Keeping a Lid on the Trash Cans--and Trash Can’ts

Hundreds of times every working morning Tina de la Torre lifts up a lid and peeks into a trash can. In two weeks’ time she covers the whole length and breadth of Pasadena, stopping every 100 feet or so in her city-owned truck. With every stop she hops out and moves quickly on foot, crisscrossing from curb to curb, dodging traffic.

Every so often, the city’s “green-waste inspector” finds a problem.

“This is contamination,” De la Torre announces as she peers into trash on Elizabeth Street, just west of Lake Avenue. The can in question is full of grass, leaves, wet newspapers, empty sour cream containers and dog food cans crawling with ants. All this stuff has been thrown together in a can where the mixing of grass and household trash is verboten.

These special, black-lidded cans are perhaps a glimpse at the future of rubbish collection in a region where dumps are filling rapidly, and where cities are under heavy pressure from the state Legislature to reduce the flow of solid waste.

In Pasadena, the city provides the trash cans, but residents get a choice: For a basic bimonthly fee they can use green-lidded cans and fill them with just about any type of trash, or they can pay slightly less and use black-lidded cans for lawn clippings only.

A single green-lidded container costs $21 or $32 every two months, depending on the size. Those who use a yard-waste can as their second trash container save almost $10 on every trash bill compared with the cost of two regular trash cans. Most people choose to use two containers.

De la Torre is, in effect, the trash can police force, writing out green, ticket-like notices to those who mix where they shouldn’t. Last month alone she tagged more than 200 cans. Although the notices carry no fines, third-time violators can lose their black-lid privileges, meaning higher bimonthly trash bills. It is a system that seems to work, and which residents tend to support, notwithstanding the inevitable dissenters.

“It’s a pain in the neck,” said one recent violator, a resident of Greenwood Avenue, who declined to be identified.

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About 28,000 homes in Pasadena produce a total of 250 tons of trash per day on average, said Curtis Carraway, supervisor of the sanitation crews that collect it all.

For years, all that rubbish has been trucked to Los Angeles County’s Scholl Canyon landfill in Glendale, a 440-acre gully now brimming with 22 million tons of debris. Three years ago it was estimated that Scholl Canyon (capacity: 33 million tons) would fill up and be closed by 2012, further hampering the mammoth task of disposing of the region’s garbage, according to Foster Winter, a project engineer for the County Sanitation Districts.

But there is good news: Various recycling and waste reduction measures, including Pasadena’s grass separation program, have extended the life expectancy of the landfill, Winter said. Latest estimates say Scholl Canyon will remain open until 2018. After that, the trash will have to go elsewhere, maybe to other landfills near Los Angeles, or to distant sites reached by rail, or to processing plants now on the drawing boards.

Pasadena’s grass and household trash still go to the same place, but the grass no longer gets dumped with the milk bottles and egg cartons, said Bill George, recycling coordinator for the sanitation districts. Instead, the yard waste is used to help cover the landfill, a task previously accomplished with dirt.

More cities are following Pasadena’s example, mainly because of a 1989 state law ordering cities to cut their “waste stream” by 25% by the end of this year. With that deadline just two months away, a good number of cities have complied, but many others are fretting over the possibility of fines that could reach $10,000 a day, George said.

The strict trash rules in Pasadena forbid anyone to put dirt, tree stumps, animal waste, plastic bags or long branches into one of the yard-clipping cans. When De la Torre marks a can with one of her green notices (printed on recycled paper), the can is not emptied that day. Sometimes she feels bad about it; in fact, now and then, rather than leave a tag, she removes a wayward carry-out carton or hot dog wrapper and puts it in the mixed-use can.

Getting one of the officious-sounding tags, filled with upper-case, bold-faced DO NOT ‘s, is always a little jolt for residents, who feel the mild sting of a bureaucratic slap.

“They’re real strict,” said Tim Clausen, 29, whose cans have been nailed twice for containing dirt. “You pull up weeds and there’s a little too much dirt on the roots--which I think carries it a little too far.”

But Clausen staunchly supports the program; he doesn’t mind spending an extra five minutes a week, if even that, keeping the lawn trash separate and using blue boxes that the city also makes available to separate glass, plastic bottles and newspapers.

“It’s environmentally correct,” he said.