China Recycling Program a Paper Tiger : City Hall: A much-touted plan to sell waste paper to the Chinese never got off the ground, but its demise was never announced.

An ambitious and much ballyhooed program to ship thousands of tons of Los Angeles waste paper to China for recycling never got off the ground and, quietly, has been all but abandoned.

Announced by Mayor Tom Bradley at a City Hall press conference last January, the China Paper Partners project was heralded as an innovative way to rid Los Angeles of as much as 1,000 tons of trash a day by sending it to the paper-hungry Chinese.

The paper initially was to come from City Hall, the Transamerica Building and several other office buildings, where workers were asked to separate dry paper from other trash. If it worked, other sources of paper would be added. The Chinese, meanwhile, were to build a plant to de-ink and recycle the paper, providing them with a much-needed new source of the high-quality paper.

But the Conservatree Paper Co. of San Francisco, the American partner in the joint venture, began to lose interest in the project last spring, and officials blame the political upheaval in China that resulted in a martial law crackdown against pro-democracy protesters. A company official described the project as “stalled,” and said there is little expectation that it will be revived.

The project’s demise has never been announced and workers at City Hall have continued to separate their office paper from other garbage and deposit it in separate cans.

News of the failure of China Paper Partners was particularly galling to Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, City Hall’s most inveterate recycler. Galanter has insisted on the presence of a row of recycling cans and bins in the City Council chambers, and she is known to police the garbage-tossing activities of her fellow council members.

“Even though the program has been dead almost since the day it was born, no one ever bothered to tell the mayor, the City Council or the city employees,” Galanter said last week.

“The mayor’s office held a press conference to announce the program but never set it in motion or told the employees what to do,” she said.

Some weeks after the January press conference, Galanter said, she called the city’s General Services Department, which operates City Hall, and found that department supervisors were unaware of the new recycling program.

“It wasn’t until I stepped in that the program was put into action,” Galanter said.

Under the program, which city officials viewed as a pilot project, all dry paper, whether white or colored, was to be set aside in specially marked bins. It would then be collected, baled and loaded onto container ships bound for China.

Before last January, a program to separate and recycle only white paper, which can be sold at a much higher price than mixed batches, had been in place at City Hall.

“While we wasted our time trying to make the China Paper program work, we ignored the white paper recycling program that had the potential to actually earn money for the city,” Galanter said. White paper sells for about $100 a ton, but mixed paper sells for only about $25 a ton, she said.

“I’m going to get to the bottom of this and we are going to have an effective recycling program before we are through,” Galanter said.

One aspect of the China project that foundered from the beginning was the attempt to gather paper from the Transamerica Building, said Charles Crouse, the building’s director of maintenance.

Crouse said Transamerica had an aggressive recycling program before January but was willing to cooperate with the China Paper plan. “We were glad to participate, but we never sold any paper to them,” he said last week.

Janitors at Transamerica thoroughly sort all trash each day and paper is sold to the highest bidder, Crouse said, adding that China Paper Partners never met the other bids.

John Stodder, Bradley’s top environmental aide, conceded that the China project had not worked out but said Conservatree “got whipsawed by history.”

“The potential of it seemed terrific,” Stodder said. “It’s not a failure, but it gets an incomplete grade.” Initially, he said, China Paper Partners helped distribute waste cans and stickers around City Hall, but he said he had not heard from its officials since last April.

Susan Kinsella, director of communications for Conservatree and vice president of China Paper Partners, said China’s uncertain political situation stalled the project.

“Our expectations and our schedules now aren’t working out because of the political problems there,” she said.

The Americans involved in the venture have not been able to get a clear answer about the progress of the de-inking plant in recent months, said Kinsella, who added that prospects of reviving the program are dim.

The city, meanwhile, is considering hiring a consultant next year to revamp recycling at City Hall and develop an education program.

“Our thinking is that since China Paper dropped out, the (recycling) program has really needed a new parent,” said Stodder, the mayor’s environmental aide.

Ultimately, he said, the lack of landfill space will force Los Angeles to find a foreign market for its paper waste, and a new project similar to the China program will be developed.