Our Whole House Is Set to Topple in a Flood of Trash

We on the West Coast have been known to have a somewhat smug attitude toward the problems of life in the East. Angelenos smirked, for example, at the well-reported odyssey of Long Island’s vagabond garbage barges searching the Atlantic shore unsuccessfully for admittance to a landfill.

But we no longer have room to be smug. By the end of this year, Los Angeles could be Long Island West, with more than 20% of our trash looking for a resting place.

According to the best estimates of sanitation experts, Los Angeles’ trash crisis was not supposed to hit until late 1991. However, a pending City Council action threatens our dwindling landfill space, potentially causing us to face uncollected trash in our streets as early as the New Year.

Solid-waste management is a complicated problem and all parts of the disposal system demand constant vigilance. The local sanitation officials who monitor this complex “house of cards” have been assuming that the present amount of landfill space would hold steady until late 1991, when they predicted a shortfall in disposal capacity. That’s when the current permit expires for the Sunshine Canyon landfill in Sylmar, which receives 6,500 tons of trash per day from more than 2.5 million people in the Los Angeles area. But several recent actions by government agencies have accelerated the onset of the crisis.

Last month, officials of the South Coast Air Quality Management District filed a petition to close the city of Los Angeles’ only municipally owned landfill at Lopez Canyon for failure to complete installation of a methane gas-collection system. Then, a few days later, the City Council’s Planning and Environment Committee upheld a city board’s decision that would close the main land-filling area of the Sunshine Canyon landfill by Dec. 31.

More recently, the state Solid Waste Management Board issued a “cease and desist” order against Lopez Canyon. If either the AQMD or the state board is successful in closing Lopez Canyon (which receives 4,000 tons of trash per day) and if the bulk of Sunshine Canyon’s 6,500 tons-per-day capacity is lost, we’ll have no place to put more than one-fifth of the trash generated daily by Los Angeles County residents.

It is theoretically possible to divert the waste from Lopez and Sunshine to other more remote landfills, such as existing ones in Calabasas, Sunland and Chiquita Canyon in Castaic But in reality, this won’t happen. Calabasas’ available capacity is only 500 tons per day. The other two landfills would not be able to absorb more than 6,000 tons per day.

In addition, rerouting of 1,000-plus trucks from Sunshine and Lopez daily would result in a substantial increase in traffic and air pollution to areas undergoing rapid development.

The city can avert this environmental crisis in the short term by approving a proposal to relocate activities to a more remote northern area of Sunshine Canyon landfill. However, under the recent restrictive city decision, the owners of Sunshine Canyon landfill must cease operations in the southern part of the site even if the owners have not completed the time-consuming process of obtaining the required approvals and preparing the northern area for landfilling. Vital landfill activities in the southern area should not be halted until the northern area, which will include a recycling center as well as more landfill capacity, is ready.

It makes no sense to close Sunshine Canyon landfill prematurely. Allowing it to remain open and relocating its operating area away from its residential neighbors is an interim step in a four-part, long-range strategy to deal permanently with our solid- waste problems.

The next step: Implementing the “Three Rs” of Recycling, Reuse and Reduction of waste. The city is doing it with its new household recycling initiative, which will provide curb collection of recyclables from 720,000 households. This initiative is expected to reduce city-collected waste flow by 30%. Santa Monica has been doing something similar for years.

Step three: Permit and extend other landfills to take the waste that cannot be disposed of in any other way. Landfills must be a part of an integrated waste-management strategy.

Finally: Investigate other technological alternatives like rail long-haul and waste-to-energy plants. There is a way out of the solid-waste crisis if the public, private enterprise and government work together toward the solution. None of us should avoid our part of the burden through negligence or inadvertence. The removal of a major card like Sunshine Canyon would cause the whole house to topple.