.A recycling love story births Urban Ore

Two tiny steps and a 15-minute kiss launched Daniel Knapp and Mary Lou Van Deventer’s 40-year marriage. The couple lives close to the Richmond border in Contra Costa County and are co-founders of Berkeley-based Urban Ore, a material-recovery enterprise in operation since 1980.

Knapp, 84, is a sociologist most noted in the professional reuse, recycling and composting field for establishing his 12 Master Categories of Discarded Resources. Van Deventer, 80, is an environmental journalist with a career prior to Urban Ore, where she now manages special projects. Together, they are leaders and active participants in the Northern California Recycling Association, Zero Waste Action Committee, the annual National Zero Waste Conference, and other regional and national activist and advocacy endeavors. They are parents of two adult daughters.

In an interview, Knapp said, “We met in Sacramento. Mary Lou came to the brown bag lunch where I was the speaker. I was talking about the revolutionary niche recycling business of scavenging in a landfill. More importantly, because I was hitchhiking to get home, she told me about a bus I could take. When I got to the station, she was there. She took two tiny steps in my direction, but when we got on the bus, I sat down alone. She then came to sit next to me, and we spent the whole trip talking. Those two steps, because I was so lonely, I’ll never forget.”

Van Deventer picked up the story, describing her work as a bureaucrat at an “avant garde” recycling agency who decided after hearing Knapp’s presentation that he should be enlisted to write a think piece. “I was his project manager. We discovered we worked well together, so we went to a movie for a date. When he took me home, he kissed me. The world just disappeared. It was earth-shaking. It went on for 15 minutes. I had roommates and left the front door open the whole time, and the entire house cooled. Nothing else mattered at that moment,” she recalled.

Asked to describe what eventually became Knapp’s third and Van Deventer’s second marriage, Knapp said “it’s sexy.” Lightly cajoled by his spouse, he explained that their union is an “intellectual merging” and used a term he favors for Van Deventer: “victorious battle maiden.” She, in turn, said the marriage is rooted in “convivial equality,” always fun and often described by people who know them as “gracious.”

A healthy dose of effort, compromise, debate, patience, space and problem-solving constitute vital ingredients in the mix. Especially when a relationship is both a romantic and a business partnership, the stakes are enormous, and the risk of ruptures multiplies. 

“What I know about marriage and business interacting is that you have to get along in all dimensions,” Van Deventer said. “You’re going to be in close quarters. Dan and I share perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. We give each other respect and intellectual room. You can’t bully the other one into complying. In a partnership where you solve problems well, the pair of you will be more than either of you can be alone.”

Knapp said the alchemy works in their case because he’s a sociologist and she’s what he calls “an engineer, someone who relies on facts to make complicated systems work.” He arrived in the Bay Area from Oregon, determined to save the planet and with only $40 in his pocket and virtually no business acumen. “I had no business training except for a paper route as a kid. Nothing like what was required to run Urban Ore,” he said.

The nimbleness and knowledge—scientific, legislative, financial, cultural, political and more—required to operate the for-profit company is mind-boggling. Knapp recalled that the first of many challenges was convincing the City of Berkeley that valuable resources could be gleaned from landfill items others deemed as garbage. “I started with selling non-ferrous metals,” he said. “Now, Urban Ore recognizes about 240 categories. A friend of mine calls us ‘the back-end of the GNP,’ the Gross National Product.”

One of their largest early initiatives involved preventing the City of Berkeley from building an incinerator. “We led the opposition,” Knapp said. “We had no grants or other funds, so we supported all the advocacy through the business. Getting the word out was essential, and eventually the voters turned the proposed burn plant down by 63%. I’d say my biggest contribution is developing those 12 categories that, if the things in them were not thrown away, it would result in zero waste.”

Urban Ore’s building materials department accepts doors, windows, lumber, toilets, sinks, fencing and more. The General Store receives and handles items including clothing, furniture, electronics, art and other goods. The operation serves as an environmentally sound disposal resource for unwanted but still-usable merchandise and a retail outlet open daily for finding and purchasing hard-to-find and/or low-cost items. The company also consults and advises Zero Waste resource-recovery facilities domestically and worldwide.

The most urgent issue on their minds continues to be “saving the planet.” Their concern gains momentum as human beings and the climate crisis reach a fulcrum. Knapp says the climate crisis and waste management are at a tipping point few people understand. He is primarily concerned with the antiquated, decaying facilities used for processing discarded materials. “All over the country, these transfer stations need to be rethought and redone. If we don’t do it, we’ll miss the golden ring on the merry-go-round,” he said.

Van Deventer is less poetic, but not less passionate. “Landfills are the largest single human-created source of methane. It’s 100 times worse than carbon dioxide,” she said. “Methane is the worst climate-warming gas that spins to the poles. If we don’t stop dumping things in landfills, if we don’t have legislation and funding to support preventing it, people will continue to throw away things that result in more methane. We will miss saving the planet.”

Their tone is serious, and their energy equally earnest—and frequently interrupted by laughter as they complete each other’s thoughts and sentences. The key to a good marriage, as it is in a successful business, Van Deventer said, is not formulaic, but designed to fit each couple.

“For us, it’s renting a house on the coast, jumping in the car and starting to talk—and never stopping—and not forgetting to have fun,” Van Deventer said. “You solve problems mutually with time, love, psychic space, respect; and act graciously to each other.”

Knapp, given the invitation to summarize, said, “Say thank you whenever anything happens that takes effort. I say it 100 times a day, and the lubrication value is huge. Work as if you’re both editors, and accept changes the other person makes in the story. Find someone who fills the places where you are less. You expect downs. Problem-solve to get through them, and you find the ups come later. It helps to get in a hot tub, talk and have a good meal, too.”