Residential Recycling Efforts Gain Popularity : Trash disposal: Law now requires the amount of refuse sent to landfills by 1995 to be cut 25% by home recycling efforts.

Every Thursday morning in the Arroyo Seco neighborhood of Pasadena, Catherine Tosettilugs to the curb a big, blue plastic box filled with bottles, cans and a bag of newspapers.

White lettering on the box proclaims: “WE RECYCLE.”

Once, she would have thrown the lot directly into the trash. But under a pilot program begun last spring, the city gave her and thousands of other residents a choice. Tosetti chose recycling.

“It’s very easy,” she said last week. She dropped the carton on the grassy strip by her curb for pickup by a truck that would take its contents not to a dump, but to recycling merchants.

“But if I had to take this even to my local grocery store, where they have the recycling bins, it’d be lots harder,” she said.

With a mixture of eager cooperation and habitual reluctance, San Gabriel Valley residents are facing up to the garbage glut.

Landfill space is dwindling in Los Angeles County, the cost of hauling and dumping trash is on the rise, and recycling is moving out of the realm of personal choice.

It’s now the law. State legislation enacted in September dictates that by 1995 communities must use recycling to reduce by 25% the amount of trash sent to landfills. Furthermore, the percentage increases to 50% by the year 2000.

Unrelated to approval of the state law, at least 17 San Gabriel Valley communities already have begun or soon will start home recycling programs. They are El Monte, Alhambra, Arcadia, Claremont, Diamond Bar, La Verne, Walnut, Duarte, Monrovia, San Dimas, Altadena, Hacienda Heights, Sierra Madre, San Marino, South Pasadena, San Marino and Pasadena.

In addition, West Covina, Monterey Park and Pomona are seriously discussing the issue.

This represents a marked change from just two years ago, Hacienda Heights environmentalist Wil Baca said. Then, only one San Gabriel Valley city, Claremont, operated a curbside recycling program for residential trash. Also, fewer than half a dozen of the county’s 86 other cities practiced extensive recycling.

Now, according to William George, who coordinates recycling for the county’s sanitation districts, more than 20 communities have citywide recycling programs and another eight to 10 are moving quickly in that direction.

But former Walnut mayor Harvey Holden, now executive director of the San Gabriel Valley Assn. of Cities, said the time for talking is past. “There are a lot of cities that are continuing to study, quote unquote, recycling. Why they keep debating it, I don’t understand,” he said. “Recycling is a moral necessity.”

For a large swath of the western San Gabriel Valley, recycling has become an immediate need. Pasadena, Altadena, South Pasadena, San Marino and Sierra Madre must implement their recycling programs by next month, if they want to continue using the Scholl Canyon landfill, which is owned by the city of Glendale.

Earlier this year Scholl, officials told their San Gabriel Valley customers to recycle or go elsewhere, which would have meant finding other, more costly solutions, as well as contributing more trash to the county’s rapidly filling dumps.

To comply with Glendale’s requirement, communities have responded in different ways.

Pasadena declared November “Recycling Month.” The city sponsored exhibits of artwork created from items found at dumps. It staged a call-in cable television show and hosted a street festival with a recycling theme.

After receiving a $58,000 state grant, South Pasadena devised a back yard recycling program to cater to residents who don’t have to carry their regular trash to the street as it is and don’t want to start now with recyclable items.

“We’ve tried every which way to let the public know what was happening,” said South Pasadena City Manager John J. Bernardi. “Mass mailings, newspaper articles, water-bill inserts, community meetings.”

And the county has instituted a special hot line, (800) 552-5218, to field questions on its new recycling programs in areas such as Altadena, Hacienda Heights and east Pasadena.

But, despite all the recent fanfare, recycling is hardly a new thing in the San Gabriel Valley.

For years, local groups have earned money by gathering newspapers and reselling them to recycling merchants.

And since 1987, the state’s Beverage Container Recycling Act, or “bottle bill,” has required that recycling centers be established near stores that sell a large volume of products in bottles and cans.

But Joseph Delaney, Pasadena’s recycling coordinator, said the public has a hard time understanding that a recycling program doesn’t necessarily pay for itself. In fact, it means that residents must pay a fee for the privilege of doing another household chore--sorting newspapers, bottles and cans and putting them into in a special container or containers.

People realize that recycling can lengthen the life of landfills and thus save taxpayers the added expenses that would show up as increases in residential trash bills, Delaney said. At the same time, he said, it’s hard to get the point across that even though recycled materials are sold for a profit, the income doesn’t always cover all costs.

Delaney has this answer for complainers: If Pasadena didn’t recycle, and therefore could not use the Glendale landfill, monthly residential trash bills would go up at least $3.

San Gabriel Valley cities charge monthly recycling fees ranging from 25 cents in La Verne to as much as $2.50 in San Marino. Paying the fees is mandatory, but recycling itself is voluntary. The fees pay for the pickup service and for administration.

La Verne Mayor Pro Tem Tom Harvey said that monthly fees go down when more people recycle, because cities then earn more from the sale of recycled materials. Just this year, he said, the monthly fee in La Verne has dropped by 70 cents, from the original 95 cents.

And prospects seem good for greater participation. In one Pasadena neighborhood with a pilot recycling program, 94% of residents said they viewed it favorably, according to a recent city survey.

In South Pasadena’s pilot program earlier this year, officials were pleased to find that 50% of the residences recycled regularly, reducing by 8% the trash that would have gone into Scholl Canyon landfill.

Still, Delaney said, there are complications, even if everyone participates. As more cities recycle, he said, the global market for recyclable materials may be glutted, diminishing the profitability of recycling. “This involves not only domestic markets for, say, newspapers or bottles, but also the international markets of glass and aluminum.”

Recycling issues aren’t simple, he said. “If they were, they would have been solved 10 years ago.”

One difficulty, he said, involves the logistics of how to collect from large apartment buildings and condominiums. Another issue centers on how to handle grass clippings and plant trimmings, which account for 40% of Pasadena’s daily trash, Delaney said.

Even more troublesome, he said, is the matter of how to persuade business and industry to recycle.

“There are a lot of things we can do to reach that 25% goal by 1995,” said George, the sanitation district official. “The problem is, 50% is going to be tough.”

He predicted that perhaps by the end of the next decade, “there will be more trash picked up than we can dispose of.”

“We burn or bury close to 50,000 tons a day in L.A. County,” George said. “Only a few years ago, we were throwing away 35,000 tons a day. We’re going to have to fight to stay even. You keep adding more and more families. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger.”

In the past, Baca said, one battle in the San Gabriel Valley focused on whether incinerators should be used to burn trash at energy-generating plants. Smog weary residents in 1987 mobilized to force developers to scrap plans to construct such an incinerator in Irwindale.

That sentiment set the stage, in part, for the current recycling movement, Baca said. So has the debate over whether it is safe to permit the expansion of landfills, such as the one in Azusa, which sit atop the ground water that provides an area’s drinking supply.

In coming years, Baca said, fights also will involve such issues as the kinds of packaging used in consumer goods and the paper-versus-plastic bags question in grocery store check-out lines.

The environmental concerns expressed in the 1960s and 1970s, Baca said, now have been transformed into a pragmatic, political reality that must be faced in the 1990s.

As an example, Bernardi of South Pasadena said, his community’s involvement represents “more than our simply being nice guys because we want to clean up the environment. It’s something we’re going have to do, whether we want to or not.”