L.A. Recycling Program Grows by 8,500 Homes

In a sharp increase in Los Angeles’ recycling, large red buckets were distributed Tuesday to 8,500 San Fernando Valley homes along with brochures encouraging residents to separate glass, newspaper, metal and plastic bottles from their garbage.

The expansion brings to 25,000 the number of homes in the city’s two voluntary recycling programs, which are ultimately expected to be made mandatory and extended to all 750,000 homes in the city.

Recycling will “help reduce our dependence on landfills,” said Board of Public Works President Edward J. Avila. “Besides, throwing away valuables like metals, glass, newspapers and plastics just doesn’t make sense these days.”

The city has two programs under way to test different recycling strategies.

Since 1985, 15,000 Westside homes have been asked to separate material that can be recycled into three containers--for newspapers, metals and plastics--that are picked up the same day as regular trash.

Red Containers

In the Valley, 1,500 residents have been asked for the past 14 months to place metal, glass, plastic bottles and newspapers into a single 30-gallon red plastic container. Tuesday’s expansion was in the Valley program only. All 10,000 Valley homes involved are in the northwest and northeast Valley.

The compliance rate has been about 65% on the Westside and about 40% in the Valley, said Gyl Elliott, a Bureau of Sanitation spokeswoman.

Until 1961, Los Angeles residents were required to separate material that could be recycled from their trash. But Sam Yorty was elected mayor that year pledging to drop the requirement, which he decried as “coercion against the housewives of this city.”

Yorty got the city to repeal a law barring city crews from collecting trash that was not separated.

But in recent years recycling has gotten a second life as landfill space has begun to disappear. Avila said that the city’s goal is to cut in half by 1993 the amount of city-collected waste going to landfills.

Los Angeles, with its free weekly pickups, collects about one-third of the waste generated in the city.

Private haulers service most apartment and condominium complexes, office buildings and industries.