Eco Kids : Trash Survey Shows Pupils Have Grown-Up Concerns

It was a throwaway question.

“Where do you think all the trash goes?” schoolchildren across Los Angeles were asked in a first-ever environmental survey.

But instead of throwaway answers such as “outer space” or “the principal’s office,” the block-printed replies from even the youngest pupils struck close to home.

“It all goes to the streets, because I see it there,” complained Melissa Prado, a third-grade pupil from San Fernando.

“It goes into the air. Papers fly everywhere,” said serious-minded first-grader Zoe Rosenblum of Westwood.

“To countries like Mexico, . . .” worried Cecilia Padilla, a second-grader from North Hollywood.

“To Santa Monica Beach,” replied Babak Benyamini, a Westside sixth-grader.

“In the ocean,” said Alejandra Herrera, a third-grade student from Los Angeles.

“In canyons once inhabited by animals driven out by the growing population of trash,” answered Kristy Hatten, a San Pedro fifth-grader.

As depressing as all of that sounds, the responses have delighted school and business leaders. Until now, many of them have worried that youngsters are inheriting grown-ups’ casual attitude about garbage.

Adults slow to embrace recycling have left landfills bulging. They have often opted for convenience over conscience--depleting natural resources to produce materials that are quickly discarded and foul the environment.

“Kids know what’s going on, and they don’t like what they see,” said John Sebastian, a San Fernando Valley manufacturer who commissioned the unusual survey of 3,000 students at 40 Los Angeles-area schools.

Lorna Round, an assistant superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said the poll suggests that “we’re laying a good groundwork for when these young people are old enough to vote.”

The classroom survey is a kickoff project of “Little Green,” a campaign by a business and government coalition that Sebastian organized to beef up ecological instruction for children.

Last month, the group sent 61 volunteer speakers to 54 Los Angeles-area schools to discuss conservation issues with students. Next month, it will conduct an international children’s art and writing contest aimed at saving the Earth’s rain forests.

“Kids are aware there’s a problem,” said Sebastian, the owner of a cosmetics and hair-care company. “Whether they express it to mom and dad is another issue. But we’re going to have strong adults.”

An Italian who was raised in Tunisia, the 52-year-old Sebastian has been on his own personal environmental crusade since 1970. That’s the year he visited his brother, Jim Cusenza, in Brazil, where Cusenza was working as a Peace Corps volunteer.

“The rain forest was being destroyed,” Sebastian said. “While I was there I saw the kind of devastation you don’t forget.”

He remembered it when he launched his Sebastian International company two years later.

To the surprise of customers, he printed environmental messages on the back of his shampoo bottles and put pictures on delivery bags of Indians paddling dugout canoes along the Amazon River.

When he opened his headquarters in Warner Center two years ago, he placed recycling bins in every office and installed sensors that switch off lights in unoccupied rooms. He hung large scrolls from ceilings and walls on which employees could write conservation ideas.

In an interior hallway, he built a two-story replica of a rain forest, complete with tropical ferns and trees and an 1,800-gallon recirculating stream that falls from volcanic rock into a jungle pond.

None of Sebastian’s employees were surprised last year when he expanded his crusade to include children.

His kid’s-eye approach will pay off in the future, said C.N. (Skip) Wrightson, an executive at the Rocketdyne Division of Rockwell International, one of the sponsors of Little Green. Others include the Los Angeles Children’s Museum, MCA, the Southern California Gas Co., TransWorld Bank and the city Department of Water and Power.

“Kids are going to make a difference in what starts to happen here in the next few years,” Wrightson said. “Interest in the environment is going to escalate.”

Survey organizers said it will take several more weeks to tabulate the results of their classroom poll, distributed late last month in English and Spanish. But the poignancy of replies has been more quickly measured.

Sixth-grader Richard Corral of East Los Angeles said he is worried that the planet may not be able to handle “as much trash as we dish out.”

Fourth-grader Allen Mangona of the Mid-Wilshire area said Los Angeles is becoming so full of litter that “I have to move out.”

Fifth-grader Denise Garcia of Highland Park warned that waste seems destined to pile up “until it kills all of us.”

Fourth-grader Ki Bin Kim of the Wilshire District wasn’t certain how much more abuse the Earth can take.

“Don’t ask me,” he said. “Ask God, or Mother Nature.”