Kenny Derieg literally makes his living dumpster diving. As Santa Monica College’s recycling program specialist, he’s paid to keep his hand in the waste and his eye on everything students throw away.
“I consider myself the traffic control for all campus waste,” he explains.
Day by day, dumpster by dumpster, Derieg and his two student workers, Enrique Zanotta and Dylan Burger, scout the campus on the lookout for eco-fails and missed opportunities.
They methodically log what and how much gets pitched. “We go around with a paper and clipboard, and we’re taking notes on how often this bin or that bin is filling up. Every bin is numbered,” he says.
Periodically he and his students perform “trash audits,” emptying selected bins onto a tarp and sifting through the noisome contents for signs of “contamination.” A greasy pizza box befouling a blue recycling bin. A water bottle carelessly mixed with grass clippings. A banana peel mistakenly bound for the landfill.
Derieg’s main focus is capturing organic waste — everything from wilted lettuce to clamshell paper boxes. It’s his job to make sure SMC stays in compliance with SB 1383, which requires the collection of organic waste around campus.
“We’re currently averaging about 300 pounds a week,” he notes.
According to Derieg’s supervisor, sustainability director Ferris Kawar, SMC was one of the first community colleges to hire a full-time recycling specialist — almost 20 years ago now.
“The position was important then and has only become more critical,” Kawar says, as environmentalists came to understand the disastrous consequences of putting organic waste in landfills. Left unattended, green waste turns into methane, a heat-trapping gas 80 times worse for the climate than carbon.
“We were ahead of the curve,” Kawar adds, reflecting on SMC’s early embrace of sustainability work.
When Derieg started this job last year, it felt like a homecoming. “It’s nice to be back on my old stomping grounds,” says the 33-year-old alum.
He prides himself on being “a hyperlocal native.” Born and raised in Santa Monica, he graduated from Samohi and studied two years at SMC before transferring to UCLA, where he earned dual bachelor’s degrees in sociology and urban planning. He went on to earn a master’s in urban sustainability from Antioch University, focusing on food systems.
Before joining SMC’s staff, Derieg was an environmental educator with TreePeople, giving “Trash Talks” to teenagers and jumpstarting school-based recycling programs across greater Los Angeles.
Passion for the environment runs in Derieg’s family. His father spent 40 years working for the City of Santa Monica, starting as a street sweeper. His mom was a parking enforcement officer: they met working the same route. “She would write the tickets for the cars parked in his way,” he says, with a grin.
In a twist of fate, the “hyperlocal” recycling specialist left Santa Monica four years ago to embark on an experiment in sustainable living with his wife, Brittany, and their two cats. When their jobs went remote in 2020, they grabbed an opportunity to become “land stewards” of an undeveloped 20-acre lot in Temecula.
“We were pretty much living off the grid,” Derieg says. No electricity. No sewage. The only infrastructure was a water hook-up. They built a tiny home on a trailer running entirely on solar power. In their spare time, they planted 150 fruit trees and established a productive orchard. In 2022, they returned to the grid, settling in quasi-rustic Rancho Palos Verdes.
Derieg’s day starts early. To beat traffic, he arrives on campus at 7am via e-bike. Then, he and his team head for SMC’s on-campus food pantry Bodega, scooping up unwanted produce. They stop by the glass-blowing studio to collect broken glass shards. Certain departments generate lots of batteries and shredded paper, so they touch base daily.
With organic waste, everything stays on campus. Once a week, Derieg and his helpers crank up an industrial-strength grinder that crushes food into pulp. They mix in a slurry of mulch, horse manure and hay donated by Ocean View Community Garden. This surprisingly un-smelly slop goes into SMC’s Vermitech machine — home to some 500,000 red wiggler worms — where it’s transformed into gardener’s gold.
“The worms have magical microbes in their intestines,” Derieg says. “Whatever they’re digesting and evacuating, the plants just love. It’s the ultimate fertilizer.” The process generates about 100 pounds of worm castings every other month. Part goes back to Ocean View in a barter arrangement. The rest is applied to SMC’s Organic Learning Garden and campus landscaping.
Derieg’s time is also spent educating others and advocating for waste management across SMC. Earth Month is an especially busy time, as the focus of campus life turns in Derieg’s direction. But he’s never too busy to share his passion for sustainable solutions.
Four tips for earth week how to minimize food waste:
• Try thinking of everything you throw away not as trash but as a resource that can be re-utilized, recycled, and kept in the loop of our economy. Then dispose of it appropriately.
• Instead of throwing away food that’s getting a bit old, consider freezing it, drying it in a dehydrator, or preserving it as jam. If you hate leftovers, consider sharing them with friends who are less finicky. Composting should be the last option. Always avoid food waste.
• If you’re throwing food scraps in the trash, understand that it’s very bad for the environment. A head of wilted lettuce takes years to break down properly in the landfill, and it releases harmful methane into the atmosphere. By putting that lettuce in a green bin, you help create a closed-loop system where we grow food, eat food, compost food and re-apply that compost back onto the land.
• Everybody is now legally required to have green bins, but some haven’t complied. If you don’t have access to a green bin, put pressure on your landlord, your employer, your city or your waste hauler to provide one.
Article Courtesy of the SMC Public Information Office