L.A. to Bring Recycling Operation to the Westside : Environment: Overburdened landfills and state mandate to reduce trash will likely cause more 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 residents will soon have a nice yellow recycling bin to stow it in instead. They 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.

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.

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.

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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 too expensive 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.

Sanitation officials said they have received hundreds of calls from residents concerned about scavengers. Earlier this month, 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.

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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.

Efforts by Los Angeles and other local municipalities are part of a statewide drive that has reduced solid waste by 20% since 1990.