The Waste Queen : Environment: L.A.’s new garbage manager wants us to learn to toss out less and recycle more.

Joan Edwards, Los Angeles’ new Director of Integrated Solid Waste Management (that’s garbage, folks), had been at work for just a week when the City Council last Wednesday approved its ambitious new refuse plan: Within seven years, at least 30% of all city-hauled garbage will be recycled rather than burned or dumped.

That means no more tossing kitchen waste, kitty litter, pop bottles, papers and tin cans into one huge plastic bag.

Especially not with Edwards around.

Some say Los Angeles residents may not even want to take that old easy way out once they hear the Waste Queen’s recycling rap. This woman is, after all, the country’s undisputed expert on reborn trash. She was lured to Los Angeles from New York after what Ed Avila, president of the city’s Board of Public Works, calls a national search for the person with the most distinguished garbage recycling career.

Edwards got the job, at about $115,000 per year, because as director of recycling and planning for the New York City Department of Sanitation, she wrote the plan that will get all 8 million New Yorkers to start dividing their garbage into four parts--before the trash collector gets to their doors.

Even more important, she developed some markets for such previously unappreciated discards as crushed, contaminated glass, which New York City used to dump but now recycles as an asphalt component, to help pave city streets.

She talks waste streams, compost and household bulk the way Tommy Lasorda talks spaghetti sauce.

“This country is in a waste crisis,” Edwards says from her small office in City Hall, “partly because of environmental issues and partly because landfills are disappearing at an enormously rapid rate.

“People used to think their garbage just disappeared, poof. But garbage has never disappeared, poof. It’s always gone somewhere. We’ve been living in a happy dream world, where collection and disposal was cheap. Land was cheap. We bought it, we dumped (on) it. Because we didn’t see it, we forgot it was there. Now, all of a sudden, our landfill life is drawing to a close.

“There are communities in Long Island, N.Y., that are shipping their garbage to Ohio today.” Regular garbage, mind you. Kitchen waste and all that. “There are towns whose municipal budgets have almost doubled because they used to get rid of their waste for about $2 to $3 a ton and now it’s $120 a ton” because they have to ship it so far away.

Of course, there are enormous differences between New York and Los Angeles, she is quick to explain.

And because she’s so new on the job here, she’s “not yet super comfortable” discussing specifics of the local disposal dilemma. (Statistics show that about 18,000 tons of waste is produced in Los Angeles daily, and most of it gets buried in landfill.)

But certain verities exist no matter where you’re dumping your trash, she says.

The waste stream, for example, is not mysterious. In fact, it’s basically the same everywhere.

Private citizens discard certain general categories of trash: garden trimmings, food, newspapers, and containers made of tin, plastic and glass, to name a few. The city-owned Lopez Canyon landfill, in Lakeview Terrace, also receives thousands of tons of “miscellaneous waste” annually, such as leather, rubber, dead animals and ceramics. Institutions such as prisons, hospitals and schools generate predictable types of waste, such as paper and tin cans.

Much of this, Edwards says, can be recycled into useful, “second generation” raw materials instead of being burned or buried.

A favorite Edwards example of “second generation” material is glass: jars and bottles in all sizes, shapes and colors that were tossed in the trash by New Yorkers. Until Edwards took the New York job, the glass, once collected, was simply ground into a multicolor pulp and dumped because it was too contaminated to be reused by jar makers.

But under Edwards’ guidance, the New York municipal asphalt plant conducted a one-year test to use the previously unmarketable mush.

“We used it as a substitute for sand and stone,” she says. “And it worked. We paved five medium- to high-traffic city streets with a mixture of 15% ground glass in the asphalt mix. The test went four seasons. It was found to work wonderfully with minimal changes in plant operations and none that required any capital retooling. The engineers that ran the plant, as well as those responsible for paving the streets, are enormously satisfied.

“As a result, the city will not have to worry about that residue of broken, contaminated glass that normally you have to throw away because you can’t find someone to buy it.” And it saves money by obviating the need to buy so much sand. “I think that is what government needs to do more of, and that is one of the things I want to do in L.A.”

Edwards’ total New York trash plan, which is probably similar to the one that will eventually be implemented in Los Angeles, has residents putting out different types of waste in separate packages on special days.

On “recycling day,” special two-bin trucks will collect two bundles from curbsides: metal, glass and plastic containers in one; newspapers, magazines and corrugated boxes in another.

New Yorkers will also have a regular garbage day, for disposing of non-recyclables like kitchen waste. And a household bulk recycling day, for such things as sofas, refrigerators, water heaters and bicycles.

In neighborhoods where there is enough compostable material, there will be a leaf and yard waste collection day. (Tree trimmings, grass and leaves may be used in city park lands and as landfill covering when the New York plan is in full effect.)

But New York could prove easy compared with Los Angeles.

The Big Apple’s City Charter specifies that all 8 million residents in five boroughs get city trash collection whether they live in 50-story apartment buildings or single family homes. So it was easy for Edwards to focus on what the Sanitation Department actually picked up.

But in Los Angeles, only a third of the waste stream is picked up by the city, from single family dwellings and apartment complexes of up to six units. All trash from everywhere else, including larger apartment buildings, city offices and institutions, is collected by private haulers who are paid by the people who own the buildings.

