Venture Would Ship 80% of S.D.’s Trash to a Dump in Desert

A private joint venture has offered to help ease San Diego’s garbage woes by using an old tuna cannery and an eastbound railroad to sort and then ship most of the city’s trash to a remote dump, possibly on the Campo Indian Reservation.

Ogden Martin Systems and Taconic Resources, calling themselves Recycle 2000, submitted a formal proposal to city officials Wednesday, offering to dispose of nearly 1.3 million tons of trash a year, almost 80% of all the garbage generated by San Diego homes and businesses.

Under the proposal, handling the trash would require two steps. First, the garbage would be brought to the old Van Camp tuna cannery, on the waterfront near the new convention center, to be sorted for recyclable items such as newspapers, bottles, aluminum cans and plastic bottles. Those items would be shipped by boat to Pacific Rim ports to be reused.

The rest of the trash would be loaded onto railroad cars and sent east on the San Diego & Imperial Valley Railroad for disposal in a remote dump in East San Diego County--most likely 700 acres on the Campo Indian Reservation--or in western Imperial County.

Proponents of the proposal estimated Wednesday that it would cost them $2 million to $5 million and take up to two years to develop the system. They said they have already signed an agreement to sublease the 300,000-square-foot cannery and are close to signing a contract with the railroad and the Campo Indians.

Declined to List Price

However, they steadfastly declined Wednesday to say how much they would charge the city to take the garbage off its hands, claiming such information would be useful to competitors.

“It’s not that we’re against other people coming forward,” David L. Sokol, president of Ogden Martin Systems, said at a press conference. “We don’t want to put our price out there and make ours a benchmark.”

The Recycle 2000 proposal comes at a time when city officials are beginning to grapple with a budding trash crisis. Estimates show that capacity at the Miramar Landfill will be exhausted by 1995, and the city will have to find another method of trash disposal.

Meanwhile, political pressure has killed off one alternative for the city--trash-to-energy plants, which burn garbage to generate electricity. Plans for such a plant in Kearny Mesa collapsed last year when the City Council withdrew its support, and city voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative that all but outlaws such plants because of environmental and health considerations.

Turning to Recycling

City officials are now turning to recycling as an answer, and have put together a preliminary plan calling for San Diegans to reclaim 25% of their garbage through this method.

Given those decisions, the Recycle 2000 proposal is suitable for San Diego, said Sokol and Richard Chase, president of Taconic Resources. The effective life of the Miramar Landfill could be extended 15 to 30 years because most of the garbage would be rerouted to the new landfill by railroad, they said.

Also, the city’s recycling program would get a boost. “This project, as planned, would be the largest recycling project in the world,” Sokol said.

Under the Recycle 2000 plan, San Diego homes and businesses would be asked to sort their garbage into two trash bins--green and gray.

Green bins would hold everything that is obviously recyclable, such as bottles, cans and cardboard; gray bins would hold everything else. The bins would then be trucked to the cannery, where the items would be sorted further by machine and hand.

Materials Sent to Foreign Firms

Eventually, the proposal says, the recycled materials would be loaded onto ships and sent to companies in Mexico, Japan, Taiwan, Korea and China. The recycled shiploads could exceed 300,000 tons, a 40% increase over what the port exported in 1987.

The partnership would receive the first $5 million made off the recycled materials; after that, it would turn over 60% of the proceeds to the city, the proposal said.

Handling the unsorted garbage in the gray bins would be a bit more complicated under the proposed plan.

Since a 1919 ordinance calls for free garbage pickup for any resident who can place his garbage at the curb-side, the gray bins in front of single-family residences will continue to be picked up by city crews and dumped at Miramar, the proposal said. This accounts for about 350,000 tons of garbage a year.

But garbage in gray bins at multifamily dwelling units and businesses, which generally use private trash-hauling services, will be taken to the cannery, where recyclable materials will be lifted out. The bulk of the garbage, estimated at 1.3 million tons, will be loaded into railroad cars and shipped east for burial outside of the city, probably on the Campo reservation, Sokol said.

The chairman of the Campo Indians could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Opening Railroad Line

Dick Engle, the railroad’s vice president and general manager, said Wednesday that the impending agreement with the partnership will mean opening the railroad line from Jacumba to Plaster City. The railroad will have to invest $2 million to replace two damaged bridges and enough track to allow the garbage trains speeds up to 25 miles an hour.

Although Sokol declined repeatedly to say how much the total package would cost the city, he added that it would be at least double the $8 a ton the city pays for dumping at Miramar. How that increase is distributed among homeowners and businessmen is up to City Council, he said.

Deputy City Manager Coleman Conrad said Wednesday that he received a copy of the lengthy proposal. A city manager analysis of whether the plan is feasible will be forwarded to the City Council, which may choose to solicit ideas from other firms, Conrad said.

A spokesman for Mayor Maureen O’Connor said she hasn’t seen the proposal but is interested in any solution that does not include a trash-burning plant.

Councilwoman Judy McCarty, the city’s leading advocate of recycling, said that the Recycle 2000 plan sounds like a “good idea” but added that she objects to dumping San Diego trash miles away.

“I’m afraid that people think that dumping our trash in the desert is going to solve all our problems,” McCarty said. “What is does is transfer problems. I don’t support that. I think we have to deal with trash in a responsible way, and dumping it in the desert is irresponsible.”