Crunch Due Soon : L.A.’s Trash Woes Keep Piling Up

Each month, the sun sets earlier on rustic Kagel Canyon.

The reason isn’t the change of seasons. Rather, it’s the ever-expanding mountain of dirt-covered trash in the city’s Lopez Canyon Landfill half a mile to the west.

“It used to look bucolic here, but now it’s depressing,” said Rob Zapple, a community activist in the 200-family northeast San Fernando Valley neighborhood. “The wall of trash is what the sun sets on at the end of the day. We’re losing up to an hour of light a day.”

A virgin canyon until 15 years ago, Lopez contains more than 10 million tons of trash and looms as high as 1,760 feet above sea level. The only remaining city-owned landfill, Lopez also serves as a symbol of Los Angeles’ burgeoning trash crisis.

Los Angeles, so often a trend-setter, is at the top of the heap when it comes to generating solid waste.

More Than Average

Nationwide, Americans dispose of about four pounds of garbage per person a day, by far the highest average in the industrialized world, according to a 1989 state report. In Los Angeles County, officials say, residents and industries together dispose of almost three times the national average--just under 11.9 pounds per capita daily.

City and county sanitation officials say the truth is clear: Unless action is taken quickly, Los Angeles will soon run out of space to dispose of its trash.

The initial flash point is Lopez, long the target of neighborhood ire and more recently the subject of tough state legal mandates. If the California Waste Management Board wins a pending court action scheduled to be heard next Wednesday, Lopez could be closed, at least temporarily, within days. Moreover, according to city sanitation officials, its remaining life span would be reduced to no more than one year.

Tip of the Iceberg

Yet Lopez Canyon, the daily dumping ground for 4,000 tons of household refuse, is merely the tip of the garbage iceberg.

With continuing increases in countywide trash volume--the figure now stands at 48,000 tons a day--some collection trucks on any given day are being forced to hustle between several of the county’s 10 public and private dumps to find one that has not reached its daily limit.

And in 1992, the real crunch will hit. That is when, according to current projections, more garbage will be collected than there will be space to dump it. If no new landfills open and no existing ones are allowed to extend their operations, there will be 6,000 tons of trash daily with no place to go. That is enough to fill 600 collection trucks, or a ship double the size of the garbage barge that floated fruitlessly down the East Coast in 1987 in search of a willing dump.

“Is there a crisis? Absolutely,” said Stephen R. Maguin, head of solid waste management for the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County. “And if we’ve got to wait until trash sits on the curb, that’s a second-level crisis.”

Scurrying for solutions, the city Bureau of Sanitation is seeking City Council and state permission to extend the life of Lopez to the year 2005 and to increase daily dumping there by 3,200 tons.

Meanwhile, BKK Corp., a private landfill operator, is vying with the city and county to win approval for a landfill with a potential life span of 50 years in Elsemere Canyon, southeast of Santa Clarita in the northern San Fernando Valley. In addition, local government officials are pressing ahead with household recycling programs and expansion plans for existing landfills. They also are considering the costly alternative of hauling garbage by rail to a Riverside County landfill.

Such proposals are hampered by the same forces that have created the crisis: stiffening neighborhood resistance to landfills and alternative disposal methods, longstanding political feuds, the sluggish pace of recycling efforts and political resistance to costly long-distance hauling.

The problem is exacerbated by Los Angeles’ propensity for generating trash.

Although comparisons are somewhat skewed because of Los Angeles’ heavy construction and industrial base, there is no question that the Southland is in the vanguard of the disposable society.

In a 1989 survey by the National Solid Wastes Management Assn., Los Angeles, in part because of its growth-driven economy, rated No. 1 in generating the highest amount of garbage per capita among nine major cities worldwide, including New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Paris and Rome.

“In the past, people really didn’t take things too seriously because forever and ever they put their trash on the sidewalk and it went away and they didn’t have to think about it anymore,” said Edward J. Avila, president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

Or as Maguin puts it: “The acronym for trash is MIGA--Make It Go Away. That’s all they want. . . . But it’s not going to be as easy and it’s not going to be as cheap.”

The roots of the current crisis date back to the 1950s when public outrage over smog led to the banning of back-yard trash incinerators. Sam Yorty didn’t help either when he won election as mayor in 1961 after pledging to end a curb-side recycling program, which he termed “coercion against the housewives of this city.”

At the time, civil engineers proposed what seemed like a simple, safe and inoffensive alternative--the sanitary landfill, where trash was compacted and covered daily with a foot-thick layer of dirt.

Because the county is blessed with a multitude of remote canyons, officials created a countywide system of 16 massive public and privately run landfills that amply served Los Angeles through the 1960s and early ‘70s.

