Cities Scramble to Establish Recycling Plans : Environment: Ten cities have yet to begin such programs. Time is short, as a state mandate requires a 25% cut in garbage by 1995.

Terry Dolton methodically sorts his family’s cans, bottles and plastic, then dutifully drives them to a recycling center three miles away. Every Friday, he bundles his newspapers so neighborhood collectors can carry them off, and he stockpiles his grocery bags so he can drop them off at the store for recycling.

Careful control of his trash has long been a habit for Dolton, an environmentalist from Huntington Beach. He goes to such lengths because he lives in one of 10 cities in Orange County that have yet to begin offering residents a recycling program.

Since the state launched its war on waste four years ago, more than 21 cities in Orange County have started automated sorting of recyclables or provided special containers picked up at curbs. However, communities that are home to more than one-quarter of the county’s population, more than 600,000 people, still lag behind--Santa Ana, Seal Beach, Fullerton, San Clemente, Dana Point, Laguna Niguel, San Juan Capistrano, Huntington Beach, Fountain Valley and Westminster.

Nearly all the latecomers will start programs next year, beginning with Dana Point in the first week of January. But several don’t have firm plans yet.

Seal Beach is the furthest behind in the county, with no decision from its council yet about which type of recycling program to use or when to start. The Midway City Sanitary District, which serves most of Westminster and the western corner of Garden Grove, has decided to use an automated sorting center, but has not selected a company or set a start-up date. And Fullerton, which has begun negotiations with three companies, may take until mid-1994.

“We’re not trying to be unpatriotic or anything, but we want to evaluate this. We have to make sure it’s not so expensive that people can’t afford to put their trash out, especially with so many people unemployed,” said James Evans, president of the Midway City Sanitary District’s board. “But the state requires us to have a program in place by ‘95, and we should be doing it by 1993 or 1994.”

They are running out of time. Under a 1989 state law, each California municipality must reduce garbage 25% by Jan. 1, 1995, and 50% by the year 2000.

The goal of the law is to force cities to make recycling easier for residents and ease the burden on California’s overloaded landfills. Every day, Californians throw away more than 200 million pounds of garbage--enough to fill Anaheim Stadium every few days.

Ultimately, the cost of recycling programs is borne by residents. On the average, household garbage bills increase $2 to $4 per month to pay for recycling. In San Juan Capistrano, for example, a typical single-family home will pay $15.80 per month, an increase of just over $4, once recycling begins in late January.

“A recycling program will cost us somewhere between a half a million and a million dollars per year, and that’s not peanuts for a little district like ours that has a budget of about $4.5 million,” Evans said.

Some cities, including Irvine, Laguna Beach, Orange and Mission Viejo, are so far staying with their tried-and-true approach: curbside pickup programs that ask households to sort their newspapers, cans, bottles and glass into three small, color-coded bins.

Other cities, including Anaheim, Brea and Cypress, have started programs called “commingled,” where each resident tosses recyclable materials into one large barrel and all trash into another. Then, the barrel of recyclables is hauled from their curb to a site for sorting.

Still others--Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Buena Park, Stanton and La Palma--have gone automated, which means residents don’t have to sort anything. All trash, commercial and residential, is hauled to a $10-million “materials recovery facility” in Stanton, operated by CR Transfer Inc., a subsidiary of one of the nation’s largest recyclers.

Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley are also going automated. Their waste hauler, Rainbow Disposal, is building a sorting center similar to the one in Stanton, with start-up expected next fall. Currently, Rainbow Disposal handpicks some recyclable materials, mostly wood, aluminum and concrete, from Huntington Beach and Fountain Valley trash.

Ron Shenkman, Rainbow Disposal’s marketing director, said the new automated center is worth the wait for residents. “We will have a state of the art facility on line that will process and sort through all the waste we get. We’ll have a far higher rate of recovery than what you could do manually, and it’s more cost-effective than any curbside program,” he said.

Tustin has begun sending trash to a smaller sorting facility in Irvine, and Santa Ana, Fullerton and Midway City Sanitary plan to follow with automated programs in the next year or so.

Santa Ana, which has not yet chosen a company, hopes to begin serving one-third of the city on July 1, 1993, and the rest by July, 1994. Fullerton might not get started until August, 1994, depending on whether it chooses the Stanton company or one of two others offering to build automated centers, said George Buell, an assistant city planner.

Four other cities, all in South County, are on the verge of initiating curbside pickup. Beginning Jan. 4, barrels will be distributed to households in Dana Point, followed by San Juan Capistrano, Laguna Niguel and finally San Clemente in March.

Each household will get one black, 60-gallon barrel for garbage and a blue one for recyclables. In San Juan Capistrano, single-family homes will also get a green barrel for yard waste.

A debate still rages among cities over which program is best. The biggest benefit of automation, proponents say, is the efficiency. Recyclables are collected not just from households, but also commercial and industrial areas, and the cities aren’t reliant on residents’ skill or interest in sorting their garbage. The automated companies guarantee at least 25% of trash will be recycled, while many cities with curbside collection recycle less than half that.

The downside is that materials such as newspapers are sometimes contaminated after being mixed with trash. Also, asking residents to sort their own garbage might make everyone more environmentally conscientious, some city officials say.

“It’s been successful for us. We’ll look at something else when we see some guarantees that it works. But in our city, people are willing to sort, and they keep the materials clean so they have more value,” said Carolyn Solomon, Laguna Beach’s environmental specialist. “So far there seems to be no clear consensus from the experts on what type program works best.”

The cities that ask residents to sort their recyclables concede that they will have to start doing more by 1995 to meet the 25% state mandate. In Laguna Beach, where 12.5% of trash is being recycled, the City Council will soon consider a program to begin curbside pickup at commercial buildings, Solomon said.

Some cities have no alternative but to use curbside because of their location. No companies have built automated sorting centers in South County, which means the nearest one to San Juan Capistrano is in Stanton, a 70-mile round trip that would be an expensive haul for the trucks, said Douglas Dumhart, the city’s management assistant.

Eventually, though, Dumhart said, the South County cities may have no choice. To meet the state’s mandate, they will probably have to persuade a company to build an automated sorting center or finance one themselves by the year 2000, he said.

To people who already make recycling a habit, it won’t make much of a difference.

Dolton, president of the environmental group Amigos de Bolsa Chica, says even when automated sorting begins in Huntington Beach, he will keep hand-sorting newspapers and redeeming bottles and cans, a habit he developed 12 years ago when his son was a Boy Scout.

Still, he says, the new system will recover materials he doesn’t now recycle, such as dirty glassware and junk mail, and he is glad the city will finally salvage goods from neighbors who don’t bother to sort.

“I’ll be really interested to see how the city does with its program,” Dolton said. “All the cities have to do something soon. Fifty percent (by the year 2000) is a tremendous amount of trash to recover.”

Correspondent Shelby Grad contributed to this story.

* TRASH FOR SALE: Getting people to recycle has become the easy part. Finding markets for the materials is not. A1