Residents to Protest Planned Recycling Plant

Several Pomona residents said they’ll reuse and recycle, but they refuse to accept a trash-sorting facility in their back yard.

Monday night the City Council is expected to review and consider a final environmental impact report for a proposed materials recovery facility in the Phillips Ranch area, and protesting residents said they plan to be there.

With the closure of the city’s landfill planned for next year, Pomona began discussing the proposed facility two years ago.

The plant would replace the landfill as a trash truck destination, but no garbage would be stored there. Instead, trash would be sorted, packed and shipped out to other facilities, potentially increasing the percentage of the trash that Pomona recycles from about 25% to the new state mandate of 50%, City Manager Severo Esquivel said.

“I think it would be positive for Pomona,” Esquivel said. “It would give us a clean facility in which we can handle our garbage. . . . It could generate 300 jobs.”

But some residents said all that the proposed 27-acre plant would generate is headaches.

“They want to be in operation 22 hours a day and sort six tons of trash a day,” said Leslie Charles Hedges, a retiree who lives less than two miles from the proposed site. “My wife and I were planning to live here for the rest of our lives, but now we’ll have to see.”