On any given weekday, if there is a public lecture or seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, there is a good chance it is listed on Lowell Moorcroft’s online calendar.

For more than four years, Moorcroft, 62, has used university computers to publish “Lowell’s Listings — Intellectual Events Around U.C. Berkeley.” The site has developed a following among local retirees and others who come to the campus to learn about everything from the siege of Sarajevo to the capture and storage of greenhouse gases.

Lowell Moorcroft working on his calendar at a campus computer terminal

The calendar has listed more than 10,000 events since 2004, archives show, and it appears to be the most comprehensive listing of U.C. Berkeley events in existence. It is Moorcroft’s life’s work, he said.

But while the calendar has earned Moorcroft praise from his users, he said it has also become an obsession that has taken over his life as he fights to avoid becoming homeless for the second time.

“It’s consuming me,” Moorcroft said of the calendar.

Moorcroft first became homeless in 2000 after he lost his job as a database manager, he said. He discovered the U.C. campus as a place with free computer access to help with his job search. He attended lectures to occupy his time, and filled his stomach with the free food often served there.

He started tracking campus events with a free Yahoo calendar, and by 2004 made the listings available to the public. At the time, U.C. Berkeley had no campus-wide listing of public events.

“There’s just a treasure of things happening on this campus that really was hidden from the public because there wasn’t an easy way to find out about it before,” said Jeff Kahn, manager of the university’s official calendar.

In 2006 the university launched a new calendar network to provide a campus-wide events portal, and Kahn said the network is still expanding. But events for several major departments, such as the law school, are still not part of the network, which is the reason some users say they still use Moorcroft’s calendar.

“It combines all the events into one place,” said Anthony Charles, 63, a retired Berkeley resident who said he attends about three campus events per day. “It’s a lot more complete.”

Moorcroft said he spends the first three hours of his day working on his calendar. He draws from a list of more than 350 individual calendars, and subscribes to hundreds of departmental email lists.

If he has a question about an event, he contacts the organizer directly for clarification, and he has become a familiar name in many departments.

“Most of the coordinators that I work with from time to time definitely know his name,” said Jessica Owen, events coordinator for the university’s Institute of International Studies. “From time to time we’ll have an error on one of our calendar entries, or something that hasn’t been updated, so I’ll get an email from him.”

But Moorcroft’s attention to detail takes time, something that is lately in short supply. According to an eviction settlement with his landlord, Moorcroft must move out of his Berkeley rooming house by mid-December, he said, because he hasn’t been paying the rent. His first Social Security check recently arrived, but with his bad credit and evictions record, he said few landlords are willing to bet on the chance that he will pay.

Landlords may be right to worry, because Moorcroft, a self-proclaimed socialist, dislikes private ownership.

“I have always had problems with jobs and landlords,” he said.

Moorcroft may be facing homelessness, but dressed with a sport coat and tweed cap he could play the part of a college professor. A Midwest native, he graduated from the University of Wisconsin, and moved west to Seattle in 1969, he said. He cut fabric in a garment factory until he injured his hand and then became an office assistant.

Since then, Moorcroft said he worked in a variety of clerical jobs, and became interested in computers in the 1980’s when they became widely used in offices. In his last full-time job, he was a database developer for a financial advisory firm, he said. Until he lost the job in 2000, Moorcroft said he lived in “a large flat full of tools and furniture and cookware and records and books.”

With his mornings spent on the calendar and the rest of the day at campus events, Moorcroft has little time to spend looking for a job. He said he wants “some kind of small version of the normal life—housing and a part-time job” and knows that he may have to give the calendar up.

“The actual physical work is kind of tiring, staring at the computer screen copying and pasting,” Moorcroft said. “I’d like to get out and sell the [calendar] for a few hundred dollars like you’d sell a business. And if they want to continue it or screw it up, let them do it.”

But with Moorcroft’s life wrapped up in U.C. Berkeley events, it will not be easy to step back from the calendar and lose his closest link to the campus.

“How am I going to find out what’s going on?” he said.

The Berkeley police call them “recycling bandits” – the people who dig through curbside bins and pile shopping carts high with bottles, cans, cardboard and metal.

The managers of local recycling centers call them “recycling professionals.” And the worse the economy gets, they say, the more professionals, and amateurs, they see.

“We’re getting more working people, homebodies, non-professionals trying to collect a few extra dollars,” says Jay Anast, owner of Alliance Metals in Emeryville.

Anast and the managers of several other area recycling centers say that over the past few months they have noticed a significant increase in the number of new faces at their businesses. They say that job loss, along with steep increases in the price of staple groceries and gasoline, have pushed even comparatively well-off people to begin redeeming recyclables themselves, rather than relying on curbside pickup.

“Why throw away $20 every week when you could keep it for yourself?” says Anast.

Anast estimates that he normally sees about 500 people each day. In the past six months, he says, that number has jumped to 600.

“A lot more people are coming in with smaller amounts of stuff, people who are not professional street collectors,” he says.

“Now, we get a lot of people in cars, bringing to us and not using the curb.”

Jerman Figurea, an employee at Berkeley’s recycling center, says he’s noticed a change as well.

“It’s not just people in the poverty range – we’re seeing high middle class, lower middle class,” he says.

“People drive up here in Mercedes-Benzes, in BMWs. They’re not shy.”

According to the California Department of Conservation, last year commercial recycling centers collected roughly 85 percent of the state’s total recycled materials. Curbside recycling made up the other 15 percent.

“Curbside is nice for middle-class people who want to feel good about themselves,” says Anast. “But the landfill diversion is in the hands of professional collectors.”

Both managers and collectors said that an experienced professional recycler can earn over $100 each day. Because the state of California considers the money from buybacks to be a refund, those earnings are income-tax free.

Most of his regulars, says Anast, are not homeless, though many receive welfare or veterans’ benefits.

Many of the newcomers, he says, are “people we suspect have dropped out of the job market and are using this as a bridge or a crutch, an income supplement.” Still others, he says, earn money through recycling while looking for a full-time job.

Garfield Carter, 47, has been redeeming recyclables at Alliance since he was nine. He says he sees new people at Alliance “every day.”

“There’s always new people coming, especially towards the end of the month,” he says. ‘It’s money.”

Rudolph Wilkins, 62, has been coming to Alliance for 20 years, and says he uses the money to supplement his income as a longshoreman. He, too, has noticed the new recyclers.

“Every day, there’s guys that come that have families and can’t find work right now,” he says. “They make $25-125 a day. It’s not much, but it beats $325 a month on assistance, or $125 a month on food stamps.”

“There’s many people that come in now, who never did before, just to keep driving their vehicles.”

None of the recyclers interviewed for this story expressed concern about competition from the influx of new people.

“If there’s a crunch, you just step up operations,” says Tad Dellinger III, 47, a self-described “regular” at the Berkeley recycling center. According to Figurea, Dellinger “comes here religiously, like church.”

Dellinger says he doesn’t worry about new people on his turf, who he calls “pretenders.”

“Get out earlier. Work harder,” he says. “It’s all manageable.”

Brian Thomas, 20, is a business student at UC Berkeley and the president of the campus chapter of the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. While in the past he has scorned “homeless” dumpster-divers, he says his fraternity has recently begun to see the value of recycling.

“We were proud that in one month we could turn in our cans and bottles for 36 bucks,” he wrote in an email.

“Now I know why they collect so many cans.”