Escondido Takes Reins of Recycling With Trash Plan

Until recently, Escondido residents could take their recyclable trash to the Noon Optimist Club salvage center, earn a little pin money and know their efforts were aiding local youth projects. But the center closed.

In the near future, those same householders will be putting their salable trash at the curb and paying the city to pick it up.

It is the way of the future in this era of garbage glut, said Mike Little, the Escondido city staffer in charge of turning the proposed citywide recycling plan into reality.

Little, who hopes to have the voluntary recycling program operating by May, believes that such programs soon will become mandatory as local governments scramble to meet new state standards that require that 25% of all trash be recycled by 1995.

Escondido’s plan has been about a year in the making, Little said, and has borrowed ideas from other California communities already in the recycling business: bright-colored containers for residents’ recycled trash, modest per-household fees to cover the collection costs and educational programs appealing to the residents’ environmental concerns.

Although the Noon Optimist Club’s center closed after 18 years because of a combination of management problems and falling prices for recyclable items, other centers remain open. Residents can still sell their trash to one of these, but it does not absolve them from paying the city fee.

County solid waste management officials emphasize the growing trash problem by citing statistics that show that per capita trash volume has grown 40% in recent years.

The crunch was made official when Gov. George Deukmejian signed into law last fall a bill that mandates 25% recycling by all local governments by 1995 and 50% recycling by 2000.

Brooke Nash, who heads Solana Recyclers, is a veteran in the recycling business and converted Solana Beach (1983) and Del Mar (l987) into two of the first 100% recycling cities in the county where commercial, industrial and residential properties all participate on a voluntary basis.

Encinitas is going to full recycling in a few months, and other cities, including Carlsbad, San Marcos and La Mesa, are gearing up for citywide recycling.

Escondido, which has had a pilot program of about 500 homes operating since last May, plans to phase in its citywide residential program in May. About 7,500 of the city’s 22,100 single-family homes will be served in the first phase, followed by a midsummer expansion and total coverage in November.

Escondido City Council members gave the program a vote of approval after a workshop Wednesday night but requested that the city staff work out a few kinks in the system and investigate a “carrot and stick” approach to reward participants in the curbside recycling program and penalize bleacher sitters.

Nash said that no such system has been tried in coastal cities because of the difficulty in keeping records and the unfairness of penalizing persons who take their recyclable trash to salvage centers.

She said curbside recycling programs alone will not meet the 1995 requirement for recycling 25% of the trash generated within a city. Grass clippings and other organic wastes, which make up 20%-30% of all solid waste--must be recycled into mulch and ground cover before such recycling levels can be met.

County officials are considering banning the dumping of greenery in landfills, requiring instead that it be separated and dumped at chipping centers situated at landfills, Nash said.

Under the curbside recycling program proposed for Escondido, residents would pay $1.37 a month, picking up some city administrative costs and most collection costs.

The city would face start-up costs of about $380,000 to acquire recycling containers and to set up the program. Escondido Disposal Inc., which handles trash pickup in the city, would face an equal amount of start-up costs, including acquisition of new equipment.

Little estimated that the recycled materials would bring in $15,000 to $50,000 a year in city revenue, which could be applied toward the cost of the program.