He's got his household trash down to eight pounds.

A year.

And despite the fact that for two decades he has run what is surely the region's most quixotic and varied recycling enterprise, here's a little secret about the master recycler: He doesn't think it should be happening.

"The lesson isn't to recycle more," he says amid his hivelike realm, a two-acre property strewn with the detritus of a consumptive culture. "The lesson is how to generate less."

Yet in the world according to Crater - inventor, prankster and dreamer - recycling still has to happen, because of society's willful blindness. And it happens big-time here just south of Pottstown.

He finds destinies for 1,000 to 1,500 tons of materials a year, truckload after truckload of stuff no one else will touch.

He makes biodiesel from leftover cooking oil.

Polystyrene (crinkly cookie trays) becomes flower pots.

He looks locally, and factors in sustainability. His farthest market, he says, is North Carolina, where he sends No. 5 plastic (mostly, yogurt tops) to be made into auto parts.

About a decade ago, the expansion of curbside recycling put a dent in his business, but revenue has nevertheless increased - from $130,000 in 1997 to $184,000 in 2006, according to his nonprofit tax filings.

Most of the income is from an $8 gate fee he charges those dropping off recyclables, from memberships, and from selling items collected. However, Crater says a lot of items cost more to handle than he can sell them for. (Polystyrene, for instance, costs $1,000 a ton to handle and sells for $100 a ton). Some things, like tires, he has to pay to get rid of. He also gives things away to relief efforts and such.

He has 13 part-time workers. His salary is now up to $52,000.

He amazes Montgomery County recycling coordinator Art Feltes because he comes up with so many creative uses for stuff.

Still, some objects resist even him, so he's used a lot of them to build a 10-foot-high dragon at the facility. He named it Merlin.

Not long ago, he lost his buyer for plastic foam. The company got "fussy," demanding something that was all but impossible: testing each piece for fire retardants.

Crater wound up with 150 bales of the foam before he finally found a company in Downingtown that is using it for archery backstops.

Good news, right? But it also presents another contradiction. "There's an image of our times," Crater says, almost bitterly. "We can't deal with something that saves energy. But we sell it as something that people shoot at."

And that gets to the core of this whimsical maverick, given to cosmic pronouncements such as: "Technology moves ahead because it has no conscience."

A compact man with a long ponytail - often wearing charms representing his "spirit guides," the eagle and turtle - Crater joined his high school ecology club in 1972 and never looked back.

He has fitted a truck with an array of solar panels that he used recently to electrify a concert he called a "solar-powered hootenanny."

At the event, he debuted "the world's first cordless electric solar-powered ironing board vehicle," complete with "a little clicky thing" just to entertain little kids. It emerged through a curtain of bubbles, made by a solar-powered bubble machine.

Yet for all this, he's been oddly melancholy lately.

A champion of sustainability, he finds himself working 80-hour weeks with no vacation. "What's sustainable about our operation if I can't take a day off?" he laments. "It's a contradiction that really bothers me."

Every year, he comes up with a list of "spring projects" to tackle. This year, his biggest success was getting several stores in the Pottstown area to start selling organic milk in returnable bottles.

His "Children of the Great Oak" project involved collecting seedlings from a locally famous tree to nurture and eventually sell.

But he still feels as if he has all these ideas, and no one to help him do them.

"It's like, where are the people that are interested in making things happen? There are opportunities knocking, and I keep turning them down."

Can't people see the beautiful logic of something like his "Common Thread" project? His radical goal was to make something new from something old, generate no waste, run it off renewable resources, and employ disabled people.

What he came up with was collecting jeans, a universal piece of clothing that he sees as "a microcosm of society." He sends them a few miles away to Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, a farm community that includes adults with developmental difficulties, who weave the fabric into rugs. The trimmings return to Crater to be made into paper.

Even so, he often feels like a voice in the wilderness. "I'm so far outside the outside of the box," he says, "that I'm not even in the same country as the box."

A marriage and two serious relationships have foundered - he wonders if it's his consuming environmental ethic. He speaks of "the work I do and the pain it creates," adding, "I know I'm incredibly intense."

He has despaired of finding romance online. A computer recently matched him up with a smoking, meat-eating conservative.

But here's another contradiction: Crater, the recycler who wants recycling to become obsolete, is looking for a new place, one with room to handle more stuff and brainstorm more projects.

He would have an area for research and development, a store, a restaurant, sustainable "permaculture" gardens, and space for "micro enterprise concepts using renewable energy." He's posted the plans online and is trolling for support.

In his own life, his own waste stream, he thinks he can do better. He thinks maybe he can get down to four pounds a year. But it's getting difficult.

"I still can't figure out," he says, "what to do with those little silica things - the packs they put in vitamin bottles."

Recycling Services

Recycling Services Inc. is located near the intersection of Routes 422 and 100, on the Chester County side of the Schuylkill.

Address: 365 Elm St., Pottstown 19465

Information: 610-323-8545 or www.recyclingservices.org

Hours: Tuesdays and Saturdays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Fee: $8 per car