Guy Who Un-Junks Junk Wins Award

Jeff Hvid, who’s removed junk from Marin County open spaces and beaches by the ton for 10 years, has won a Green Award.

It will be presented at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 12 at the San Anselmo Town Council meeting.

The Quality of Life Commission voted unanimously at a recent meeting to give its award to Hvid, who’s lived in the town since 1980.

Along the way, he’s done more than 120 solo volunteer trash cleanups along creeks, at pullouts, in ravines and on the beaches of Marin County. He’s also organized over 130 group efforts.

At various times he’s un-dumped tires, mattresses, construction lumber laced with arsenic, car engines, tools, tennis balls, tangled fishing line, dry-cleaning drums, baseball caps, cigarette butts, motor oil, beer bottles, broken dock pilings, boat varnish, computer monitors and broken folding chairs.

And that doesn’t count the tons of plastic grocery bags, Styrofoam cups and food wrappers he finds everywhere.

Some of the stuff gets there accidentally, but the rest — including much of the eyesore and environmentally toxic material — is “intentionally dumped by stupid people,” he says.

About one-third of the debris he picks up is recyclable, and he sometimes turns that into whimsical, temporary trash sculptures. He photographs them “because, otherwise, nobody would believe what we collect.”

After the art pieces sit there a while, Hvid hauls the junk to the dump.

Regarding those sculptures, he says: “I don’t want to make them too ugly ‘cause people will turn away, but I don’t want to make them too pretty either, ‘cause people might think it’s too much fun and miss the point that they shouldn’t be messing up the environment.”

The 58-year-old’s green consciousness started as a pre-teen. “We’d go to the beach and I used to pick up cans and bottles and plastic stuff and take it to the garbage bin,” he recalls.

Later, when he became an avid hiker, he “picked up litter and stuffed it into my backpack.”

His cleanups accelerated when, about a decade ago, “on my way to the Fairfax Watershed, I found a tire on a deer trail. Later I found a bicycle frame, a bunch of fluorescent tubes, a television set, clothes and broken beer bottles thrown there by some boneheads.”

In 2007, he organized a series of creek cleanups in San Anselmo. He worked with Drake High School students from SEA-DISC, the environmentally-based academy at the school.

They constructed a sculpture outside . on San Anselmo Avenue with 1,000 pounds of trash they removed.

Another year, he and three senior-class members “did a cleanup at the Hal Brown Bridge at White’s Hill and three weeks later found graffiti all over the underside of the bridge, with the spray-paint cans left there. That was painful.”

Hvid also led a series of 13 Marin County cleanups in which he pulled 16,000 pounds of junk (“we weighed it just to prove it wasn’t a fish story”).

And one day in 2004, he helped lead 50 other volunteers on Coastal Cleanup Day — “moms, teenagers, little kids, students, retirees, dads and working stiffs.” His job, he says, was “to run around like a maniac trying to inspire those who show up [and] point them to specific areas that need attention.”

The inspiration must have worked: They collected more than 3,000 pounds of debris in three hours.

Hvid (a Danish name that rhymes with “Sid,” the “h” being silent) also volunteered with their baseball and soccer teams when his two sons were boys.

A carpenter/construction worker and an Air Force veteran, he admits he occasionally gets burned out and stops for a while. But it’s not unusual for him now to do big cleanups two Saturdays a month.

Why does he work so hard at it?

“Very few people will see a water heater in a creek and say, 'I’m going to get that out.’ But I will, and if I’m driving in my truck and see a car battery or computer on the sidewalk, I’ll take it to the dump. We all should do something to mitigate our impact.”

He adds that “living in Marin in as close to Heaven as most of us will get. Many people before us did things to make life here excellent, and I’m working on their shoulders.”

Hvid will become the 18th winner of the Green Award, which is aimed at “unsung heroes.”

Earlier citations were given Dick Miner, Conn Rusche, Charles Kennard, the team of Steve Reinertsen and Scott Weeks, Sita Khufu, Rohana McLaughlin, Joyce Brown, Larry Nilsen, Matt Eakle, Ted Bakkila, Christine Dietrich Cragg, Bob Mellin, H.G. Von Dallwitz, Denali Gillaspie, Jonathan Braun, Dan Goltz and the husband-wife team of Janet Byrum and Bob Fleming.

Nominations can be hand-delivered or mailed to:

Quality of Life Commission, c/o Town of San Anselmo, 525 San Anselmo Ave., or e-mailed to voodee@sbcglobal.net or  townclerk@ci.san-anselmo.ca.us.