Recyclers in Pilot Program Face Glut : Environment: A city contractor says 1,000 tons of glass that has been carefully separated by homeowners could end up in landfills.

Though the city of Los Angeles’ household trash recycling program is only in a limited test phase, recyclers are already reporting difficulty in finding markets for much of the material.

And at least one city contractor said that unless a solution is found within the next several weeks, 1,000 tons of glass that has been carefully separated by homeowners and collected for recycling could be sent to landfills.

“I don’t know how long we can hold out,” said David Jiang, project coordinator for CR&R; recycling company of Stanton, one of four processors contracted by Los Angeles to collect and sell recyclable materials. “We’ve got a mountain of glass” and a limited market, he said.

CR&R; has been unable to find a market for upward of 30% of all glass it has picked up from its share of the 92,000 Los Angeles households now participating in a pilot recycling program, Jiang said.

The recycling program, which ultimately will involve 720,000 households throughout the city, is designed to cut the amount of trash sent to the rapidly filling landfills.

The growing problem with the recycled glass market was underscored earlier this week when the California Department of Conservation quietly triggered a provision of the state’s beverage container law and slapped a new 0.7-cent redemption fee on every glass beverage container sold.

The move, which could cost the state’s 13 glass bottle manufacturers an estimated $22 million a year, is aimed at forcing the companies to buy more recycled glass at competitive prices.

Conservation Department Director Randall Ward, whose agency oversees the state’s bottle redemption program, said 7,000 tons of glass beverage containers, or 2% of all bottles collected for recycling in California last year, were sent to landfills because of the market glut. “We have a sense that there is more on its way” to the dump, he Ward said.

So far this year, recyclers have dumped tons of glass containers from various municipal recycling programs in landfills, according to recyclers. The city of Anaheim dumped 260 tons of recyclable glass in a landfill earlier this year when officials determined it was contaminated and thus unsalable.

Others, including the companies handling Los Angeles’ recyclables, say they are finding it increasingly difficult to market the material.

Still, Los Angeles officials were unaware of the festering problem at CR&R; until questioned about it last week by members of the Solid Waste Citizens Advisory Group, a watchdog group appointed by the City Council.

Barbara Fine, who chairs the advisory group, last week asked city Bureau of Sanitation officials about rumored problems in the glass recycling market. Fine said she was told that it would take 30 days for the bureau to compile a report on the issue.

Frustrated by the bureaucratic response, Fine then simply called the recyclers herself. They told her that glass from the city’s recycling program was on the verge of being sent to landfills.

“It seems like quite a problem,” Fine said. “The city can do more than just take a glance at the problem.” Sanitation officials, she added, “need to be looking into this.”

Drew Sones, the city’s recycling director, said he was surprised when told about the imminent prospect of having tons of glass from the city’s recycling program dumped in landfills.

“I haven’t heard that,” Sones said.

Fine said that if sanitation officials do not come up with a solution in 30 days, she will ask that the City Council hold hearings.

One of Fine’s concerns is the “disillusioning” effect the dumping will have on the public. Recycling, she said, “will be just one more thing the public will be fed up with.”

What may be even more disillusioning, she said, is that recyclers, city officials and glass manufacturers alike lay part of the blame for the market glut on the state government’s bottle redemption program, which they say may be working at cross purposes to municipal curb-side recycling programs.

The beverage container redemption program, they say, is effective at subsidizing the collection of recyclables, but may be discouraging the ultimate use of the material by glass manufacturers.

Under the state’s so-called “2020” beverage container redemption law, known by its Assembly bill number, glass manufacturers are required to maintain a market for recycled glass at an average price of $93.72 a ton. That price--roughly double the cost of new material--is mandated by the state to make the collection and processing of recyclable glass economically viable.

Lee Wiegandt, president of the California Glass Recycling Corp., a glass manufacturer’s trade association, said imposition of the new fee “does not fix the problem.”

“It’s bad for recyclers; they just don’t know it yet,” said John Holzemer, a spokesman for Owens Brockway Corp., one of the state’s largest glassmakers.

Still, recyclers such as Jiang said the new fee could help maintain the recycling infrastructure until new or expanded markets are developed.

“It keeps the flow going,” Jiang said, “even if it is going to the landfill.”