This means that in New York, where she worked for the Department of Sanitation, Edwards did not have to persuade anyone outside the city structure to participate in her plan.

But here, where she toils for the Department of Public Works, Edwards will have to talk not only with her own board, but with the Department of Sanitation and independent haulers to get her show on the road.

(A state law, enacted in September, does require that by 1995, communities must use recycling to reduce by 25% the amount of trash sent to landfills. The percentage increases to 50% by the year 2,000.)

Edwards says she looks forward to the challenge, because her Los Angeles job may just allow her to accomplish more here than in New York.

She’ll “head up a very small office” in which she will be “the idea person,” who helps create a feasible plan. She’ll work with the private sector as well as the government, “the corporations, hospitals and schools that generate the waste; the haulers who pick up the waste,” and the private recyclers.

“I’ll help develop a plan for all of those, focusing very much on the private sector waste stream,” she says.

And if she stays true to form, her operation won’t be very small for very long. Deborah Stabile, New York City’s assistant sanitation commissioner for operations, planning, evaluation and control, says Edwards’ impact on New York was “quite dramatic.”

“She made recycling a reality for us,” Stabile says. “She laid out a strategy for recycling and waste reduction that could be implemented. She directed us into programs for residents as well as institutions and the commercial sector. She developed the staff to identify and develop markets for recycling.”

Edwards started in New York with “a very small unit,” Stabile says, and “the staff has grown to 86 people, including managers, analysts, researchers, community outreach and public education types.”

Edwards was a woman of “great vision,” Stabile says. “It was a tough loss to the city. But she trained her people well and left us with a sound base to continue what she began.”

Will Edwards get the same cooperation for her visionary ideas in Los Angeles?

“Recycling has come of age,” Edwards says. Anybody in waste management today, private or public, understands that this is the future, because it is both ecologically and economically best, she says.

But recycling is only half the battle, she asserts, and possibly the less important half. It does no good turn trash into usable raw material if there’s no one out there who’ll buy and use it. In other words, she intends to develop the same kind of markets here that she did in New York for glass and other trashed goods.

“Markets are the key” to turning recycling dreams into reality, she explains. “If you collect trash that no one wants, you don’t really have a recycling program. Many public officials and grass-roots organizers don’t understand that,” and so they rush to recycle prematurely.

“What I want to do in L.A. is . . . help city and private recyclers and haulers and environmental advocates to reach consensus on strategies to increase markets.”

These strategies could involve government purchasing policies favoring recycled materials; research to develop new means of using recycled products; and subsidies to encourage private industry to use “second-generation” instead of virgin materials.

Top priority for Edwards, however, is not recycling or developing markets.

Rather, it’s an attempt to reduce the amount of waste we generate in the first place.

She would like us all to “step back in time a bit, and reverse gears; think about products that have a longer life.” To consider products, for example, that might be initially more expensive but ultimately last longer and contribute less to the waste disposal crisis.

“What I’m saying is that we have to think about solid waste management in a whole new light,” she says. “Our options are getting slimmer all the time.”

Excessive packaging is the worst offender today, she adds.

“The tiny product that’s wrapped in something that’s wrapped in something else that’s in a big box. Or the little thing on the cardboard back with the bubble pack covering it. The ratio of packaging to product is excessive.”

All products today should be “recyclable and recycled,” Edwards says. In theory, “almost everything can be recycled.”

But there are no easy answers, she says. Only trade-offs, which the consumer must be willing to make. And though recycling is hard for many to accept because it “requires us to think about our garbage and do something about it,” it is also this element that makes people understand that the problem we face is one we can all help do something about.

We all feel helpless about so many problems, she says, and this is one where ordinary citizens can really pitch in and do something.

Edwards was one of those ordinary citizens when she started in the waste disposal field.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Adelphi University in New York with a language major, she taught junior high school for a couple of years. Then, on Earth Day, 1970, she joined the Environmental Action Coalition as a volunteer. When the group got government funding to prepare educational materials on the environment, Edwards accepted a full-time job as educational director.

But didn’t she have any solid waste management education to prepare her for this singular career?

Absolutely not, Edwards says. In those days, there was no such education available.

This is one of the ways the environmental movement has changed in the last 20 years, she explains. In 1970, it was almost totally a “cause” issue, she recalls. People involved were generalists and activists who simply wanted to help save humanity and the Earth. Some went to the Peace Corps, others joined environmental groups.

“I doubt that universities even had environmental sciences programs in those years.”

Up until 2 or 3 years ago, she says, waste management professionals were engineers who believed in incineration and landfill. They didn’t think recycling was a legitimate strategy, she says.

“Remember, recycling is people and education oriented; it involves participatory involvement,” she says. And up through the mid-’80s, such a program wasn’t considered “professional.”

Ten years from now, Edwards predicts, training institutions will be conferring Ph.D.s in recycling. And, just as likely, a whole crop of employees in municipal offices such as hers will have become experts by virtue of on-the-job experience.

For now, her goal is to find a consensus among all segments of society, from those who create waste to those who dispose of it, and to convince everyone that less waste is best, and recycled waste is next.