Recycled Castoffs Get New Life in Growing Trade on Pacific Rim
Gliding out of the Port of Los Angeles, the steamship President Eisenhower towered above the sailboats and fishing skiffs as it began the 12-day crossing to Yokohama laden with a California product prized in the Far East.
The valued cargo was not Cabernet Sauvignon from the boutique wineries of Napa Valley, nor was it Ventura County lemons. It was old newspapers, culled from the household trash of Santa Monica and other cities and sold to the Korean mills that keep the Japanese trade machine in cardboard.
Completes a Circle
In a matter of weeks, the old paper could return to the West Coast as packaging for new toys and television sets. Inside of a month, it might again be thrown away by some Southern California consumer.
Welcome to recycling in the Pacific Rim decade. The recycling movement born in the environmental-mindedness of the 1970s has gone international, turning trash into a major cash crop passing through Southern California bound for ports in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia.
This urban ore mined from the garbage of American cities includes billions of aluminum cans every year, most of which go back to domestic smelters. Old glass is melted and used to make wine bottles or gets spun into fiberglass insulation here. But it is old newspapers that now command record prices in the Far East, inspiring more recycling than ever before.
The high prices have caught the eye of Los Angeles officials, who hope that recycling can help solve one of their most unsavory, and perplexing, problems--where to put the daily mountain of trash thrown away by the city’s 3 million residents.
That is 6,500 tons a day, not counting all the computer paper and food wrappers chucked away in offices and shopping malls. This 6,500 tons is just the garbage collected from homes in city trucks. It does not even include refuse from most apartments, which is picked up by private haulers.
Once the city takes possession, this trash gets driven up the freeways to Lopez Canyon, in the hills above Pacoima and San Fernando, to be buried in the city’s only landfill. But Lopez Canyon will be filled (and perhaps be known thereafter as Lopez Mesa) in 1995. Right now, Mayor Tom Bradley and other city officials frankly admit that they do not know where the city’s garbage will go after that.
Public Rebelled
Plans to burn it in big trash-to-energy incinerators were dropped this year when the public rebelled. The city is willing to pay handsomely for a new landfill dump, but it may not be able to find a site that is acceptable to nearby landowners at any price or to secure permits from environmental authorities.
Officials are even talking about paying an entrepreneur to take trash by train to Imperial County for burial in the desert--a costly proposition, but not far-fetched. “It is by no means ridiculous,” said Joe Haworth, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, which also have looked at hauling away trash by train.
So this summer Los Angeles city officials are busy making plans for the biggest municipal recycling program in the country--and the only program west of the Mississippi River where residents would be required by law to separate recyclables from the rest of the garbage before putting out their barrels every week.
The Los Angeles City Council has ordered the Bureau of Sanitation to devise a plan for mandatory citywide recycling. Officials in that agency are trying to arrive at what kind of program would work best in a city as geographically and culturally diverse as Los Angeles.
But it took the council’s action to force officials to think seriously about recycling. By tradition, sanitation officials in big cities have eschewed recycling as trivial. Glass, newspaper and cans, the most easily recyclable materials, make up only 20% of the garbage picked up by city trucks in Los Angeles.
The rest--grass cuttings, plastics and assorted garbage--is much more difficult to process and sell and may always need to be sent to landfills.
“Recycling alone is not going to touch their problem” in Los Angeles, said John Rowden of the state Waste Management Board.
But the City Council took the position that every ton sold on the recycling market delays the political trauma that could occur when the city runs out of landfill space.
New Jersey and Rhode Island, facing more imminent trouble than Los Angeles, enacted laws this year to begin statewide recycling of the most salable commodities found in ordinary trash.
Most residents there will soon be required by law to put out newspapers, aluminum cans and glass in separate barrels and the rest of their trash in yet another container. Oregon does it somewhat differently. There, officials assume that most residents want to recycle and the law requires towns and counties to make recycling services available.
Techniques Vary
In California, 49 communities now collect separated garbage from homes. Techniques vary, but the most respected programs are in small cities such as Santa Monica and Berkeley, where a high number of residents participate.
When expanded later this year, the home recycling program in San Jose will be the largest in the country. A contractor will drive by the city’s 180,000 homes once a week and dump the recyclables into a special truck with separate compartments for paper, cans and glass. The trucks drop their loads at a plant where the material is quickly sorted and shipped to mills.
San Jose has plenty of landfill space; it got into recycling to cut costs. City officials expect to cut the cost of trash disposal from $50 a ton to $30 a ton with recycling, despite the added costs of new trucks, mailers from the mayor encouraging residents to recycle and free trash containers for every home in the city. Participation is voluntary, but more than 50% of the city’s households are cooperating.
“By giving them containers, we got more people to participate, and the more material we’re collecting the less material goes to the landfill,” said Richard Gertman, the city’s recycling coordinator.
In past years, recycling has been limited by the low prices American mills paid for used materials. But recyclable glass and aluminum cans have become desirable because reprocessing the scavenged goods consumes less energy, and costs less, than milling raw materials.
Trade Is Spirited
In the case of old newspapers, the spirited trade between California and ports on the other side of the Pacific Rim has created whole new markets and driven up prices. Most used paper is still bought by American mills, including the Garden State Paper Co. mill in Pomona that makes newsprint from recycled paper. But the demand for American paper in Asia has forced domestic mills to pay higher prices.
