Recycler’s Job Gets Recycled

CJ ​“Magic Man” May saved 133 mattresses from the garbage dump in the ​“last hurrah” of spring campus cleanup — and the end of a 22-year-long recycling odyssey at Yale.

As Yale’s first recycling coordinator, Cyril ​“CJ” May has grown the program at New Haven’s largest employer from a volunteer student operation to an institutionalized effort to minimize Yale’s environmental footprint.

After leading Yale recycling for 22 years, May is finding his own job recycled: In mid-July, Yale will eliminate his position, absorbing his duties into other departments.

“It’s not an end to recycling,” assured Julie Newman, director of Yale’s Office of Sustainability. May ​“laid the groundwork for us to embrace [recycling] at a campus-wide level,” she said. ​“He’s left a legacy of recycling behind.”

May, who’s 49 and lives in East Rock, kept Yale on the cutting edge of recycling through ​“guerrilla” operations, passion for the job, and a healthy dose of magic.

Yes, magic. Over the past decade, he’s learned to weave in magic tricks to his work as an education tool. Kids at festivals know him as ​“Cyril the Sorcerer.” Adults know him as ​“the resourcerer.”

Around campus, some people call him ​“Magic Man.”

On Yale’s Old Campus one morning last week, as he oversaw a final step in the annual flushing out of student dorm rooms, May used his skills as a trained magician to educate passersby about the meaning of the work.

Tuesday morning found him stationed at his trusty box truck, which bears a spray-painted Yale Recycling symbol on the side. He wore a bright orange safety vest, a two-way radio, three Silly Bandz bracelets, and long white hair pulled back in a pony tail. He checked his watch as the clock ticked on 100 mattresses that were piled up at Yale’s iconic Phelps Gate, where campus tours enter the university. The discarded ​“don’t look good at Yale’s big fancy gate,” he explained, so he picked up his phone and dialed the not-for-profit that was late to pick them up.

The mattresses, which Yale replaces every seven years, were taken out of freshman dorms as part of spring cleaning. May arranged for the Christian Community Action of Norwalk to pick up 100. Another four were headed for a no-freeze shelter. And for the first time, 29 were headed for a new mattress recycling company in Bridgeport.

The company, Park City Green, employs ex-offenders to take apart mattresses and recycle the materials. Yale pays a disposal fee, May said, but chucking them in the dump would cost the university, too.

As he waited at the gate, May took the chance to perform a ​“random act of magic” for some young students who were visiting Yale.

He took a plastic bottle — the kind that gets strewn around the ground after a quick drink — and used his sorcerer’s powers to lift up one end of the bottle, as though it were rising from the dead.

He said he uses that trick to show that ​“there’s magic in everything — cans, bottles, mattresses — anyone who recycles is seeing that magic in the material and making it happen again and again and again.” 

May began ​“seeing that magic” at Yale as a forestry grad student in 1988. He joined an undergraduate student club that ran Yale’s only recycling program. At the time, no law required Yale to recycle. Of their own volition, students were collecting 200 tons of office paper per year and sending it to a paper processing plant.

Then the Connecticut legislature passed a law that would require all institutions, businesses, towns and individuals throughout the state to start recycling effective 1991. There were nine items Yale would have to recycle, including: white office paper, newspaper, glass and metal food and beverage containers, and corrugated cardboard.

Yale summoned all the ​“T‑shirt, Birkenstock-wearing students” of the recycling club into an office and asked if they could implement the law.

“Hey, can you do this?” Yale asked, May recalled.

May decided to take up the issue as his master’s thesis for his degree at Yale’s forestry school. He jumped into Yale’s Dumpsters and took a look at what was being thrown out. His thesis paper assessed Yale’s level of recycling, checked out the law, and came up with a plan. 

His conclusion: ​“There was no way students could do it” alone. For example, Yale was buying 600 tons of office paper per year — far more than the students could handle.

After absorbing the shock of that finding, Yale hired May in the fall of 1989 to run Yale’s recycling program. May ordered 2,300 recycling bins and got the program off to a start.

“This man is the beginning of recycling at Yale,” said Carmine Amento, director of facility services for residential colleges at Yale. ​“I’ve never met anyone as passionate.”

Amento joined May at Phelps Gate Thursday for the mattress mission. At 10:15, after circling the block to find a lost Budget rental truck, May declared the mission begun.

“The eagle has landed!” he called out to a crew of 12 day workers hired to move the goods.

Felix Rodriguez (pictured) and a trail of coworkers loaded the 80-inch mattresses onto the truck.

May joined the caterpillar line.

He planned to deliver another 29 to the mattress recyclers later that day.

Mattress recycling is the latest in years of experiments May has tried out in his tenure at Yale. Over the years, his subterranean office on Old Campus served as a staging area for new frontiers of recycling, many of which would later be institutionalized by Yale.

“Yale has always been on the cutting edge” of recycling, May reflected. The first recycling initiative was started in 1970 by one of the first female undergraduate students at Yale. Students filled up a station wagon with paper and drove it to a plant.

May helped push that trajectory forward, asking each year, ​“what’s next?”

When he got to Yale, May recalled, the university had no formal recycling program affiliated with graduation. Cans and bottles would ​“get chucked out.” In addition to setting up bins for cans and bottles, May started salvaging bits and pieces of the tons of reusable goods students leave behind as the hustle off for summer break each year.