But circumstances changed as environmental awareness and neighborhood involvement grew.

Siding with upscale Westside residents who feared truck traffic, odors and ground-water contamination, the city refused in 1977 and again in 1981 to allow the county to reopen the Mission Canyon Landfill in the Santa Monica Mountains, which had been used for dumping in the 1960s. In 1984, the city also rejected plans for the Toyon 2 Landfill in Griffith Park, which would have taken the place of the city’s only other dump besides Lopez, Toyon Canyon Landfill. It reached capacity and closed in 1985.

County officials reacted by banning city refuse collection trucks from the four county-operated landfills. The city has thus been forced to haul to higher-priced private landfills the 2,000 tons of household trash that exceed Lopez’s daily limit. (In private facilities, the fee is now about $18 a ton, $7 more than county-run landfills but still far below rates in crowded East Coast states. In the city of Los Angeles, households, apartment buildings, businesses and industries account for roughly 19,000 tons of waste daily; private haulers, who use private and county landfills, pick up all but the household waste.)

In recent years, government officials have issued periodic warnings about the impending problem. As far back as 1983, Mayor Tom Bradley addressed a lunchtime rally on the steps of City Hall, a banner reading “TRASH CRISIS” above him. But the public was hardly galvanized--fewer than a dozen people attended.

By the mid-1980s, city and county officials had decided to ease the predicament by pressing ahead with new technology aimed at burning refuse rather than burying it.

The city, in particular, counted on a $235-million trash-to-energy incinerator, slated for South-Central Los Angeles, to take the burden off Lopez. However, the project, dubbed Lancer, ran into stubborn opposition.

At a series of city forums, community leaders argued that the incinerator would release suspect emissions and that the Coliseum neighborhood was the wrong place to put a 200-foot smokestack. They also questioned whether the city, which had earlier agreed to keep landfills out of pricier Santa Monica Mountain neighborhoods, was seeking to dump its garbage on a less affluent neighborhood.

Before the fight was over, Westside and San Fernando Valley slow-growth advocates, fearful that additional waste-recovery plants would be built in their neighborhoods, teamed up with South-Central organizers to persuade the mayor to dump the project.

Left in a quandary, city sanitation officials have taken to emphasizing household recycling while seeking to expand Lopez, which is scheduled to close in 1992.

A pilot program for recycling cans, bottles, newspapers and eventually yard waste was extended this month to 90,000 of the city’s 720,000 households. But final financing plans for the $33-million-a-year program, which could include monthly fees for city residents, have yet to be worked out.

Household recycling, at best, would reduce the amount of garbage destined for the dumps by half. “There will always be a need for landfills, and people are just going to have to understand that,” said John E. Gallagher, chairman of the California Waste Management Board.

Los Angeles’ dilemma is by no means unique.

Fourteen other California counties--including San Bernardino and Ventura--could run out of landfill space in less than eight years, according to a new report by the Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy, known as the Little Hoover Commission. Moreover, the federal Environmental Protection Agency recently predicted that most landfills throughout the United States will be filled within 10 years.

As the Lopez imbroglio demonstrates, winning permission for new or expanded landfills anywhere is a difficult task.

City sanitation officials are now seeking City Council and state approval for a $16-million plan to keep Lopez open until 2005. If approved, 6 million cubic yards of dirt would be bulldozed and a mountain ridge would be graded at Lopez, where the depth of trash now ranges from 90 to 270 feet.

In the meantime, however, the embattled Bureau of Sanitation is attempting to fend off efforts by the state and neighborhood activists to restrict its current operation. The problem, opponents say, is that the city has dumped too much too fast without adequate environmental care in its sole remaining dump.

State waste management officials recently accused the city of violating the conditions of its 1978 operating permit, which limited Lopez’s daily use to 400 trucks and set a 1,725-foot limit on the trash piles. In recent years, as many as 600 city trucks have wheeled into the landfill daily, expanding its face above its eastern ridgeline as high as 1,760 feet above sea level.

The city maintains that it won tacit state approval in 1983 for the increased limit. And Bureau of Sanitation Director Delwin A. Biagi, in a court affidavit, argues that “if allowed to stand, (the state’s order) would effectively shut down Lopez in just a few days.”

Lopez opponents question the city’s figures, labeling them an attempt to foment hysteria.

But city sanitation officials insist that it would take several months to reconfigure Lopez to meet the state demands, and even then there would be room for no more than a year’s worth of garbage.

Moreover, if Lopez were shut down, they say, the yearly dumping cost in private landfills for the 4,000 daily tons of waste it takes would be at least $26 million.

