City May Step Up Push to Buy Recycled Goods : Thousand Oaks: It now requires contractors to purchase items made from reused materials. A proposal before the council would hold the government to the same standard.

Every time he tried to buy a cup made from recycled plastic, caterer Manuel Urrego felt like he was killing romance.

He just couldn’t picture filling the flimsy, chintzy-looking cups with champagne. He envisioned one cracking, spilling red wine on a white evening gown. And yet, as maitre d’ for Thousand Oaks’ new Civic Arts Plaza, he had agreed to use recycled plastic cups.

After working the phones for nearly 40 hours, Urrego found an acceptable cup: a bit more upscale, a lot more solid and indisputably made from recycled plastic. Now, grudgingly, Urrego concedes that the city’s unwavering stance paid off. He even wishes that other cities would impose similar requirements on their concessionaires.

“The demand for these products isn’t great and, because of that, the cost is high and, because the cost is high, the demand isn’t great,” he said. “It’s like a Catch-22, and it will be until someone starts passing rules and regulations” mandating the use of recycled products.

Thousand Oaks council members will consider such action Tuesday night.

They will vote on proposed new guidelines that emphasize the need for the city to buy goods made out of recycled products.

City staff members are already enforcing recycling requirements in some contracts, including the concessionaire’s contract for the Civic Arts Plaza. The proposed procurement guidelines would reinforce that policy and hold the city to the same standards as its contractors.

“If the government is asking residents and businesses to do something, we should be able to do it better,” Councilwoman Jaime Zukowksi said. “This will really get the ball rolling.”

Emphasizing the need to build a market for recycled products, the city’s environmental programs analyst, Grahame Watts, added: “If we don’t buy recycled products, we’re not really recycling.”

The guidelines urge city department heads to order office supplies made mainly from recycled goods--everything from index cards to toilet paper, trash-can liners to scissors.

Already, about 60% of the city’s office supplies contain some recycled material. To raise that figure, a dozen staffers now meet monthly to identify products that could be bought in recycled form.

They’ve studied carpets made from recycled plastic milk jugs, insulation stuffed with recycled paper and pencils carved from scraps of recycled wood.

The best products land on a list distributed to every city employee in charge of purchasing.

The guidelines are flexible: City staffers can order non-recycled supplies if they’re much cheaper, much more effective or would arrive much more quickly.

In Ventura County, Watts said, “no other city has taken as aggressive a step” to boost the market for recycled goods.

Oxnard staffers hope to develop their own procurement guidelines early next year, and the Ventura council has passed a resolution urging the use of recycled products wherever possible. But Thousand Oaks’ proposed policy is stronger still.

Reaching beyond the confines of City Hall, the guidelines urge contractors and consultants to use recycled paper for all documents sent to Thousand Oaks. And they encourage vendors bidding on municipal contracts to outline their plans for using recycled products on the job.

As the project manager for the Civic Arts Plaza, Ed Johnduff can understand the need to recycle paper--he has collected enough documents to cram 30 file cabinets. But he has reservations about the guidelines.

“I’d hate to have it come down to rejecting a low bid because they haven’t used recycled paper,” said Johnduff, the city’s administrative services manager.

The guidelines “might encourage some more use of recycled paper,” he said. “But when it comes to a big company doing a big bid, they’re probably not going to change.”

Nonetheless, Watts said he figures that it’s worth a try. “We don’t want to require anything unnecessarily overburdensome,” he said. “We just want them to know that we’re looking, encouraging, hoping, saying, ‘Please, please, please use recycled paper.’ ”