City Battles Scavengers of Recyclables

The call came in on a two-way radio from a member of a Neighborhood Watch group on patrol in Reseda. An aging, blue van with tinted windows was spotted cruising slowly along Victory Boulevard, stopping a few times on each block.

When police stopped the van to question the two men and young boy inside, they found that contraband that the team of citizen volunteers and police officers had been looking for: old newspapers and receipts from the sale of recyclables.

“I didn’t know it was illegal to take the newspapers,” explained the driver, Miguel Flores, with a shrug.

But it is, and police and residents from the San Fernando Valley to New York City are so fed up with the so-called scavengers who pilfer municipal recycling bins that they are escalating their war on this new breed of urban criminal.

Los Angeles and other cities that rely on recycling programs for revenue have begun to impose tough penalties on scavengers, including fines and even jail time. They impound cars, set up citizen hot lines and deploy special police patrols such as the pilot program that spotted Flores.

The anti-scavenging patrol united a Neighborhood Watch group from the West Valley, known as We Are The Community Helpers, or WATCH, with police working overtime on the pilot program.

In addition to these efforts, city officials are considering spending $600,000 in grants and recycling revenues to expand the anti-scavenging police patrols throughout Los Angeles and distributing recycling bins that can be locked.

As for Flores and his crew, police could only warn them because they did not catch them in the act. But they told Flores that if he is caught, he could face a $500 fine and six months in jail. However, they impounded the van because none of the occupants had a driver’s license.

According to the receipts in Flores’ van, he had earned at least $100 from a previous load he had sold to a North Hollywood recycling firm.

“They didn’t collect enough to get the van out of hock,” quipped LAPD Officer Victor Monroe as he looked over the stacks in the van.

Police across the nation are running across similar scenes. On the streets of Sacramento, Boston, Houston, and Newark, N.J., the hottest new stock-in-trade among the shady set is newsprint.

In the 1980s, most municipalities had to pay waste-disposal companies to haul away newspapers and other materials. By the early summer of ‘95, the price had skyrocketed to $210 a ton, said Steve Apotheker, technical editor for Resource Recycling, a monthly publication in Portland, Ore. The price has since dropped to about $100 a ton, he said.

The higher prices for newsprint are due in part to greater worldwide demand, state and federal initiatives to use more recycled paper and the wood products industry’s increasing use of old newsprint to make new paper products.

In the past, recyclables were pilfered by transients looking for a few extra bucks. But with the rise of newsprint costs, scavenging has become a more organized venture run by people who work three or four days a week.

Scavengers across the country have been caught brazenly hauling away newspapers and other recyclables in vans, flatbed trucks, shopping carts and, on at least one occasion, U-Haul trucks. In Rhode Island, recycling officials recently caught an entire family--mother, dad and kids--carting away recyclables in the family station wagon.

Last month, police in Sun Valley cited a man who said he earned up to $1,200 a week by selling newspapers he collected from recycling bins. The city attorney declined to file charges after the man proved that he had permission from some residents to take their recyclables.

During the recent patrol, police and Neighborhood Watch members stopped three men in a brown pickup in a dark alley in West Hills. Stacks of newspaper and scrap metal filled the bed of the one-ton truck, weighting it down so that the back bumper was about a foot off the ground.

The driver, Isador Ruiz, said he and his friends had been collecting recyclables for nine hours and had pulled into the alley, with police on his tail, to rest. He also claimed he didn’t know scavenging was illegal.

“Ask him if he thinks I’m stupid,” Officer William Rose responded sarcastically. The driver was warned about taking recyclables and cited for driving without a registration and missing a license plate light.

Councilwoman Laura Chick, who represents parts of the West Valley, said the city is desperately trying to crack down on the scavengers to keep its recycling program viable.

“Many people whose recyclables were stolen vowed to stop participating in the program unless something was done,” she said.

The city hot line allows residents to report the license plate of a vehicle used to pilfer recyclables. The city then sends a letter warning the registered owner about the penalties of the crime. Officials said the hot line records only 25 messages at a time and is filled repeatedly each day. Plans are in the works to expand the line’s capacity.

Last week, Councilman Mike Feuer asked that sanitation officials consider using new residential recycling bins that can be locked to keep thieves out.

“Police enforcement is helping, but it’s not sufficient,” said Feuer, whose office is routinely inundated with complaints about scavengers raiding recycling bins.

Other cities are also trying new tactics to reduce the pilfering:

* Santa Monica has redesigned more than 200 recycling receptacles to make it harder for people to pull material out of the containers.

* Long Beach has employed plainclothes police in residential neighborhoods to issue misdemeanor citations to recycling scavengers.

* In Newark, city officials are trying to crack down on companies that knowingly buy recyclables stolen from curbside bins.

* The New York City Sanitation Department assigned teams of officers from its police squad to patrol exclusively for newspaper thefts.

Some frustrated residents have even taken the battle into their own hands.

One city block in Berkeley became scavenger-free after residents began taking their photos and waiting until morning to put recycling bins out.

In Sun City, Ariz., residents of that retirement community put locks on recycling bins and formed a volunteer posse to patrol the street.

Residents in a Studio City neighborhood became so frustrated with scavengers that they have given up on the city’s recycling program and are selling their newspapers to a recycling firm to help pay for an annual block party.

“We feel scavengers are coming to our neighborhood and may be casing homes and looking for other things,” said Art Howard, a member of the Studio City Residents Assn.

The lengths some cities and residents are going to to protect their recyclables is not surprising, considering how much money many cities are losing.

According to Resource Recycling, about 7.6 million tons of newspapers were recycled in the United States last year, roughly two-thirds of them through municipal collection. Scavenging costs municipal programs across the country about $100 million a year, according to the publication.

In March, 1994, the city of Los Angeles collected more than 4,500 tons of newspapers from the 720,000 residents participating in its program. That number had dropped to just over 1,500 tons in August, 1995. City recycling officials attribute the drop to scavenging.

They estimate that they are losing about $2 million annually, or half of what the recycling program is expected to raise each year from sale of the materials.

In San Diego, scavengers annually take about $250,000 from the curbside recycling program, officials there said. “It’s getting worse over the past two years as the price of recycling commodities are rising,” said John Turner, the city’s recycling coordinator. San Diego occasionally deploys police patrols in neighborhoods when complaints about scavenging increase.

David Hare, environmental services and operations manager for West Hollywood, said a newspaper deliverer for The Times complained to him about a man in a truck who once followed him as he filled newspaper racks there. The man paid for one copy at each rack but took all the newspapers.

Although this was only one example of brazen tactics among scavengers, Hare said he could not estimate how much has been lost.

“It’s like trying to estimate the size of the fish that got away.”

Times correspondent Kay Hwangbo contributed to this story.