Wal-Mart’s loss is Jeff Joseph’s gain.

Joseph, owner of Jeff’s Curbside Recycling, hopes to pick up customers now that Wal-Mart has closed its community recycling center for the next three months.

“I can double (my customer list),” said Joseph, whose business already has grown by at least 20 percent annually during its five years of operation. “Once people figure out how economical it is – the savings in time and gas – hopefully I can keep them.”

The Wal-Mart center – which last year collected more than 3,000 tons of soda cans, beer bottles, detergent containers, milk jugs and dozens of other materials – is scheduled to be closed through at least the end of September.

Wal-Mart is building a new recycling center alongside its expanding store at 3300 Iowa. Wal-Mart is being converted into a supercenter concept, which includes groceries, a fuel center, a drive-through pharmacy and other features.

The recycling center – established in 1993 as part of the store’s opening as the chain’s first “Eco-Mart” – never has turned a profit, said Ruth Becker, the discount store’s green team coordinator. Proceeds from the sale of aluminum, newsprint, cardboard and other materials are used to pay the salaries of workers from Community Living Opportunities.

“There’s just not any money in recycling,” Becker said Monday at the site.

But unlike Wal-Mart, curbside operators bring in revenue by charging for their services. Many of the curbside operators even use the Wal-Mart center to drop off the least valuable of the materials they collect, such as glass and plastics.

Jim Tuchscherer, owner of Topeka-based Home Recycling Service, said that he already had lined up alternative places to drop the materials he collects from his 140 customers in Lawrence. More of it will be coming back with him to Topeka, where he already has 600 customers.

But Tuchscherer, who runs a one-man business, knows one thing: He can’t take on any more Lawrence customers without hiring another employee or getting another truck, and that’s not in the plans just yet.

“I’m busier than I want to be right now,” he said. “I’m at the point where I might need to start a waiting list.”

Or folks can call Traci Trent. She and her husband own Tree Hugger Recycling Service, a business launched last month after the couple bought a 1976 Volkswagen bus.

The business has three customers. But with e-mails and phone calls picking up Monday, she plans to be busy for the weeks and months ahead.

“It’s something I believe in,” said Trent, who had been taking materials to the Wal-Mart center. Now, her husband plans to drop them off in Johnson County on his way to work.

Valerie Giedinghagen is holding out. The Lawrence resident dropped off the last of her newspapers, plastic bags and milk jugs Monday at Wal-Mart.

She concedes that she may need to call for curbside pickup, but is hoping that it won’t come to that.

“We’ll start stomping our aluminum cans and get some bigger containers and see how long we can go,” she said. “We’ll try to tough it out. I like a challenge.”