Volunteers Get to Know Their Trash

Pam Cooke is proud of the garbage she hauls out to the curbside of her Atwater home every Wednesday. Her glass jars are clean, the newspapers are stacked and her aluminum cans are crushed. And everything is neatly stacked, ready for the rumbling city recycling truck to snatch it up.

“To tell you the truth, I love recycling,” the mother of two said. “It makes me feel more environmental.”

Cooke and her neighbors are among 95,000 Los Angeles residents who have participated in a voluntary trash recycling program that will serve as the model for a mandatory citywide recycling effort approved Wednesday by the City Council.

If the experience of residents like Cooke and others holds true, the sweeping order will dramatically change that most basic of household chores: taking out the trash.

“People are going to have to get more intimately involved in their waste, that’s for sure,” said Drew Sones, the city’s recycling director. “You are going to have to think twice about what you are throwing away and how you are doing it.”

Gone will be days of tossing everything from coffee grounds to tin cans into one kitchen trash container and then dumping it all into the big can outside. Recycling calls for three containers for different kinds of trash.

“Now I make mental notes about what I have to separate,” Cooke said. “When I’m cooking, I think about that tomato can. I never used to think about trash before.”

Studio City resident Anne Howard also participated in the pilot program. She said it forced her to modify her nightly dish washing routine because she likes to rinse out all her cans and bottles that must be stored in a bin.

“I just line them all up on the counter and at the end of the day wash them after the dinner dishes,” Howard, 67, said. “My husbands takes it all out.”

Another participant, Lavina Rampino, 52, of Atwater, said: “I know it’s a hassle, but now I tell my sons to throw their beer bottles outside in the bin. I tell them they have to separate their own trash.”

Howard echoed the sentiments of several other veteran recyclers when she said the program “makes me feel like I’m finally doing something good for Los Angeles.”

“It’s gotten to be such a frustrating city with the traffic and the smog. At least my garbage is good,” she said.

City officials said residents in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside have a nearly 70% participation rate in the voluntary program. In low-income neighborhoods, the percentage is about half that, but officials believe that many residents recycle on their own for pocket money.

The downside for some participants in the pilot recycling neighborhoods has been theft of their handy recycling bins, which are about the size of a milk crate. They have also been visited by streams of scavengers in search of such money-earning trash as aluminum cans.