THE GOODS : It’s Time to Trash Curbside Looting

Curbside recycling came to my street in March. Bright yellow bins, each stamped with the official seal of Los Angeles, dotted the lawns on my Westside block one morning like so many early daffodils.

Little did I realize that those containers would hold not only glass, aluminum and plastic, but the tensions and contradictions of the city as well.

Cities make money by selling newsprint and grass clippings, glass and soda cans. Los Angeles also markets TopGro, a garden fertilizer made of retrieved “green waste” and treated bio-solids from the Hyperion sewage plant.

Economic incentive aside, state law mandates that by this year each city reduce the 1990 volume of its landfill contributions by 25%.

David Mays, spokesman for the Recycling and Waste Reduction Program of the Sanitation Bureau, says Los Angeles has reduced its solid waste by 30% since 1990. Conscientious curbside recyclers deserve a good measure of the credit.

My neighborhood, east of Santa Monica Airport, was among the last to get curbside pickup. That first week, my cache of cans, glass and plastic filled the bin to the brim. Newspapers filled two grocery bags. I surveyed my loot and that of my neighbors Tuesday night. A good haul. The city driver will be pleased, I thought.

But at 6:15 Wednesday morning, when I went outside for my newspaper, I found the neighborhood clean. All the aluminum cans--gone. Every bag of newspapers--gone. All the green and brown glass, tin cans, plastic containers-- all silently scavenged during the night. Only a few glass jars with no redemption value remained in my bin.

In the weeks since, I have likened my reaction on discovering the theft of my newspapers and cans to the way I felt when we returned from vacation to find our home burglarized and our car stolen.

It is melodramatic to compare the scavenging of cans and newspapers with grand theft auto and residential burglary. But the result is the same frustration, the same creepy realization that people are cruising my street at night probing for vulnerabilities.

I began to keep my bin and my newspapers inside until Wednesday morning. One week, I opened the front door at 5:30 a.m. to see a series of pickups, each loaded with newspapers. I waited until 7:30 to take mine out. Half an hour later, my newspapers were gone. A blue van was halfway down my street. Two men were busy heaving someone else’s bags of newsprint into the back.

I cruised the area for that van or any of the others swarming over the neighborhood and found the blue van in an alley two streets away. I followed it to the edge of our tract, noted the license plate and reported it to my councilman’s field office. An L.A. Police Department officer promptly called me and took a report over the phone. It turned out some of my neighbors had made similar reports.

I knew I was angry but I wondered if I was also crazy. I’m acting like the marshal of Dodge City, I realized, chasing down people who are, after all, taking garbage.

That’s where the complexity comes in. The city makes it easy for us to be good citizens. Just by collecting cans and newspapers we can do our bit for the environment, the city treasury and bolster a flagging sense of community spirit. But in practice, the more cans and bottles I set aside, the easier I make life for the legions of scavengers.

Stealing from these city bins is prohibited by Section 66.28 of the Municipal Code and violations are punishable by six months in jail and/or a $500 fine. Nonetheless, Mays of the Sanitation Bureau acknowledges that scavenging, long a persistent problem, has become particularly acute. The skyrocketing price of newsprint is one factor--up from $10 a ton last year to $100 a ton.

So Mays and his colleagues pine over the city revenue lost. More than $1 million a year comes back to the treasury from recyclables, but the city is losing tens of thousands of dollars just from the newsprint that’s being ripped off.

They also fret about a loss of this city’s fragile public spirit. Why bother to separate the good stuff from the rest of the garbage if we’re just making life easier for some freeloader? That frustration has already discouraged some residents in the West Valley and South-Central, where curbside pickup has been in place longer, to give up on recycling. Result: More trash into the landfill, less revenue for the city.

For the solitary men and women I’ve seen picking through my trash barrels, my aluminum cans may get them enough change to eat. Turning aside while those folks comb my garbage becomes an act of charity.

But what about the organized crews? The three or four men briskly walking alongside a truck at night, silently pitching bags of newsprint aboard? Should I look the other way when they come?

And what’s prudent? Mays says some trash truck drivers who have confronted organized scavengers found themselves looking down the barrel of a gun.

I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. But I am dismayed and, apparently, I’m not alone. Councilwoman Laura Chick, whose district in the western San Fernando Valley has been particularly plagued by scavenging, is mounting a counterattack.

Working with the police, the city attorney, the Sanitation Bureau and neighborhood associations, she has launched a pilot program in the West Valley to reduce pilfering by the larger operators through stepped-up surveillance and citation.

I suppose this makes sense. After two months, Chick’s office says that scavenging is down in her district (but not in mine), and that the volume of recyclables picked up by the city trucks is way up. But it also makes me wonder: Is Chick’s program the ultimate manifestation of life in Los Angeles in the ‘90s? Community policing for our garbage?