By Jon Bashor

Mark Figone still remembers the excitement of driving the streets of El Cerrito at the wheel of a garbage truck owned by his family’s waste disposal company, East Bay Sanitary Co. He was in high school, had just recently received his driver’s license and filled in during summer vacation.

“I’ve always been fascinated by cars and trucks and I loved driving a garbage truck,” Figone said. “I felt like the king of the world.”

And it sure beat another job he had working weekends at the company’s yard in Richmond. On weekends, he’d use steaming hot water and a pressure washer to thoroughly clean two or three trucks inside and out. That meant opening the large trash compartment, climbing in and spraying down every surface to remove the dregs of a week’s worth of garbage. The pressurized hot water and the waste created a steamy stench that still sticks in Figone’s memory.

Today, he works out of the company’s office on Kearney Street, running the company with his sister, Cara Figone. They’re the third generation to lead the firm that was started by their grandfather, Victor Figone, just before World War II. When the contract for collecting El Cerrito’s trash was opened to bid in 1939 or 1940 (the records aren’t clear), Victor Figone won out and the company has retained it ever since, renewing it at various intervals.

Such long-term contracts are essential in the industry, Figone said, given the necessary investment in equipment. A new diesel trash truck costs $400,000 or more and an electric version would cost upwards of $1 million, including the needed charging infrastructure.

Through the years, the Figone family has been active in the community, sponsoring a wide range of events dating back to the 1948 Fiesta del Cerrito. It has sponsored several El Cerrito Youth Baseball teams and continues to support the city’s annual 4th of July festival. Mark Figone followed in his dad’s footsteps and became active in the EC Chamber of Commerce in 2002, serving multiple terms on the board and serving as president for several years. He’s currently the chamber’s treasurer and the president of East Bay Sanitary.

With his sister, he oversees the company’s fleet of nine trucks, seven of which are on the road during the week, with two in reserve. Each day, the trucks run three residential routes, one-and-a-half commercial routes, one-and-a-half green waste routes and they handle debris boxes on a daily route as well.

The residential trucks each make 700 to 800 stops a day. The average truck load collected each day is between six and eight tons – well below the legal load limit of 10 tons. The total weight of household discards has remained about the same over the years, Figone says, but it’s now distributed between the bins for landfill waste, recycling and green waste. The amount of recycling is inching up.

Customers can also arrange for two pickups of bulky items twice a year. Years ago, all such items were collected twice a year – the first Saturdays in May and October. Figone remembers that as a high school and college student at UC Davis, he would return home for those two weekends to help collect the items – and often brought a few fellow students with him to help out.

At Davis, he earned his degree in environmental studies, with a focus on plant and soil science with the goal of a career in land reclamation. But the call of the big trucks was strong and the money was good, so he returned to the family business.

And while he never knows exactly what each day will bring, there have been some freaky surprises.

Back in the days before the trucks could mechanically grab and empty the bins, one of the crew on the truck carried a large can on their back. They filled it with the contents of customers’ smaller cans before lugging it back to the truck.

Figone recalled a day when he climbed up two steep wooden steps to get the produce waste from two 30-gallon cans behind a small market. With his can full and weighing about 100 pounds on his back, he was lumbering downward when he heard some scrabbling inside the can. He couldn’t stop and only realized the noise was from an opossum climbing out when the marsupial slid down the side of his face and landed in front of him, opened its long jaws and hissed loudly.

“It scared the ever-loving crap out of me,” he admitted.

Even with that, he has no regrets about his career path.

“I love coming to work and I love the industry, and the other people in the business,” Figone said. “And we’re very proud of our family history that’s been given to us. It’s been grand.”