By Scott O'Leary

A woman in a dirty checkered shirt pushes her rickety shopping cart full of garbage bags toward two large green recycling bins in a Safeway parking lot. As she gets closer, she spots a sign attached to the side of one container. It reads, "Evicted."

Puzzled, she looks around. About 20 feet away from her is a tall man standing behind a table with cake and soda set out. There is a small crowd of people gathered around and a five-member band is playing the blues. "Is this a birthday party or something?" the scruffy woman asks as she walks over. "Nope, we're being kicked out," replies Andy Pugni, executive director of San Francisco Community Recyclers, as he cuts a piece of cake and hands it to her. "Thanks for recycling."

SFCR held a customer appreciation party Oct. 30 at its recycling center at the Safeway located at 1335 Webster St. to thank its supporters for their business over the past 12 years. Safeway is expelling SFCR from its property, setting the stage for Tomra, a recycling conglomerate headquartered in Norway, to replace the nonprofit organization.

Safeway has been at odds with SFCR for more than 10 years, but this is the first time the company has successfully removed a center from its property.

According to Pugni, "Safeway doesn't like the fact that most of the recycling center customers are homeless." He claims that Safeway is bringing in Tomra because the company says it can lower transaction times, which would move the homeless out of the parking lot faster.

Unlike SFCR, whose employees take and sort by hand all the material they receive, Tomra uses a vending machine system to collect the recyclables. Tomra currently has more than 50,000 machines installed in 40 different countries, according to its Web site.

The SFCR site at Webster and Geary was officially closed Oct. 31. A Safeway representative told us they expect recycling to resume under Tomra by mid-December but could not comment on why the SFCR had been evicted.

The loss of the site, which generated the most revenue for SFCR, was described by Pugni as "an unbelievable blow." "We're not sure if we will survive," he said.

Along with running two other recycling centers in San Francisco, SFCR is responsible for pioneering a number of new reuse programs that target nonrecyclable material that would otherwise go to landfills. These programs could be threatened now that SFCR has lost its most profitable recycling site.

"Reuse is the future," said Matthew Levesque, project manager of the Red Shovel Glass Company, which is one of the nonprofit programs funded by SFCR. When you recycle something, you have to melt it down, and those materials need to be compatible. "This severely limits the types of waste that can be recycled," Levesque said.

The Red Shovel Glass project uses modified cement mixers to tumble nonrecyclable glass with a water solution. This process creates hard mulch that is used for landscaping.

"We're diverting waste from landfills, and every piece we make we sell," Levesque said. "Tomra's not going to do this." PS SFCR still operates a site at the Safeway located at Market and Church Streets.