Studios See a Way Out of Waste Forest : Environment: Proposal would send discarded lumber from production sets to a job-training program instead of to landfills.

Some Hollywood studios want to turn sitcom sets into sofas.

The major studios in Los Angeles produce more than 41,000 tons of solid waste--40% of it wood--each year. Most of the wood, used primarily to build studio production sets, is sent to landfills after the sets are disassembled.

Now a group of entertainment industry environmentalists is proposing that the studios recycle the material to help establish a job-training program in wood crafts at a facility to be built in South-Central Los Angeles.

Under the proposal, disadvantaged youths would be taught how to build furniture and toys, or to recycle it into new construction materials. The wood could also be donated to groups that build low-cost housing.

“I knew about all this wood that was just tossed into dumpsters, or burned up as fuel,” said David Saltman, a television producer and project director of Earth Service Inc., an environmental consulting firm. Saltman was hired by a group of studios to study how such an idea would work.

He will present his plan today to the urban planning task force of Rebuild L.A., the Peter Ueberroth-led organization formed after last year’s riots. The study for the Trees of Life Wood Recycling Project is being funded by the Arco Foundation, with matching grants from 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros. and MCA.

Much of the now-discarded material is plywood made from Lauan, or Philippine mahogany, a tropical hardwood. Lauan is the cheapest available wood that meets studio requirements for light, easily worked material.

In an agreement with the city of Los Angeles, the studios have agreed to voluntarily meet state requirements for cities to reduce their trash output 25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000.

“We have also looked at a variety of ways to decrease our use of wood in set production,” said April A. Smith, co-founder of E-Squared, an environmental consulting firm working for Sony Pictures. But reusable metal scaffolding, for example, has only limited applications for set builders, Smith said.

“The Trees of Life program . . . brings all the studios together to help solve one of their largest environmental problems,” Smith said.

According to Steven MacDonald, a management analyst in the Integrated Solid Waste Management Office of the Los Angeles City Board of Public Works, 421,000 tons of solid waste were produced within the city limits in 1990. Most of the wood in that trash is not as high quality as what the studios would be turning over, MacDonald said, because much of the studio wood has been used indoors.

“They are a real good source of quality material,” he said.