Ballyhooed Trash : Familiar Worker in Sports Coat, Tie Heaves Inaugural Load for Recycling Project

The man who picked up City Councilwoman Joy Picus’ trash Friday morning on a quiet street in Woodland Hills looked new at the job.

He held the containers awkwardly, at arm’s length. And, in a snappy sports coat, dress shoes and a tie, he wasn’t exactly dressed for the job, either.

He was Mayor Tom Bradley, and along with Picus, he kicked off an experimental trash-recycling program by dumping the inaugural load of recyclable items, accumulated by Picus over several weeks, into a bin on the front of a specially designed truck.

5 Neighborhoods

In the project, 1,500 households in Picus’ Woodland Hills neighborhood and four other neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley will be asked to separate recyclable metal, glass and newspapers from their weekly load of garbage.

The city will give each homeowner a red 20-gallon container for the recyclables. The truck will then pick up the recyclable trash along with the other refuse on its standard weekly trip to each neighborhood.

Picus and Bradley together hefted the first container, recoiling at the crash as an assortment of cans, bundles of newspapers and empty bottles that once held everything from champagne to Sprite cascaded into the bin.

Possibly not since a National Enquirer reporter picked through Henry Kissinger’s trash more than a decade ago has a political figure’s garbage been so scrutinized. Television crews, photographers, neighbors and sanitation officials peered into the bin.

The Valley project is designed to be much simpler for the homeowner than the city’s other pilot trash-recycling program, which has been under way in West Los Angeles for two years.

“The less effort and confusion there is, the more success we’ll have,” Bradley said.

In the Westside project, residents must do a lot of the work of recycling--putting metal, glass and paper in three separate containers, which are picked up on a different day than the garbage.

Even in that relatively cumbersome project, about 70% of the households have participated, and the flow of trash from that area to landfills has been cut by 10%, according to figures at the city Bureau of Sanitation.

The Valley project was delayed several times after the truck failed early tests and underwent design changes, said Delwin Biagi, director of the sanitation department.

The truck has a sectioned bin in front of the cab and a cavernous rear compartment split into two chambers. A lone operator dumps recyclables and the other garbage into the bin, which is tilted so that its contents fall into the appropriate compartments.

Nervous Moment

On its first public test, Biagi held his breath as the bin rose above the truck and started to tilt. “If any of this lands in the street, I’m out of a job,” he said. But, with a second crash, the material all went where it was supposed to go, producing a round of applause.

In about a year, if the project is judged a success, it could slowly be expanded citywide. The hope is that the flow of household trash to Los Angeles’ overburdened landfills can be cut by as much as 10%.

That may not sound like much, Biagi said, but “every cubic foot of trash that doesn’t go into a landfill saves space for the future.”

Biagi emphasized that the project is an experiment. An important question is whether the mixed recyclables will be something that a commercial recycling firm will want.

The city at first had trouble finding anyone willing to take the intermingled trash. “Most of them want their materials pure,” he said.

‘Truck Can Be Modified’

Active Recycling Co., which normally buys scrap metal and paper separately, has agreed to take the mixed recyclables for the first year of the project and weigh the costs of separation against the income generated when they are sold, said Errol Segal, the firm’s manager.

“If it turns out not to be feasible, the truck can be modified,” Biagi said. The two bins would be used, perhaps, for separated paper and glass, he said. Unfortunately, he added, that might mean that homeowners would have an extra task.

Bradley said New Jersey and Rhode Island have already done studies showing that collecting mixed recyclables can work well. The two states are building centers for processing such materials.

Each day of the week, the truck in Los Angeles’ experimental program will collect trash in one of the designated neighborhoods--Sunland, Sylmar, Granada Hills, Van Nuys and Woodland Hills.

The truck will start its pickups Friday in Woodland Hills, Biagi said. At the city’s Lopez Canyon Landfill, the recyclables will be dumped in a container that will later be picked up by Active Recycling.

Such a project is long overdue, said Barbara Royden, one of more than a dozen of Picus’ neighbors who gathered for the ceremony. “I hate to waste the trees of Canada,” she said.