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pecial thanks to San Clemente-based artist and surfer Drew Brophy for providing the Green Issue cover art.

Brophy has been a professional artist for more than 20 years and currently works out of his studio in San Clemente’s Los Molinos District. Through hard work and dedica-tion—as well as the help of his wife and partner Maria—Brophy has become world- renowned for putting his lively and colorful work on everything from clothing and shoes to guitars and surfboards.

The cover art was inspired by a song Bro-phy heard at the April 17 Earth Day event at Panhe—a former village and still sacred site for Acjachemen/Juaneño Band of Mission Indians in the San Mateo Creek bed.

“The Acjachemen Indians spoke of how their songs have echoed in San Mateo Creek for hundreds of years,” said Brophy. “I imag-ined the land as it once was, in all its glory, and how the tribal speaker said ‘the land

Drew Brophy. Courtesy photo

On the Cover

must be happy to hear these songs again.’” To learn more about Brophy and see more

of his art, log on to his website at www.drewbrophy.com. —Andrea Swayne

BY JONATHAN VOLZKE

Doggy Bag or Compost Pile?Experimental program tests food-scrap recycling in South County restaurants.

sed to be that the food you didn’t fi nish at a restaurant went home in a doggy bag or straight into the

eatery’s trashcans.But now, depending on where you’re din-

ing, those uneaten scraps could end up in a mountain of compost 150 miles away and maybe even ultimately help grow the food you’ll eat on another night out.

Participating restaurants in eight Orange County cities—including Dana Point, San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano—and the unincorporated areas served by CR&R Waste and Recycling Services have joined in a yearlong experiment to keep food waste out of landfi lls. Just like the push to recycle paper, aluminum and glass, offi cials are studying the logistics, costs and practicality of turning food waste into compost.

Every city in California is required to di-vert at least 50 percent of all its waste away from landfi lls. A restaurant, on average, disposes of more than 50 tons of organic waste every year. Californians overall throw away more than 5 millions tons of food scraps each year, said Maria Lazaruk, CR&R’s environmental manager.

Funded by a $400,000 grant from the county, the participating restaurants in the Stanton-based trash hauler’s program kept close to 1,000 tons of food scraps out of county landfi lls in the past 12 months, Lazaruk said.

Dana Point restaurants participating included the Ritz Carlton, St. Regis and Salt Creek Grille, while San Clemente’s participants included Adele’s Café, The Fishermans Restaurant and Tommy’s Family Restaurant. In San Juan Capistrano, the facilities recycling food scraps were a little more diverse and included Farm to Market, a grocery market with a deli, El Campeon

Mexican restaurant, El Adobe and Casa de Amma, a live-in facility for adults with special needs.

Since the program started, Dana Point restaurants have diverted 272.38 tons of food scraps, San Clemente 109.80 tons and Capistrano 157.97 tons, Lazaruk said.

Also in the program: Two public schools, Ladera Ranch Middle School and Chap-arral Elementary School, also in Ladera. Other restaurants started the program but dropped out.

It doesn’t take much to be in the program, said Marcos Costas, general manager at Salt Creek Grille. Participating restaurants are given additional collection cans to keep inside the restaurants, and employees sort the waste among traditional recyclables such as glass and paper, refuse and the food. CR&R picks up the food scraps twice a week, Costas said. The food-recycling cans are lime green.

“The restaurant’s been open 15 years, so there was 15 years of habits,” Costas said. “I posted signs where employees punch in for work and put them up where they get information on the daily specials … it took a little bit to get the muscle memory down, but CR&R made it so easy on me.”

Costas said the food-scrap recycling

didn’t cause any problems.“It’s one of those things you can be proud

of for doing, but if I felt it was causing any kinks in the armor operationally, we wouldn’t participate,” Costas said. “It’s not, so we’ve never been prouder.”

Reyes Gallardo, general manager at El Adobe in Capistrano, agreed the program was easy on the restaurant, made famous as one of Richard Nixon’s favorites.

When the scraps leave the restaurants, they are trucked more than 150 miles to Thermal, the home of California Bio-mass, which has permits that allow it create 140,000 tons of compost a year, said Mi-chael J. Hardy, one of “The Hardy Boys” who founded Bio-Mass with his brother in 1991.

