Ventura May Collect ‘Green Waste’ : Recycling: A proposal to be considered by council Monday would help the city meet a state mandate by sending less material to landfills.

Ventura households would get a third waste can for yard clippings and pay an average of $2.18 more per month for trash pickup under a proposal approved Tuesday by a City Council committee.

The new “green-waste” recycling program, to be considered by the full council on Monday, would go into effect Oct. 10 and would help the city meet a state requirement to reduce landfill waste.

About 30% of the city’s waste is yard clippings, said Councilman Steve Bennett, chairman of the three-member Environmental Committee.

The yard clippings would be picked up every other week, alternating with recyclable waste that is now collected each week, but would then be rounded up only twice a month.

The city’s trash hauler, E.J. Harrison and Sons Inc., would transport the yard clippings to Cal-Wood Recycling/Agromin in Camarillo. Once there, the waste would be recycled into a material applied to freeway embankments to prevent the growth of weeds. The material eventually decomposes to soil, Bennett said. He said the clippings are also recycled into some other materials.

Bennett predicted the new recycling program would bring a dramatic decrease in the amount of city waste sent to Ventura County landfills. The decrease, he said, would help bolster efforts to comply with a state law requiring that landfill waste be reduced by 25% by 1995 and by 50% by 2000.

Ojai has already implemented a program to recycle yard clippings, and several other cities around the county are planning to start similar programs soon, Bennett said.

Ventura’s proposal includes some restructuring of recycling rates that would also increase fees for commercial businesses that recycle, said Assistant City Manager Steve Chase, the city’s environmental coordinator.

Chase said the restructuring is being recommended because residents were paying more than their share in processing fees for recycling, while commercial businesses were paying less than what it costs to recycle their garbage.

“In the past we’ve been having (residents) sort of subsidize commercial,” said committee member Councilman Greg Carson. “Now we’re going to have everybody pay their own way.”

Despite the average increase per household of $2.18 under the proposal, Chase said about 25% of residents would see a decrease in their monthly trash collection fees.

Because yard clippings that used to be stuffed in the green trash bin will now be put in a separate brown container, those residents will be able to use smaller trash collection bins that do not cost as much for trash pickup. Residents have a blue bin for other recyclables.

In another development Tuesday, the Environmental Committee voted to investigate whether to charge E.J. Harrison Inc. $76,000 that city officials said the company has failed to bill its industrial customers since Jan. 1.

The committee postponed a decision on whether the city should absorb the $76,000--driving trash pickup rates even higher--or the Harrison company should take the loss.

He said the Harrison company has “some new information that they have ways to offset the costs. But nobody knows what it is yet.”

Mitch Kahn, an attorney for Harrison, said his company had undercharged industrial customers for waste pickup since January because the company did not catch a provision in a city resolution ordering an increase in some industrial rates.

Still, he said E.J. Harrison Inc.’s accountant believes the city overestimated the amount of industrial waste the company had recycled in the last six months.

“We believe once we explain it, there won’t be any shortfall,” he said.