Rejection of Plastic Trash Gives Woman a Clear Mission

There Jeanie Cunningham goes again, talkin’ trash.

“No more yogurt. No more soft-spread margarine,” she says. “Those wonderful Trader Joe’s chicken salads--I’m giving those up too.”

Cunningham can’t contain her unhappiness over the containers in her refrigerator that suddenly are making her life miserable. They are those convenient plastic tubs and food cups that have been banned from her recycling bin.

For years the Los Angeles singer-songwriter meticulously culled the little containers from her garbage, carefully washed them and put them out by the curb in her yellow recycling basket for pickup.

But that ritual came to a sudden halt last month when sanitation officials delivered the city’s large new blue recycling barrels to Cunningham’s Mt. Washington neighborhood. Along with the barrels was a list of do’s and don’ts.

Don’t try recycling plastic take-out containers or food tubs in your new blue barrel, city officials warned. We don’t want them.

That was news to Cunningham, particularly because the tubs and cups often carry the same familiar triangle recycling code that is stamped on the city’s accepted plastics. And especially because the city has taken those containers from her curb in the past.

But it turns out that for years the city carted them off to the trash heap, not to the recycler.

The reason: The tubs and take-out containers cannot be mixed with other old plastic recyclables without contaminating the new plastic that recyclers manufacture from kitchen castaways.

Although some neighborhoods’ trash collectors made a habit of leaving the forbidden plastics behind, Mt. Washington’s helpful refuse collectors quietly tossed the forbidden containers into the trash as a favor to homeowners.

They can’t do that with the deep, 90-gallon blue barrels that are emptied into trash trucks by automated arms, though.

Word that the containers were never recycled to begin with has angered Cunningham, whose work includes TV advertising and corporate jingles.

On Monday she plans to travel to Sacramento to help pressure legislators into tightening recycling laws so that all plastics get recycled.

In the meantime, she has sworn off buying foods that come in the unwanted containers.

“All these years I’ve stood over the sink waiting for hot water to come out so I can wash the margarine tubs and yogurt containers out so they would be clean for the recycler,” Cunningham said. “And all these years they’ve ended up in the landfill anyway.”

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Cunningham has reserved a 1 1/2-minute speaking slot before the Assembly Natural Resources Committee, which on Monday begins studying Assembly bill 2555. The proposed measure would tighten rules on the landfill disposal of plastic packaging by requiring increasingly larger percentages of recycling in California through 2010.

The bill, by Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley), would give manufacturers an incentive to reuse plastics that now have little or no recyclable market, according to the ecology group Californians Against Waste.

“Try as curbside programs might, they’re finding insufficient markets for plastic,” said Mark Murray, executive director of the group.

“Basically, the city of Los Angeles is making an economic decision by not trying to recycle those items. We don’t dispute the decision the city has made.”

Mark Miodovski, marketing manager for Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation, said he is hopeful the Legislature can help create more demand for reused plastic. But for now, no recycler is interested in margarine tubs, yogurt containers and the like.

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That’s because the injection-molding process used to make the tubs changes the molecular structure of high-density polyethylene plastic so it cannot be mixed with polyethylene terephthalate that is made into things like soda and shampoo bottles through a blow-molding process.

The blow-molded bottles need to be recycle-coded differently from the injection-molded tubs so that consumers are not confused, Miodovski said. “It’s something we and environmental groups have been telling the plastics industry for a long time,” he said.

In the meantime, Los Angeles residents are being urged to toss margarine and yogurt containers in the garbage so money doesn’t have to be spent having the city’s recyclers do the trash separating, Miodovski said.

As for Cunningham, she is already putting her money where her mouth is.

She calculates she will spend more than $500 on airline tickets for herself, two friends and a bag of unwanted plastic containers to deliver today’s 90-second appeal.

“I’m leaving the non-recyclables up there,” she said. “If they find it offensive, they can take it up with the plastics industry.”