The food scraps don’t add much value to the compost Bio-Mass creates from the ma-nure and other waste it composts because it is so high in nitrogen, Hardy said. But the sheer mass amounts of compost created by Bio-Mass means the food scraps are “like a needle in a haystack” and don’t hurt it, either. But Bio-Mass charges CR&R to take in the waste, then charges customers—most large agricultural operations—for the compost it creates, too.

The process of taking those food scraps (Continued)

U

S

GOING GREEN The food-scrap recycling program was one of the efforts cited when The South Orange County Regional Chamber of Commerce this month awarded CR&R its “Going Green” Award.

CR&R converted its hauling fl eet to clean-burning liquefi ed natural gas, offi cials said, and also spear-headed a bottle and can school recycling program that resulted in one school district receiving approxi-mately $59,000 from CR&R for their collection efforts.

For more information, see www.socchambers.com

Adele Lux, owner of Adele’s Café in San Clemente, shows off one of the food-waste collection bins. Photo by Jonathan Volzke

Doggy Bag or Compost Pile?(Continued)

and turning them into compost takes about 13 weeks. Upon arrival, the waste is chopped up. Again, because of the huge amounts of materials being mixed, Bio-Mass can blend in dairy scraps and meat products—materials backyard composters can’t work with because they take so long to break down they can pose a health hazard.

The materials are molded into windrows on the 80-acre Bio-Mass property, and turned by machines. Regulations call for monitoring to ensure the material reaches at least 132 degrees for 15 days to kill off harmful bacteria, Hardy said.

Although permitted for 140,000 tons a year, Bio-Mass is doing about 70,000. That’s enough to put it in the top half of compost companies in the state, but leaves plenty of room for the food-waste programs to expand. “Our ambition is to keep moving these prod-ucts forward,” Hardy said.

For now, it’s working without the Vintage Steakhouse in Capistrano. Vintage is one of those that withdrew from the program, said Matthew Timmes, one of the owners. While the Vintage owners fi gured out how to handle the lime green food recycling bins in the res-taurant, the eatery’s outside trash bin areas

were too crowded. “Space wise, it was a challenge,” Timmes said.

Still, he added, Vintage—green in an-other way because it grows basil, thyme, rosemary, sage, tarragon, onions and mints in an herb garden in front of the restaurant—would be happy to rejoin the program in the future.

They, and all restaurants, might have to in the future, Lazaruk said. The pilot program is determining how much the program costs CR&R to operate, and in the future the hauler will work with cities to determine how the program can be imple-mented with minimal impact on ratepayers, such as charging less for the food scraps than for non-recyclable waste.

But with the changes in participating res-taurants, the tonnage generated in the pilot program was less than expected, she said, and the equipment costs a little higher than expected. Those lessons are spurring CR&R to ask the county to extend the program past its original end date this month to No-vember. That will allow them to better nail down their costs and get more feedback from restaurant owners.

“We don’t want this program to go away,” Lazaruk said.

Neither does Adele Lux. The lifelong San Clemente resident owns Adele’s Café at the San Clemente Inn, where she recycles so much—glass, papers, cooking oils and now food waste—that she foresees a day when she might not send anything off to a landfi ll.

“My customers appreciate it,” she said. “But this is where I live, and that ocean is where I swim. It all makes a difference.”

Guerilla Gardenersatricia and Tom Southern live on La Ventana atop the bluff overlooking the Pacifi c at the corner of Coast

Highway and Camino Capistrano. Situ-ated at the border of San Clemente and Capistrano Beach, this corner is heavily traveled by both locals and visitors and, until recently, was nothing great to look at. Patricia decided to do something about it.

“I got tired of seeing this area looking so bad, full of trash and looking like an abandoned lot,” said Patricia, who with Tom began cleaning up the corner.

“We really wanted to improve our com-munity so we started by planting plumeria cuttings from our garden and picking up the trash. Little by little, we have been planting wildfl ower seeds and adding drought resistant and native plants to help with erosion and make this corner a beau-tiful part of our neighborhood.”

Those original plumeria cuttings, placed there about two years ago, took hold and the Southerns were encouraged to keep going.

“A couple of neighbors saw what was happening on the corner but didn’t know it was us, said Patricia. “When they fi gured it out, some of them joined in to help. It has become a pride of neighborhood type of movement,” she said.

