WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : PITCHING IN FOR THE PLANET : RECYCLING: Overburdened Landfills and a State Mandate to Reduce Trash Could Cause More Westside Residents to Change Their Ways

Wait! Don’t toss that bottle in the trash. Curbside recycling is about to hit most of the Westside, so you’ll soon have a nice yellow recycling bin to stow it in instead. You will, really.

It’s only a matter of weeks. OK, months, or maybe a year--it all depends on where you live. But the city of Los Angeles is finally bringing the broad, garbage-rich swath of territory west of La Brea Avenue into its recycling operation.

For residents of some areas this will be nothing new, since they have had curbside recycling for years. So have people in Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Culver City and Malibu.

But for the residents of 125,000 Los Angeles homes who are about to be included in the city’s newly expanded recycling district, that environmentally responsible feeling is finally at hand.

“I’m glad to hear it because a lot of people tend not to bother,” said Jim Witoszynski, a West Los Angeles resident who takes his recyclables to a drop-off station in Santa Monica once or twice a week. “So if they just have to put it in front of their house, then it’s easy.”

Although officials of Los Angeles and other Westside municipalities say they expect to meet or surpass a state-mandated goal of a 25% cut in the flow of solid waste by next year, the bad news is that another 25% in garbage savings will have to be achieved by the year 2000.

“Getting to 50% is the hard part,” said Joan Edwards, director of the Integrated Solid Waste Management Office, which coordinates Los Angeles’ recycling programs. The city of Los Angeles has already surpassed the 25% mark, she said.

There is only so much that individuals can do. Only about 15% of the trash from an average household can be recycled, experts say.

Any surplus of recyclables goes straight into a hole in the ground, and with landfills running out of room, it is unclear how much longer that will remain an option.

Lopez Canyon, the landfill that serves the city of Los Angeles, is scheduled to close in 1996, although sanitation officials are trying to keep it open for another three years despite the opposition of residents in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

Officials said extending its life to the year 2000 would save the city $72 million over the cost of hauling the trash elsewhere.

“People may be putting out less trash per person, but there are more people,” said Bill George, recycling coordinator for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. “We don’t see this problem going away.”

So any further improvement will have to come from mass changes of behavior summed up in the first two words of the state Integrated Waste Management Board’s “Three R’s” slogan: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” In short, a farewell to the throwaway society.

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Change will not come easily.

Despite the popularity of recycling and the downturn in the Southern California economy, “we’re still getting a lot of trash because we are still pretty much a disposable society,” said Kimberly Collins, project manager for Malibu’s Public Works Department.

Research has found that Americans create more waste than any other nation, averaging half a ton per person per year--3.5 pounds per day. Californians are said to be generating more than twice as much as the average.

“The real secret is the next generation,” said Joan Satt, waste-reduction coordinator for Culver City. She cited the case of a man who called to ask about recycling after his 4-year-old daughter came home from preschool talking about it.

“Just as parents stopped smoking when their children pressured them into it because they learned in school that tobacco kills, so, too, will the children lead us into less wasteful ways,” she said.

Until those tykes grow up, however, it will be up to the rest of us to find a way to come to terms with the problems of waste in a land of abundance.

Across the Westside, cities have found their own paths, and now Los Angeles is about to take major strides to step up its recycling program after a two-year delay caused by problems with staffing, equipment and finding a site for a sorting station, known in the trade as a Materials Recovery Facility, or MRF.

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For now, most of the area’s recyclables will go to a plant in an industrial zone near Downtown and the rest will go to a facility in the West Valley. That led Valley Councilwoman Laura Chick to voice concerns earlier this year about air pollution from 150 truckloads a week of Westside waste.

In response, officials said that they are negotiating with several operators to find one that would run a Westside MRF to be located in an industrial area near Robertson and Venice boulevards in Palms. Officials hope the plant will be operating by next year.

When the latest expansion of curbside recycling is completed sometime next summer, the service will be available to 720,000 residences and businesses citywide.

In Los Angeles, paper accounts for the biggest share--about 30%--of the waste stream,followed by yard scraps at 13%, food waste 11%, plastics 7%, and other categories.

Most apartment buildings are served by private trash haulers, so they will not be part of the program; those served by the city’s garbage trucks will be included.

As the residential program is expanded, each household will be issued a yellow 14-gallon bin for recycling everything but paper--metal and aluminum cans, glass bottles and jars and plastic bottles. For now, no milk cartons and no tubs such as those used for cottage cheese and margarine will be collected because they are impractical to recycle.

Residents will be asked to put discards such as magazines, newspapers, corrugated cardboard or paper bags next to the yellow bins.

“It happens on the same day as the regular trash collection, so there’s nothing you have to remember except to put it out,” said Gyl Elliott, public information director for the city Bureau of Sanitation.

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Sanitation officials said they have received hundreds of calls from residents concerned about scavengers. Last Friday, the Board of Public Works approved a proposal to form a three-member team to crack down on organized rings that routinely raid the yellow bins. The proposal now goes before the City Council.

A law makes scavenging a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine or six months in jail, but authorities said they didn’t know if anyone had ever been prosecuted under it.

It is not so much the loss of recyclables that bothers city officials as the fear that residents will not bother with recycling if they see the proceeds going into private hands.

There will be 60-gallon green containers for garden waste, which is composted, mixed with sewer sludge and sold as fertilizer.