Such action, would have a “ripple effect,” Biagi said, “on the overall availability of landfill space in Los Angeles County.”

“Landfill space in Los Angeles County is a finite resource in that it is not renewable; once it is gone, it is gone.”

Last Thursday, the California Waste Management Board moved to strip the Los Angeles County Health Services Department of its oversight authority, declaring that the county has failed to enforce health and safety standards at several trash facilities, including Lopez Canyon.

The state investigation that led to its determination that Lopez is larger than permitted took place last spring after two city landfill workers fainted when they unearthed toxic gases.

On Friday, the state board voted to uphold the decision of its staff to seek the tougher mandates.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge Tuesday rescheduled to next Wednesday a hearing on a lawsuit brought by the city to invalidate the state’s orders. Judge Dzintra Janavs recently granted a temporary restraining order to the city, ruling that Los Angeles residents would suffer “great and serious harm” if city officials were forced to adhere to the state limits.

Lopez’s opponents, such as Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), contend that city officials are “trying to whip up hysteria (by arguing) that if you follow the rules at Lopez, there’ll be trash on the streets.”

The specter of overflowing garbage, Katz said, is simply being used by the Bureau of Sanitation “as an excuse for not following the law.”

New Attitude Needed

Regardless of who is right or wrong at Lopez, many sanitation experts argue that a new public attitude is needed to prevent a garbage catastrophe in the early 1990s.

“The main message we’re trying to get across is that you can’t look at just one facility. You can’t oppose this recycling facility or that landfill or that rail loading station because you don’t want it,” Maguin said. “You can’t think about one facility out of context. You’ve got to think about it in terms of the whole.”

Such words fall on deaf ears when it comes to Lopez Canyon neighbors who are already living on Garbage Mountain Time.

Coddy Nuckols, for example, said he had already sunk $10,000 into designing his dream house in Kagel Canyon before learning last November of the city’s expansion plans for Lopez. After four years of living in a trailer to save money, Nuckols scrapped his custom home design and bought a $3 book of generic building plans. “I don’t plan to go into debt to build a house in an environmentally messed-up area,” Nuckols said.

Community activists, some of whom live within 100 feet of the dump’s main entrance, insist that it is time for the rest of the city to share the trash burden.

“People are throwing numbers around about how high the landfills should be allowed to go, but that’s not really at the heart of the problem,” said Lewis Snow, vice president of the Lake View Terrace Homeowners Assn. “It comes down to this: The city has all its eggs in one basket, which is Lopez Canyon. . . . (And) so many council members are more concerned with their own back yards.”

Zapple, the Kagel Canyon community activist, conceded that landfills are necessary, but added, “We have already done our share. . . . Why not spread them around?”

Yet in making his argument, he may have unwittingly answered the question.

“Drainage-wise, structure-wise and fume-wise, Lopez has major problems,” Zapple said. “And imagine something like the Hoover Dam in your front yard.”

Existing sites proposed for expansion. CHIQUITA CANYON SUNSHINE CANYON LOPEZ CANYON BRADLEY WEST SCHOLL CANYON AZUSA WESTERN PUENTE HILLS Existing sites. No expansion planned. CALABASAS BKK WEST COVINA SPADRA Potential sites. TOWSLEY CANYON BLIND CANYON BROWNS CANYON ELSMERE CANYON MISSION RUSTIC SULLIVAN CANYONS L.A COUNTY TRASH SITES Existing Landfill Sites

Current Projected tons per day closure Operator Azusa Western 1,500 1990 Private firm BKK West Covina 9,000 1995 Private firm Bradley West 2,500 1992 Private firm Calabasas 3,000 2005 to 2009 County Chiquita Canyon 3,000 1991 Private firm Lopez Canyon 4,000 1992 Los Angeles Puente Hills 12,000 1993 County Scholl Canyon 2,600 2004 County Spadra 2,800 1998 to 2000 County Sunshine Canyon 4,000 1991 Private firm

Note: Officials are seeking permission to expand most existing landfills. Small landfills in Burbank, Whittier, Palmdale and Lancaster each receive less than 300 tons of garbage a day.

Proposed Landfill Sites

Potential capacity Blind Canyon 140 million tons Browns Canyon 100 million tons Elsmere Canyon 225 million tons Mission-Rustic-Sullivan canyons 25 to 250 million tons Towsley Canyon 235 million tons

Note: An environmental impact report on the five proposed dump sites could be completed by early next year. Depending on daily tonnage of garbage, the expected life of these landfills ranges from 20 to 90 years.

Sources: Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts and private landfill firms. Tonnage rates reflect current estimates and can vary from month to month. A change in daily tonnage rates could delay or hasten some dump closures.