Tom admitted that when Patricia fi rst approached him with the idea of what she wanted to do, he was resistant. The lot

BY ANDREA SWAYNE

was in really sad shape and looked like a huge undertaking, he said.

Now the duo, along with help from a few others, have brought that eyesore of a corner from a patch of crumbly, clumpy dirt riddled with trash to a colorful and beautiful corner of the world.

“It’s called guerilla gardening, and I’ve re-ally gotten into it,” said Tom. “This is a pretty big movement in cities all over the country and it works here too. In Los Angeles folks are beautifying vacant lots, planting near the fl ood control channels and turning ugly little pieces of dirt into beautiful gardens. All of this is being done completely by volunteers “on the sly” at no cost—aside from a bit of elbow grease—with cuttings and offshoots from existing gardens. We are hoping that this inspires others to see what they can do to improve their own neighborhoods.”

P

Patricia and Tom Southern work on beautifying the bluff face at the corner of Coast Highway and Camino Capistrano. Photo by Andrea Swayne

Solar panels not only help reduce the effects of global warming, but also offer an alternative source of energy. “They generate electricity at a very cost effective rate compared to your tradi-tional utility company, and they are the best source of alterna-tive energy,” says Donn Reese, CEO of Living Green Inc., a San Clemente based company, which offers energy solutions. “Solar panels will last as long as your home. They are an investment in your home that will last not just months, but years,” says Reese. Go to www.livinggreenincsc.com for more information. Rainbow Sandals had solar panels installed on their offi ces last October, and “now they’re kicking in gear for summer,” says Pat Huber. They not only try to be a more eco-friendly company by recycling and conserving energy, but they believe people can “save the earth by making and using products that last.” You can fi nd those products at www.rainbowsandals.com.

An energy calculator on the San Diego Gas & Electric web site, www.sdge.com, lets you see how much electricity everyday appliances use. One hour per week with your hair dryer can total up to 62 kWh per year, which translates into $12 per year. Visit their site for more calculating fun, and fi nd ways you can save energy and money.

Rain Barrels

Harvesting rainwater is an ancient practice, fi nd-ing its way back into our modern society, due to the rising price of water, as well as use restrictions drought has placed on many US cities. For more information on Rain Catchment Systems, call Eco-Space Green Pro Services at 949.218.5900

COMPILED BY PANTEA OMMI MOHAJER

Home Green Home

Water Conservation

You can save 5,000-50,000 gallons of water annually by following these simple steps:• Convert sprinklers in your lawn to rotating nozzles, and sprinklers in you planters to drip irrigation.• Replace old toilets and clothes washer with high-effi ciency models.• Fix leaking faucets, pipes and sprinkler systems immediately.For more tips on how to save visit www.san-clemente.org

Plastic

What’s the big deal about plastic? According to the Surfrider Foundation, and their Rise Above Plastic mission, “plastics do not biodegrade, instead they photodegrade-breaking down under the exposure of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, into smaller and smaller pieces…virtu-ally every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists in some shape or form.” Rise Above Plastic’s mission is “to reduce the impacts of plastics in the marine environment by raising aware-ness about the dangers of plastic pollu-tion and by advocating for a reduction of single-use plastics and the recycling of all plastics.” Visit www.surfrider.org for more information.

Composting

Why compost? According to www.compostguide.com, a blog designed to help you understand why and how to compost, “Landfi lls are brimming, and new sites are not likely to be easily found. For this reason there is an interest in conserving exist-ing landfi ll space and in developing alternative methods of dealing with waste.” By using your reusable waste, you not only save landfi ll space, but save your garden too. Replacing your fertilizer with compost “improves soil fertility and stimu-lates healthy root development in plants,” explains compostguide.com

Carpooling

According to census data, around 75 percent of commuters in the US drive alone. That’s a lot of cars, lead-ing to a lot of gas use and pollution. Carpooling offers a solution. Why share? The folks at www.erideshare.com have a few good reasons: “Driv-ing is stressful. Socializing is good for you.” The website offers resourc-es for people who are interested in sharing a ride to work, in order to save money and the environment.