Marin Recycling, which picks up from homes in Marin County, loads 1,500 tons of newsprint a month at its San Rafael plant and delivers a filled freight container to the port of San Francisco every day. Most ends up in Korea or Taiwan, but Japan, Indonesia and the Philippines also buy used American newsprint. Reports that China will soon open a mill to recycle newsprint has entrepreneurs smiling.
“People say there’s no market for garbage, but there’s a hell of a market for this stuff,” said Joe Garbarino, the head of Marin Recycling.
Son of a longtime Bay Area garbage family, Garbarino operates a nationally known private recycling plant. He also travels the country to promote recycling.
“You could reduce your trash (in Los Angeles) by 22% within five years, easy,” Garbarino said.
L.A. Could Glut Market
Still, Los Angeles officials are not sure what would happen if the nation’s second-largest city--with a population larger than the state of Oregon--added 20% of its garbage to the supply of recycled material on the West Coast.
If the market becomes glutted, as some recyclers fear, prices would plummet and the city would be unable to recoup much of the cost of buying new trucks fitted with compartments for recyclable trash. Small community recycling centers, like the dozens in Los Angeles where some residents now sell their old papers and cans, may be swallowed up by a dive in prices.
“We know there’s a market of sorts,” said Robert M. Alpern, the Bureau of Sanitation official in charge of recycling. “But we don’t know what would happen if we inundate the market.”
If only half of the city’s 477,000 homes put out barrels for the recycling truck, the city would collect 60,000 tons of newsprint a year and 78,000 tons of glass and metals to be absorbed by buyers of recyclable goods.
“It would force the price of newsprint down so low it would put people out of business,” said Ted Kargol of Consolidated Fiber Co., the biggest packer of old paper on the West Coast.
But the city’s location next to the deep-water ports of San Pedro and Long Beach that serve Asian container ships could ensure that Los Angeles itself will have plenty of eager buyers for its material.
“We have the luxury of the Pacific Rim,” said Gary Petersen, owner of Ecolo-Haul, which operates a pilot recycling program for Los Angeles on the Westside and runs a larger program in Santa Monica.
But in a city like Los Angeles, how many people would obey the law and recycle? They might consider it too much hassle to keep separate garbage barrels. And will residents agree to wash out their cans and bottles, which is necessary if the city is to get the highest price from recycling mills?
The Westside pilot program that began in 1985 reports that nearly 70% of the 15,000 homes covered put out at least some recyclable trash every month. But at that rate, less than 10% of the trash in the area is recycled, with the rest going to Lopez Canyon.
Skeptics, including many in the Bureau of Sanitation, note that former Mayor Sam Yorty was first elected in 1961 on a Populist pledge to end the mandatory garbage separation then enforced by the incumbent mayor. They also note that the Westside program benefits from a population that includes many elderly and also some of the city’s most liberal and affluent areas. All are factors that add to support for recycling.
People are less willing to separate their trash in poorer areas, other cities have found. The Los Angeles Times Poll in June asked residents for their feelings and found that more affluent areas of the city found the idea of mandatory separation acceptable. But the idea was greeted more coolly in poorer areas.
It is even harder to sell recycling in neighborhoods with a lot of apartments, experienced recyclers say. Many apartment residents dump their trash in a large bin or down a chute and, for all they know, it gets mysteriously taken away every week or so. Apartment complexes may also lack the space to keep extra garbage cans for recyclables.
“Apartment dwellers tend to be your biggest problem,” said Mary Sheil, administrator of the New Jersey office of recycling. “They don’t have the same community commitment, and they don’t usually put out their own trash.”
Details of the Los Angeles program remain to be worked out, including the debate over how many receptacles people should be required to keep.
Alpern of the Bureau of Sanitation leans toward having residents put all their recycled goods--papers, cans and glass--in one barrel the city would provide. Alpern says that homeowners would be more likely to participate if forced to keep just one extra barrel.
Many Scorn Idea
But the idea is scorned by many in the recycling industry. They say it will cost the city money because mills will not pay premium price for paper that is mixed with broken glass. The machinery and people needed to sort the glass, cans and paper would also add to the city’s costs.
“In order to sell newspaper, it has to be clean to get the highest price,” Gary Petersen said. “Ideally, it’s nice to have the three containers.”
Environmental groups are happy just to see Los Angeles finally begin to show an interest in large-scale recycling. “Historically, recycling has been ignored by waste management professionals,” said Michael Hertz of the Environmental Defense Fund. “And while I don’t think it has a record of unblemished success, no other waste disposal alternative has a record of unblemished success either.”
Meanwhile, the city is continuing its elusive search for new landfills at a price that will not force the City Council to raise taxes. Residents now pay a small garbage fee along with their water bill that is used to buy new trucks, but they pay for the major cost of trash disposal in their general city taxes.
Landfills Shunned
Influential and affluent Westside residents have already forced the city to give up hopes of reopening canyon landfills in the Santa Monica Mountains. However, the County of Los Angeles, and most notably Supervisor Pete Schabarum, whose San Gabriel Valley district is home to most county landfills, want Los Angeles to reopen the Santa Monica Mountain landfills before venturing into any county areas.
This conflict has remained in stalemate for several years, and threatens to end the city’s most promising hope for a new landfill. The land is located in Elsmere Canyon just north of the San Fernando Valley, outside the city limits in a district represented by County Supervisor Mike D. Antonovich.
