Local Laws Try to Put the Lid on Rogue Recyclers

They come under cover of darkness, or just after dawn--early enough to beat the garbage men to the punch. They move steadily, stopping a few moments at each house, the engines of their station wagons and pickup trucks idling as they rifle through curbside recycling bins, looking for treasure.

They are professional pillagers--trash scavengers who make their living by robbing curbside recycling programs of their most precious take: aluminum cans. And in most cities in San Diego County, their conduct is considered worse than sneaky. It’s against the law.

In an attempt to protect the financial stability of recycling programs that depend on aluminum-related revenue, a dozen cities have passed local anti-scavenging ordinances in recent years. All of them are designed to deter thieves by gouging their pocketbooks.

In San Diego, filching from a city-owned recycling bin is a misdemeanor for repeat offenders punishable by six months in jail, up to a $1,000 fine or both. In Oceanside, scavengers pay $118 or more if they are caught red-handed. In La Mesa, first-offenders are fined $75, second-timers pay $100, and third-timers pay $250. City officials are currently seeking to double those fines.

“We want to make it so you’d have to collect a lot of cans to make it worth your while” to risk a fine, said Sandy Schultz, a senior management analyst for the city of La Mesa. But Schultz admits that because it falls to the La Mesa police to enforce the ordinance, the citing of scavengers inevitably “takes a back seat to other calls.”

It is a paradox of the recycling age. As the rising value of aluminum (now about $1,500 per ton) makes looting more lucrative, trash theft increasingly threatens the economic health of many recycling programs. By one estimate, scavengers can cut program revenues by 20% or more.

But because few cities can afford full-time trash cops, scavenging complaints must compete--often unsuccessfully--with more serious crimes for attention from law enforcement officials. When it comes to public safety priorities, purloined garbage is low on the list.

“It’s the same issue that frustrates Caltrans and other state agencies dealing with highway litter,” said Gaye Soroka, manager of environmental affairs at Waste Management of California and the former executive director of I Love a Clean San Diego. “If an officer has the time, great. But if they’re going after a speeder, they’re not going to stop. They’re going to direct their resources toward the greatest public need.”

Brooke A. Nash, the executive director of Solana Recyclers, agreed.

“This is a problem that plagues virtually all curbside programs,” she said, recalling the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department’s frequent “amusement” when she calls to report scavengers. “Ordinances are difficult to enforce and they often end up being symbolic.”

That alarms many recyclers who fear that as well as taking a bite of their operating budgets, scavengers might endanger something even more essential to the future of recycling: community participation.

Richard L. Hays, the director of San Diego’s Waste Management Department, says he hears regularly from San Diegans upset by the sight of their carefully-collected cans being tossed into a stranger’s car.

“They aren’t angry calls--they’re livid,” said Hays, who says the callers seem to take the problem personally. “They feel like their program is being ripped off.”

Nash says Solana Recyclers gets up to five irate calls a day. Especially for residents of cities like Encinitas, La Mesa and Solana Beach, who pay a monthly fee to help finance their recycling program, a visit from a scavenger is nothing less than infuriating.

“People in vehicles can take hundreds and hundreds of pounds of cans that are worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars,” said Nash. “They leave the paper, the glass, the plastic and take the aluminum, robbing programs of their most valuable materials that make the programs work.”

Schultz says La Mesa residents “are very frustrated that they’ve taken all that time and effort to participate just to watch someone else profit. It’s demoralizing.”

In San Diego, the city’s Waste Management Department has tried to fight frustration by assigning its seven litter control inspectors to anti-scavenging details. While monitoring trash theft is not their only duty, it is among their top priorities, and they encounter garbage thieves on a regular basis.

Some people are unaware that their pilfering does any harm, said Helen Bird, deputy director of San Diego’s litter control division. One stern lecture and a written warning are usually enough to discourage them forever, she said.

But others are more stubborn. Ask Bryan Forward, Oceanside’s lone trash buster. Forward, a public service inspector, spends about a quarter of his time staking out trash bandits. He has been known to work all night, waiting in the dark, binoculars in hand, for the tell-tale stop-and-go driving and the soft clink of aluminum that alert him that his prey is drawing near.

He has apprehended people on foot and in station wagons. He’s caught children and grandparents, illegal aliens and U.S. citizens. Still, Forward knows there are many scavengers that manage to evade him--he cannot be everywhere at once.

“It’s a constant problem,” he said. “It goes on all day long.”

So prevalent is the problem, in fact, that the state Department of Conservation offered some suggestions to combat scavenging in its latest report on curbside recycling. One idea was to mimic the Bay Area city of San Bruno, which modified its anti-scavenging ordinance to make the raiding of each recycling container a separate offense.

“Undercover cops watching a scavenger go from one household to the next could rack up 10 offenses in one pop,” said Marlene Rutherford, the state’s curbside recycling coordinator.

According to Hays, San Diego’s waste management director, San Francisco has come up with an even simpler solution--urging residents to wait until morning to tote their recyclables to the curb.

San Diego emulated that idea downtown recently, when businesses complained that their trash was being ransacked. Because city trucks collected trash first thing in the morning, before many businesses were open, shopkeepers put their garbage out the night before, only to find it strewn about the next morning. So the city changed its schedule, making its pick-ups later in the morning so shopkeepers could keep an eye on their trash.

La Mesa has another deterrent strategy. By commingling their items--mixing aluminum with plastic with glass--city officials hope to make the scavenger’s job a little more labor-intensive, and less attractive.

Neighborhood watch programs are also touted as a way to reduce the number of roving rubbish-snatchers simply by letting them know they’ve been seen. With no new funds in sight to hire new litter enforcement officers, many believe such grass-roots watchdog groups may be the best short-term plan for guarding garbage.

“At least they’d have the license plate number to let them know they were seen,” said Soroka, who noted the success of I Love a Clean San Diego’s litter line, a similar concept that fielded calls reporting litterers. “The community could send letters--’A vehicle registered to you was observed doing this. This cost our city this amount of money.’ I could see something like that having an effect.”

That approach, while less punitive than citations, would also be less likely to draw fire from critics, as some ordinances have done. In Orange County, for example, the city of Orange’s ordinance sparked controversy when, a few months after its adoption in 1985, a disabled man was fined $500.

Alfonso Vasquez, then 59, had been left unable to work by an auto accident and was forced to rummage for food for his diabetic wife and five children. He was cited for scavenging by a pair of policemen who found him looking through boxes behind an Alpha Beta market. Vasquez, whose welfare check barely paid his family’s $600 rent, was spared by a municipal judge who called the ticket and the ordinance “ludicrous.” Vasquez was fined 10 cents.

Officials from around San Diego county agree that their ordinances are designed to catch professional, vehicle-riding scavengers, not transients, the poor or the elderly.

“It’s a touchy social issue. Are you going to come down on people who are trying to put a few extra pennies in their pockets? You have to decide where you are going to draw the line,” said Nash. He said at Solana Recyclers, at least, that line looks something like this: “If somebody’s on foot, our feeling is they’re entitled to them. But if they’re driving a vehicle and have got a pretty organized system, that’s taking it a little too far.”

But when an ordinance is on the books, officers can’t pick and choose when to enforce it.

“When we’re out there, we cannot be selective,” said Bird of San Diego’s litter control division. “If we see an old lady with her cart, we go up and talk to her and explain the problem just like anybody else.”

It’s a tough job, Forward says, but a strong belief in what he is doing keeps him from feeling pangs of guilt.

“My family razzes me all the time,” said the Oceanside officer. “But it seems malicious enough to me to take cans from our little green and yellow containers. I generally feel no remorse.”