Habitat Gardens

You might love tropical plants, but they’re hard to grow in the desert. Habitat gardens are designed around your environment, making the best use of what you have, to grow what you can. The use of native, drought tolerant plants means you save on water, while giving back to the ecosystem what it needs most to fl ourish. Visit the California Native Plant Society at www.cnps.org for more informa-tion on your habitat.

Electricity

Solar Panels

“Take care of the earth, and she will take care of you.” We see this saying on pillows and horseshoes, but how often do we see it in our lives? Take a walk through our Home Green Home, for tips on how to take better care of the earth we live on, in the hopes that she will take care of us, and our children for generations to come.

BY JONATHAN VOLZKE

Kick the Battery,Get a Bucket.

Sound Body, Sound Earth

his May, Saddleback Memorial Hos-pital in San Clemente will go live with their Electronic Medical Records sys-

tem as part of a federal program designed to make the offi ces of all medical care provid-ers paperless by 2014.

The San Clemente hospital will be the fi nal facility in the MemorialCare System to complete the process, and among only 10 percent of hospitals nationwide, ac-cording to data on the American Medical Association website, to put the program in place since former President George W. Bush established the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology posi-tion in 2004. The position was designed to help implement the move toward paperless medical offi ces, with a deadline set for 2014, putting Saddleback years ahead of the game.

The AMA suggests the high cost of the transfer prevented many from making the switch faster. On average, an EMR system can cost about $20,000, making the cost of transferring high, and the fi nancial benefi ts few.

Financial problems can also arise should medical care providers not meet the dead-

BY PANTEA OMMI MOHAJER

For the Love of Butterflies

an Clemente State Park Interpreter Cr-yssie Brommer led the charge last Earth Day to beautify the park by creating a

gardening program aimed at reintroducing native plant species that attract pollinators such as butterfl ies and hummingbirds to the area. Since then, volunteer gardeners from the San Clemente Garden Club, San Clem-ente High School Environmental Club, city residents, park visitors and others have culti-vated and cared for what has become known as the Butterfl y Trail pollinator gardens just inside the campground entrance.

A group of about 100 volunteers gathered at the park on April 16 to continue work on the gardens and clean up the area in honor of Earth Day and see some of the butterfl ies the plants have been attracting.

“This year’s Earth Day grant allowed us to add a live butterfl y exhibit in addition to planting 300 new plants focusing on a different bed in the Butterfl y Trail pollinator gardens,” said Kris Ethington, San Clemente Garden Club Junior Gardener Program Chair. “These native butterfl ies will be released into the park that now, through the help of volun-teers, has everything they need to continue their life cycle.”

The butterfl y tent allowed park visitors to get an up close look at the butterfl ies and learn about the plants the habitat restora-tion project is using to attract them to the gardens. Once inside the tent, people were allowed to attract the butterfl ies to land on them with fresh cut oranges. Monarchs, Mourning Cloaks, Painted Ladies, West Coast

BY ANDREA SWAYNE

C Waste & Recycling is giving each customer who visits one of Orange County’s four Household

Hazardous Waste Collection Centers from Tuesday through Friday, April 19 to 23, a battery bucket. “The buckets are a great reminder to do the right thing with your batteries,” said Board of Supervisors Chairman Bill Campbell. “Batteries contain hazardous materials and don’t belong in the landfi ll. The bucket is a reminder to properly dispose of your batteries. Having the bucket in your home makes proper

disposal convenient.”To get the Earth Day reward, residents need

only bring some household hazardous waste to one of the centers for proper disposal. Centers are located in Anaheim, Huntington Beach, Irvine and San Juan Capistrano. Once the bucket is full of batteries, residents bring the bucket to a collection center. The batter-ies are properly removed and the residents take the bucket back home to fi ll again.

The closest collection center is in San Juan Capistrano, at 32250 La Pata Avenue, south of Ortega. See www.oclandfi lls.com for more details.

Ladies fl uttered around often landing on those eager to have a closer look at them. Visitors also got a chance to see the but-terfl y life cycle from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to fl ight.

Visitors were surprised to see tiny tags with a phone number printed on them at-tached to the outside wing of some of the Monarchs in the tent. The tags were part of a study that began last November to track and monitor Monarch butterfl ies as they either pass by San Clemente on their annual migration or establish a home in the park.

