Neighbors Trash Idea for Recycle Plant : Environment: The city needs a Westside disposal center to meet state goals. But residents oppose plan for a 56,000-square-foot waste processing plant.

Developers told residents that a recycling center they want to build in Del Rey would offer the latest in recycling technology, be landscaped with hills and wildflowers, and fill an urgent need for recycling on the Westside. A ponytailed Venice artist even assured residents that the facility would offer local artists a chance to create sculptures with local garbage.

But the nearly 200 residents who turned out for a meeting on the proposal last week were having none of it.

“Put it in Beverly Hills!” one man yelled at Thursday’s meeting.

“Put it near the tracks!” another resident shouted.

“Why don’t you put it on the Venice Pier?” suggested a man in a pink shirt.

The meeting was called by City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter to ease growing tensions between developers and Del Rey homeowners. If anything, the meeting, punctuated by shouting matches, only widened the rift between developers and residents.

“Hysterical idiocy” is how developer Dan Rosenthal, a partner with BLT Enterprises, characterized his opponents’ criticisms. “I grew up on the Westside,” he said. “What’s new is this concept that everybody recognizes the problem of trash--but let’s export it to somebody else’s back yard--probably somebody poor and black.”

The recycling center is proposed for a 4 1/2-acre plot at 55535 Westlawn Ave. The site, an old General Telephone storage lot, is a block from residential neighborhoods and is surrounded by light industries and office buildings.

Up to 250 trucks a day will rumble back and forth from the center along Jefferson Boulevard to the San Diego (405) Freeway, bringing in trash from Bel-Air Estates, Brentwood, Century City, Playa del Rey, Venice, West Los Angeles, Westchester, Westwood and other Westside neighborhoods. Crews at the 56,000-square-foot processing plant will separate the garbage into recyclables, such as glass, aluminum and plastic, and waste destined for landfills.

BLT partner Bernie Huberman said the center will also buy bottles, paper, cans and cardboard from the public and bundle trash hauled in from the city’s recycling program.

City officials say the plant is a key component of their program to introduce curbside recycling to all of Los Angeles between 1991 and 1993. State law requires cities to reduce present landfill dumping 25% by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000.

The city is scrambling to meet those goals through a series of contracts with private recycling plants. The BLT plant would become the first such center on the Westside, where the city has fallen at least a year behind its deadline for implementing curbside recycling. “It’s very clear that there needs to be a plant somewhere on the Westside for the city to begin recycling on the Westside,” Galanter said. The councilwoman said she will support the project, if its officials can assure her that it will remain clean and rat-free, and that it will control traffic.

The location of a recycling site on the Westside has taken nearly two years, according to Huberman, because vacant land in the region is scarce and community opposition ferocious. The residents who turned out last week complained that the facility will diminish the value of their homes by up to $100,000, increase traffic on local streets, create noise and stench, and attract rats. “Will our children be wearing face masks out in the yard?” asked Charlotte De Meo, a member of the Del Rey Homeowners & Neighbors Assn.

Speakers in favor of the recycling center were frequently interrupted and jeered. “Where are you from? Why don’t you put it in your back yard?” the audience repeatedly shouted at supporters, many of whom were not from the Del Rey neighborhoods closest to the proposed site.

The overriding complaint from neighbors was that it is not fair that they should get stuck with everybody else’s trash. “The Del Rey community is not going to take the burden of the entire Westside,” said Salvatore Grammatico, a real estate agent and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. “Let Brentwood and Pacific Palisades take their own trash!”

Galanter called such statements unrealistic. “A number of people said we don’t want it--put it in somebody else’s back yard. The fact is, you can’t run a city that way,” she said.

Rosenthal predicted that, despite opposition, the center will get necessary permits from the city and be built before 1993. “We’re not going away,” he vowed.