The third container will be a 60-gallon black container whose contents go to the dump; it holds the equivalent of three or four regular trash cans--probably too much for many households.

“They determined in 1988 that that was the average size needed, but what they didn’t realize was how much we’d be recycling by now,” Elliott said.

The trash flow from the West Valley, for example, is already down 40% from what it was in 1990, she said.

“We challenge the West Los Angeles area to go even higher,” Elliott said. “It’s reasonable because people have been waiting for it for years, and the only reason we didn’t go there was because there was no place to take the material.”

Although the initial solid-waste reduction was measured at no more than 3% when the program began elsewhere in the city five years ago, Elliott said the inclusion of garden waste has made a big difference, representing almost a third of what the average person puts out a week.

She said chronic breakdowns of hydraulic equipment on automatic-loading trucks have been resolved since 1992, when city officials acknowledged that unforeseen problems had blocked expansion of the program. It was initially to have been in place citywide by September, 1992.

A hiring freeze was also relaxed, allowing for the employment of new truck drivers.

The efforts by Los Angeles and other local municipalities are part of a statewide drive that has reduced the solid waste stream by 20% since 1990, according to estimates by the California Integrated Waste Management Board. The latest projection shows the goal of a 25% cutback will be attained by the end of next year.

There are now 480 communities in the state with curbside recycling programs, almost twice as many as in 1990, and each one has come up with its own way of responding to the challenge of drastically reducing the flow of garbage.

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In Culver City, residents buy special blue bags for up to $2.25 at the grocery store to hold their recyclables before sending them off with the rest of the garbage for sorting at a transfer station.

There, crews of young people from the Exceptional Children’s Foundation fish the bags out of the rest of the trash and pile them up for removal to a commercial recycling plant for sorting and resale.

With an estimated 43% of households taking advantage of the program, about 23% of Culver City’s trash goes to the recycling plant, a figure that officials hope to boost in coming months through public education and a restructuring of fees to make it more economical for businesses to sort out their recyclable waste.

The city gets a monthly check from the recycling plant, but it does not come close to paying for the cost of the collection program, which is underwritten by an $18.59 monthly charge to homeowners.

“Very few recycling programs make money,” noted Joseph Delaney, solid-waste superintendent for Beverly Hills. “Some can break even when we include the money saved by not having to send waste to landfills--the cost of disposing a ton of waste in a landfill is triple what it was 10 years ago.”

Beverly Hills residents share recycling bins distributed in the city’s numerous alleys; homes without alleys are issued blue bags for recycling.

Having cut its garbage flow by about 15%, the city is hoping to reach next year’s goal of 25% by diverting garden waste from the landfill for use as mulch or compost, and by expanding the recycling program to include businesses.

West Hollywood this year granted an exclusive franchise to a company that took the place of several small trash haulers and promised to pay any state-imposed fines if the goals for 1995 and 2000 are not met.

The program is underwritten by fees paid directly by property owners to the recycling and hauling firm, which pays a new 10% franchise fee to the city.

“We pulled some cash from the trash,” said David M. Hare, environmental services and operations manager for the city. Under the old system, he said, “we found that a lot of people were being overcharged for trash despite the competition.”

In Santa Monica, bins are issued to single-family homes and other small buildings, while apartment dwellers are encouraged to drop off their recyclables in bigger containers at about 100 locations throughout the city.

The city also recycles asphalt and old toilets, distributes home composting bins to residents at low cost and picks up mixed waste paper: catalogues, magazines, phone books, office paper, junk mail, cereal boxes and milk cartons.

“We structure it such that the city runs the collection program and it’s funded out of solid-waste payments on the refuse-collection bill every two months,” said Jon Root, waste-reduction coordinator.

“I’ve never seen a residential program that’s been able to pay its way strictly on the value of the recyclables, Root said.”

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In Malibu, the big problem is green waste, said Collins, project manager for the new city’s public works department.

A residential recycling program began last year and a commercial program was initiated this summer, “but with Malibu we have more gardeners than anything else, so we need a place for them to take the stuff,” she said.

Despite the progress toward recycling goals, things are not entirely rosy.

There are only nine major landfills serving Los Angeles County, down from 13 a decade ago, and officials see no drop in demand for space in the dumps.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty here,” said Don S. Nellor, head of solid-waste planning for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. “A large metropolitan area like Los Angeles County is more than likely always going to find itself on the verge of a crisis when it comes to providing adequate disposal capacity.”

How They’re Doing

Although details of the program vary from city to city, Westside residents who are not already able to take advantage of curbside recycling for cans, bottles, paper and garden waste should be able to do so by this time next year. Municipalities have to meet a goal of reducing all of their solid waste by one-quarter by 1995. They must reduce it another 25% by 2000.

* LOS ANGELES exceeded its goal of a 25% reduction in solid waste flow, compared to 1990 levels, officials say; a survey is being contemplated for next year to see if the percentage will have reached the mid-30s as planned.

* SANTA MONICA has reduced the amount of garbage sent to landfills by 15% to 17% overall; the reduction in the residential sector has been measured at 27%.

* CULVER CITY’s garbage-reduction rate is estimated at 23%.

* WEST HOLLYWOOD has reduced its flow by 18%; once businesses are brought into the program, the figure is expected to rise to 35%.

* MALIBU has cut its flow by 17%.

* BEVERLY HILLS is at 14% to 15%; an increase is expected once a plan to include businesses is approved.