Here, It’s Clear That Some Things Go Around Twice in Life
In a grungy part of Sun Valley flanked by garbage dumps and auto wrecking yards is a place where environmentalism gets down and dirty.
This is where recyclables go after disappearing from the curb. Mountains of the stuff--about 80 truckloads daily--wind up here at Sun Valley Paper Stock Inc. The vast cordillera is winnowed into hillocks of paper, metal, plastic and glass, then bundled and shipped to manufacturers for a return trip through the economy.
In the argot of recycling, Sun Valley Paper is an “MRF”--pronounced like the Irish name but actually one of several materials recovery facilities in Los Angeles. MRFs buy and resell recyclables, linking curbside programs with anemic markets that, in theory, will absorb their wares.
Whatever you call them, MRFs are scrap yards--part of “the world’s second-oldest profession,” quipped Sun Valley Paper President Bob Fagan. While scrap dealers traditionally had all the cachet of slaughterhouse workers, they have been reborn as way-cool recyclers and friends of the Earth. Vigilant NIMBYs still fight to keep them in someone else’s back yard. But circumstances have burnished their image, as millions embrace the recycling imperative as virtuous and wise.
It’s a trip back to the future, or more precisely ahead to the past--when every decent-size town had a bottling plant and convenience was but one consideration in product packaging and design.
In fact, curbside recycling--which has reached nearly 500,000 Los Angeles households, including most of the San Fernando Valley--is an elaborate throwback to yesteryear.
Los Angeles residents used to separate metal cans for pickup by a private salvage firm, reducing waste and helping finance city rubbish services. But Mayor Sam Yorty decried trash separation as “coercion against the housewives of this city,” and it ended after his election in 1961.
Since then, recycling has gone global. Sun Valley Paper ships some materials across town and others across the sea, for instance, newspapers to Indonesia and soda bottles to India and China.
“Ocean freight is kind of fun,” said Fagan. “I did trucks for years. Now I get to play with boats.”
But when materials cross eight time zones to find a useful second life, supply and demand are badly out of sync. Curbside pickup is harvesting a bumper crop of recyclables, but industrial retooling to use them in place of virgin materials has not kept pace.
Instead of creating jobs and reprocessing industries at home, recycling is stoking the vibrant economies of Asia, which also means that cities aren’t getting the income they should from their recycling efforts.
“The good news is, markets are increasing,” said Joan Edwards, director of Los Angeles’ integrated solid-waste management program. “The bad news is, not fast enough. . . . We keep collecting just ahead of the trend.”
Sun Valley Paper pays the city about $10 for each ton of mixed recyclables and would pay more except that certain materials cost more to sort and ship than the resale price.
Still, public enthusiasm and new curbs on landfill dumping have spurred striking innovations. Consider this the next time you grope for a dropped quarter, because the fabric on the underside of the couch may be made of recycled soda bottles.
In fact, fabrics made from old PET (polyethylene terephthalate) bottles are being turned into products from carpeting to apparel. In a nice bit of symmetry, they’re even used in protective liners beneath garbage dumps, including the Lopez Canyon Landfill in Lake View Terrace.
Patagonia, the Ventura-based outdoor-clothing firm, recently began using fabric spun from recycled PET in its popular outerwear. And Deja Shoe in Oregon is using a variety of recycled materials--from pop bottles and tire rubber to milk jugs and polystyrene cups--in its sneakers, sandals and walking shoes.
“We are not recycling as a society unless we buy recycled,” said Deja Vice President Bob Farentinos. “What sense does it make to keep it out of the landfill if you have to store it in some warehouse forever?”
Closer to home, Cyclean Inc. of Pacoima is converting about 200,000 tons of old asphalt annually from landfill fodder into new paving material.
For its part, the city will soon be marketing an organic compost, Topgro, in hopes of returning shrubbery and grass to the yards whence they came. The product will be a blend of city sewage-plant sludge and curbside collections of yard trimmings, the largest category of residential trash.
“The highest form of recycling is to take a material that is now looked at as a waste and reuse it back where it is created,” said city project engineer Reva Fabrikant, whose phone answering machine features compost jokes (punch line: “A rind is a terrible thing to waste”).
President Clinton’s recent order that federal agencies, which annually use 300,000 tons of paper, buy stock with at least 20% recycled content by next year and 30% by 1998, has been hailed as a milestone in market creation. Major corporations have also announced commitments to buy recycled goods, hoping their purchasing power will spur investment in industrial retooling.
While they are hoping, trucks replenish the pile at Sun Valley Paper. About 15 men stand before a continuously moving conveyor belt, hand separating aluminum cans from steel ones, milk from soda bottles, green glass from brown and clear.
The noise is extreme, a cacophony of breaking glass and milk jugs exploding under forklift tires.
“It’s jammin’,” Fagan said. “Every day is Earth Day around here.”