The salvaging started with ​“guerrilla actions.” If May and the student workers he hired saw something reusable, ​“we’d grab it and give it out” on an ad-hoc basis to local not-for-profits.

They quickly discovered they were using ​“a teaspoon in a tidal wave,” he said.

In 2000, May started out with a simple, targeted effort focusing on discarded clothes. They’d drop the clothing off at the Salvation Army on Crown Street. The bounty grew to 18 tons per year — so much that the Salvation Army couldn’t handle the volume. A student named Sara Smiley-Smith convinced Yale to give up some storage space for unwanted furniture. May’s team rolled out ​“Free Day,” where not-for-profits could pick up furniture.

The effort grew into a large, formal ​“Spring Salvage” giveaway hosted in Ingalls Rink, where not-for-profits could pick up discarded goods for free. This year — after a surprise fire marshal decision made the rink unavailable for the event — Yale ended up selling half of the goods and donating the rest to Goodwill, May said.

The future of Spring Salvage remains in the air as May departs. Other initiatives May kicked off have been woven into the fabric of daily campus life.

For example, May started an electronics recycling program by stashing good computers in his office, then giving them away to charities. Yale followed his lead by rolling out a more established program into the Office of Safety, which makes it easy for Yale workers to discard or donate used electronics with the click of a mouse.

The streamlining of recycling came through the Office of Sustainability, which Yale founded in 2005. Through that office, the university institutionalized the recycling of organic food waste and cans and bottles strewn around at tailgating events. As Yale has infused sustainability into its daily machinations, those tasks are taken on by Yale’s regular workers — not by a separate recycling office.

In the process, Yale cut May’s position, as well as those of some 10 to 12 student workers he employed each year. Meanwhile, the sustainability office has grown: It now employs full-timers and 20 part-time student workers.

“Yale has advanced tremendously” in the realm of recycling in the past 20 years, observed sustainability chief Newman. While 20 years ago Yale was only beginning to tackle recycling, the university now focuses heavily on the previous stages — sourcing materials, reducing waste, and reusing goods before they get to the waste stream.

For example, Yalies returning for alumni reunions now drink wine out of compostable cups, which get sent to a farm in New Milford, and return to campus as fresh dirt.

And the detritus from reunions gets dumped into a new single-stream recycling system, May’s last big project at Yale.

Single-Stream

As his final trick at Yale, May spent the last year helping guide the university through a transition to single-stream recycling. That means all recyclables — cans, bottles, paper, cardboard — can be thrown into the same bin.

After a call on the radio about some overflowing bins on Old Campus, he walked over to see how the new system was working.

A peek into a couple of bins revealed some education remained to be done. Wine bottles from Yale reunions ended up in the bin — but wrapped in a plastic bag, which is not recyclable.

In another bin, May pulled out a purple long-sleeved T‑shirt. That could go to Goodwill, he said. Then he pulled out a white T‑shirt. That one had a big stain, but it didn’t need to go in the trash, he said; it could go to the international rag market. Near the T‑shirts was a folded black cloth box.

“I could use this for my magic show,” May said, stashing the find.

As he passed back through Phelps Gate, he took a moment to perform another random act of magic for the 12 day laborers, who were relaxing on Old Campus, awaiting their next task.

May thanked the workers for saving the mattresses from the dump. If they hadn’t done that, he said, the mattresses would have suffered the fate of the rest of Yale’s trash. They would have ​“gone to the B.”

B stands for Bridgeport, May explained. He wrote that letter on his hand in a black marker. He took out a lighter to illustrate what happens there.

“Every time you send a mattress to Bridgeport, it gets burned,” he explained.

He lit a flame, inhaled into his cupped hands, and paused for dramatic effect. He heaved his torso, as though beginning to throw up. Then he belched out a thin line of smoke.

Where does the smoke from the incinerator go? The wind takes it back to New Haven.

May finished his act with his water bottle routine.

He refused to tell the inquiring audience the secret to his trade.

“Alright, Magic Man!” called out one worker as May continued on his route.

May said he has been performing recycling-focused magic shows for seven years. He performs for kids and also in more serious adult settings — for example, training Yale cafeteria workers on the rules of recycling. He picked up a lot of his skills at McBride’s Magic & Mystery School in Las Vegas.

Click on the play arrow to watch him perform at the Yale Forestry School.

He said he hopes to continue his magic studies after his layoff, while he takes advantage of 10 months’ severance pay to plot his next move. He’ll also enjoy more time with his wife, three kids (including a 15-year-old budding mind-reader), four chickens and two dogs in the Goatville neighborhood. His dream job, he said, would be to work as a magician-in-residence at an institution.

“Magic can help us see connections and transformations in ways that a normal presentation can’t,” he said.

Mid-interview, he got a call from a charity looking for mattresses. He told the woman they were all gone, but she could try again next year. She’d have to ask for his boss, not him, however, because ​“I won’t be working here.”

“Budget cuts and such,” May explained on the phone.

“I’m sorry, too, but changes happen,” he told her.

He called his departure bittersweet.

“I’m delighted that Yale has pushed sustainability so far that there is a full team working on it. I’m sad to no longer be part of that team.”