O Water Bottle, Water Bottle! Wherefore art Thou, Water Bottle?

Walking tours of Castro Valley’s “garbage central”—the Davis Street Transfer Station—are being offered to local folks 18 and older who want a behind-the-scenes look at what happens to their trash.

To inform, educate and boost the public's participation in properly sorting rubbish, the Castro Valley Sanitary District is hosting free tours, specifically for area residents and business owners, of the massive 56-acre Davis Street facility in San Leandro.

June 15 is the next scheduled tour, with a registration deadline of June 1.

“It’s important for folks to understand what happens to the materials after they leave the curb,” said Rebecca Jewell, Davis station tour guide and recycling programs manager for Waste Management Inc., collection agency for Castro Valley.

Retiree Edward Bovee was already a "trash day" model citizen, earnestly separating cans, bottles, yard clippings, even his leftover food scraps, into the three bins for weekly pick-ups.

But after he and his wife took the first Sanitary District-sponsored tour held in March, even Bovee was struck by the importance of due diligence when it comes to household waste.

“If you have no clue of what goes where, you may think, ‘Oh, it doesn’t make any difference,’” Bovee said.

But it does. And if there’s one point Jewell wants to drive home to Davis Street visitors, that is it. 

“Trash never gets touched again,” she said. “Diversion is a priority.”

So the errant soda can, yanked-out weed or plastic milk jug that inadvertently gets tossed in with trash is landfill bound, when such items could be recycled or composted.

“People think, ‘Oh, it gets sorted anyway,’” Jewell said. “That’s not the case.” 

To align with Alameda County's waste-reduction initiatives and recent landfill bans on plant debris, Castro Valley must hit a “75 percent diversion” target—meaning three-quarters of the solid waste collected is to be diverted from landfills and either composted or recycled

Jewell says the figure may go higher, as government authorities discuss allowing only 10 percent of what’s collected to be dumped in landfills.

Key to meeting those numbers is getting residents fully onboard with the three-cart program for recyclables, green waste and trash.

Davis Street, which began as a dump in 1942, has over the years been upgraded and expanded to a state-of-the-art processing operation that handles organics, recyclables and trash from 1.5 million people, Jewell said.

Tour participants don hardhats and reflective vests for the tours that include question-and-answer sessions and one-hour walkabouts of the site.

Bovee is retired from a construction company that years ago built one of the first portions of the transfer station.

At 85, he recalls how refuse was handled when he grew up on a Montana farm. “We buried it and gave the food scraps to the animals,” he said. “Or we threw it in one garbage can and they picked it up.”

While already eco-minded in general, Bovee said seeing the Davis Street operation in person impressed upon him that he is not a picayune in the trash cycle and that how and what is discarded are imperatives.

“Now it’s, ‘No, wait. That goes over here in this can. This can be recycled,’” Bovee said. “We’re more mindful of it. We want to do the best we can."

Information on the upcoming tours is available at the Sanitary District web site at http://www.cvsan.org/content/davis-street-transfer-station-tour-dsts or by calling 510-537-0757. Registration is limited.