loading docks and merchants whose stores were any distance from the docks didn’t want their employees spending time carting cardboard to the containers.

“We didn’t have great participation,” Thomas said, “until we got smaller bins for the other four docks and stopped asking the merchants to bundle the cardboard themselves.”

The mall hired a full-time recycling monitor whose job is to bundle the cardboard and load it into the two large bins.

The revamped program works well, said Mercedes Malion, a sales associate at the Williams-Sonoma gourmet shop. She said employees at the shop are serious about recycling and whenever possible reuse boxes and packing material.

But the boxes that aren’t used to pack customers’ purchases are broken down each day, she said. The flattened boxes are loaded onto a small dolly and then taken downstairs, where the mall takes care of the rest.

In the old days, she said, the flattened boxes would be crammed into the big blue compactor in the loading dock, along with trash the store was dumping.

Keeping the cardboard out of the compactors is what makes the MainPlace system work, Thomas said.

The mall’s trash company, Great Western Refuse in Santa Ana, has placed a removable compactor in each of the mall’s six loading docks and charges $317 each time it hauls one away.

When cardboard was routinely tossed into the compactors, Great Western was making as many as 18 monthly pickups at a cost of nearly $6,000 a month.

“Now they make nine pickups a month and we save about $34,000 a year on hauling costs.” In addition, the mall received $6,000 last year from selling its cardboard to CR&R.; When the costs of operating the program--about $23,000 annually--are calculated, the mall figures that it saves $17,000 by recycling rather than discarding cardboard.

The type of cost savings is making other mall operators and recycling centers take notice.

“We’ve talked about our program at a number of retail mall management seminars,” Thomas said, “and we’ve gotten calls for information from several centers.” Her office has even published a “how we did it” booklet it sends to callers, she said.

The management of Grossmont Center in the San Diego County community of La Mesa heard Thomas describe MainPlace’s program at a regional seminar late last year, said Bob Clough, maintenance supervisor.

After discussing the mall’s needs and the services available from local trash collection and recycling firms, he said, Grossmont’s management has decided to launch “a whole-mall system in which we will separate and recycle aluminum, glass, office paper and cardboard.”