“There are two taggings going on here,” said Ethington. “My daughter Dani is doing one study to tag and test butterfl ies for OE—a protozoan parasite that is a predator affecting butterfl y health—in the park and other gardens in San Clemente.” The fi rst tagging program, started last fall, will con-tinue to monitor the migrating butterfl ies that stop here and migrant populations to answer questions such as: Where do San Clemente-born butterfl ies go and do they have a greater or lesser incidence of OE in-fection than the migrant butterfl ies? “They can live with OE. It doesn’t eliminate them but it does affect reproduction, Kris said.

To learn how you can volunteer, or for more information about interpretive programs at San Clemente State Park, log on to www.calparks.org. To fi nd out more about the volunteer work of the San Clem-ente Garden Club, visit www.sanclement-egardenclub.com.

line. Medical facilities that do not meet EMR system standards by 2015 will have their Medicare funding reduced.

“An EMR system is essentially a patient’s health history and medical information stored in electronic, rather than paper format,” said Elisabeth Seznov of Saddleback Memorial Medical Center. According to a news release by Seznov, the network is highly secure and easily accessible to healthcare providers, making it easier for medical professionals to share a patient’s pertinent fi les, in order to help them faster and more effi ciently.

Electronic health records also reduce the amount of paper being used by medical of-fi ces, replacing the endless walls of paper fi les often seen behind the receptionist’s desk at doctor’s offi ces, with electronic fi les instead.

According to Seznov, transferring to elec-tronic fi les not only makes it faster and easier for doctors to access a patient’s medical history, but also reduces the amount of paper being used, and the space those expired fi les can take up in landfi lls. The transfer to EMR systems makes it easier for people to lead healthier lives, while making the earth a healthier place as well.

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A tagged Monarch butterfl y is seen at San Clemente State Park. Photo by Andrea Swayne

BY ANDREA SWAYNE

By living the change that I think the Earth needs. I always think about my impact with everything that I do and I’m not afraid to tell others how they can lessen their negative impact on the environment. I also try to pass my passion on to my students at San Clemente High School.

—LISA KERR, SAN CLEMENTE

I separate the recyclables like bottles and cans at home, and I try to pick up trash in my neighborhood. In Boy Scouts we do beach cleanups, too.

—TROY NUEVA, 10, SAN CLEMENTE

I take an hour-long walk around Dana Point every day and pick up trash along the way. I also make it a point to volunteer for local cleanup, restoration and planting projects.

—ROBBIE ROBINSON, DANA POINT

I make it a point to get outside to enjoy and appreciate this beautiful place we live in. My family and I all do our best to recycle and to avoid single-use coffee cups and water bottles. We all carry our own reusable CamelBak water bottles.

—PETER SODERIN, SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO

When shopping for food, I try to buy only free-range, humanely treated animal products at stores like Marbella Farmers Market and locally grown organic produce at South Coast Farms and everyday groceries at a mainstream grocery store. It takes a little extra effort to shop at three stores but it is worth it. Oh, and when shopping, I take my own reusable shopping bags.

—MAGGIE LANDES, SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO

I make my own homemade soaps and together with a friend of mine, make bags and purses out of recycled packaging. Also, I recycle everything I can at home.

—TERI HIRASUNA, SAN CLEMENTE

What do you do to make every day Earth Day?

We use the Brita water filter system after realizing how many plastic water bottles we were going through in a day. We were surprised at how easy it is and how much money we save. And the water tastes great, too.

—LARRY LANDES, SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO

I retired from teaching in June and this year I helped Marblehead Elementary School start their own garden. Just a few days ago we counted our 625th student planting in the garden. I also volunteer in the State Park butterfl y habitat project.

—STEPHANIE ANFINSON, SAN CLEMENTE

I try to set a good example for my son by recycling, use Earth-friendly products, avoiding polystyrene foam; things like that. I am also very concerned about stopping the practice of killing sharks for their fins. I went to Monterey recently for a speaking engagement on the subject. Shark fi n soup sells for over $100 a bowl in Asia and an estimated 100,000 sharks a year are killed. It is an incredibly cruel prac-tice where fi shermen catch a shark, cut off the fi n, and then throw it back to die.

—JIM SERPA, DOHENY STATEBEACH SUPERVISING RANGER