Television Reviews : Two Documentaries Will Air Tonight on KCET

Los Angeles’ looming trash disposal problem and the uncertain realities facing recently arrived Latino immigrants are the subjects of KCET-produced documentaries tonight.

“Filthy Rich,” part of Channel 28’s “California Stories” series (now moved to Monday nights at 7:30), wraps its brisk examination of L.A.’s solid-waste disposal system around a profile of businessman Gary Petersen.

Petersen, a scavenger/entrepreneur in a buttoned-down shirt, is a high-tech embodiment of “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” He mines “urban ore”--newspapers, glass, aluminum, copper, brass, etc.--that he picks out of the L.A. “waste stream” and sells it in bulk to resource-poor Pacific Rim countries such as Japan, which recycle it and sell it back to us in everything from cars to VCRs.

Unfortunately, the efforts of Petersen’s Ecolo-haul company, which operates Santa Monica’s recycling program and an experimental curb-side trash separation project for the city of Los Angeles, doesn’t make much of a dent in the Rose Bowl-filling 45,000 tons of solid waste that Los Angeles produces each day.

As “Filthy Rich” host Tom Thompson shows us, Los Angeles is running out of places to put its mountains of refuse. No one wants new landfills in their neighborhood. The San Fernando Valley’s Sunshine Canyon landfill, the destination of 1,000 trucks a day, is nearly overflowing.

So what do we do? Getting rid of its solid wastes costs Los Angeles $1 billion a year. Some waste management experts think that kind of money can profitably support a whole new industry of companies like Petersen’s. Can European methods (burning trash) work here? Can the marketplace respond?

“Filthy Rich” writer-producer Joseph Kwong, who employs the much over-used C-word, crisis , with commendable restraint, asks but doesn’t pretend to supply the answers.

Kwong deftly packs a lot of provocative information and some fun factoids (10,000 Wall Street Journals are thrown away every day in Century City) into 30 minutes. He could easily have used another half hour to look more deeply into how other cities are handling their trash and to investigate how politics often skews the economics of waste disposal.

“Home Among Strangers” (tonight at 9 on Channel 28) is a slowly paced, in-depth look at another important part of our future: How the exploding Latino population will affect the future of Southern California and how much trouble new immigrants will have being absorbed into the American cultural and political mainstream.

In addressing religion, employment, education and Latino political representation, producer Nancy Salter focuses primarily on San Fernando--where the population is now 70% Latino.

We meet people and priests from two dissimilar Catholic churches. St. Ferdinand’s parishioners are mostly middle-class Anglos and English-speaking Latinos. Santa Rosa’s walls, on the other hand, are bursting with recently arrived Spanish-speaking parishioners whose social values are more traditional and conservative.

The segment on employment centers (perhaps too much) on Pete Beltran, a Van Nuys General Motors plant union official. He worries about the decline of high-paying industrial jobs that historically have provided Latino immigrants with a ladder to the middle class.

College professors, elementary school teachers and political leaders offer their views on bilingual education and the causes of high Latino high school drop-out rates.

Political analysts discuss the future of Latino voting power--now disproportionately low but likely to grow, especially by 2030 when half of the people in the state will be Latinos. (Latinos make up 20% of California’s population today but only 7% of voters.)

There are no sweeping conclusions and no hotly contested controversies in “Home Among Strangers.” The ending fades away and the plodding pace will test the most dedicated documentary viewer. It’s not that this installment of “KCET Journal” isn’t well done, or that its subject matter isn’t worthy of investigation. Maybe its broad socioeconomic tack just doesn’t make for especially engaging TV.