Journey to the Center of the MRF

It’s 10:30 a.m. on a Monday.

Quick: Where has your trash gone?

Don’t know? Not to worry. No one else knows either.

Urban trash has always posed a mystery. The crapola accumulates and then someone takes it away. Where exactly? Who knows.

But now the mystery has deepened. Here in Los Angeles, the Sanitation Bureau has been depositing new, blue bins in neighborhood after neighborhood.

These bins have changed the rules of trash. The idea is, you put recyclables in them. All recyclables. Once in possession of a blue bin, you will never again separate bottles and cans from newspapers, never again pile them neatly at the curb.

No. With a blue bin, you just dump the crapola willy-nilly into the container and wheel it to the street. Soda pop cans get mixed with newspapers, beer bottles snuggle up to corrugated cardboard, milk containers ooze onto magazines. Like a big salad it sits at the curb and awaits its fate.

One morning recently I was standing at the curb on trash pickup day, talking to a neighbor. We had our bins all lined up. And here came the truck. The big pincers reached down, lifted the blue bins with that jerky, Frankenstein-like movement and dumped them in the hopper. Then the truck roared off.

My neighbor stared at its retreating hulk.

“What,” she mused, “do they do with it?”

Exactly. For years we’ve been told it was necessary to separate our recyclables. Cans and bottles in one bin, newspapers--no magazines, please!--packaged and off to the side. Without separation, the recycling system could not function. It would grind to a halt, and soon we would drown in our mountains of stuff.

So powerful was the message that it acquired moral force. Separating recyclables amounted to an act of atonement. If we separated, we felt better about our consumptive sins.

As a cultural aside, Los Angeles’ sins are considerable in that regard. We first elected Sam Yorty to the mayor’s office as result of a campaign promise to demolish an early plan to separate trash. Yorty referred to the plan as “coercion against the housewives of the city,” and his message carried the day.

Think of it: all those years of Yorty because we didn’t want to put cans in a separate bin.

In any case, now come the blue bins making a mockery of separation. And posing their mystery.

Does their appearance mean that separation was a kind of hoax all these years, something not truly necessary? Or did something come along that altered forever the old rules of trash?

Or, to paraphrase my neighbor: What do they really do with it?

In pursuit of the answer last week, I found myself on a sizzling asphalt slab in the deep Valley where I waited for a man named Daniel Hackney. All around me were pastel hills of recyclables, some of them 15 feet high.

Hackney soon appeared. Once he was a college basketball star in Arizona. Now he works for the Sanitation Bureau, explaining the arcane world of L.A. trash to neighborhood groups, Japanese dignitaries and the likes of me.

“We get Asian tours all the time,” Hackney said. “They’re our biggest recycling customers. They want to copy our system so they won’t have to buy so much from us.”

Hackney had invited me to the slab because it’s the site of a MRF--pronounced “merf.” MRFs are Material Recycling Facilities and have only existed for a few years. This particular MRF, operated by Sun Valley Paper Stock Inc., actually handles the recyclables from my part of the city and, most likely, from my own blue bin.

As soon as I entered the MRF, I realized that the answer to my neighbor’s question was fairly simple. The city pays this place to do what we no longer do ourselves.

The MRF presents a scene out of the 19th century. Front loaders scoop mounds of recyclables from a hill and dump them onto a conveyor belt. Then the trash moves upward to a platform sitting inside a huge shed.

On the platform stand 22 men. They bend over the belt, furiously pulling at newspapers, cardboard and magazines. These items get flung into bins at the sides of the platform.

For this work, the men are paid a starting wage of $5.75 an hour. The belt moves at 186 feet per minute, making it a fast belt. So fast that the work, by necessity, is furious. So fast that some men develop motion sickness trying to keep up.

Once the paper products have been extracted, the remainder is scooped again and placed on another belt. A mechanical sorter separates glass from plastic and then more men throw individual bottles and cans into bins.

This particular MRF, one of several used by the city, sorts 200 tons of recyclables a day. That’s 10 tons per hour, 20 hours a day. Sometimes, when the volume is high, it operates around the clock.

For the unsorted product, the plant pays roughly $5 per ton. In the old days, sorted recyclables brought much higher prices, sometimes as much as $100 per ton.

So, in effect, the city is paying for the trash sorting. Why do that when once we did the job ourselves?

The answer, says Hackney, is simple: We didn’t do the job.

“I go to neighborhood meetings all the time and someone will always stand up and say, ‘I separated my trash every week and never got a can or bottle in the wrong place, so why have you gone to the blue bins?’

“I tell them, ‘Maybe you did, but many of your friends and neighbors didn’t.’ Under the old system, we were getting about 6% of the recyclables in the bins. The rest was going straight to the landfills.”

Six percent. It appears there’s more of the old Los Angeles attitude about trash than you might think.

Actually, as Hackney will admit, some of it was going elsewhere. Scavengers often picked the most valuable items out of the yellow bins before the city trucks arrived, their job made easy by the presorted material.

The blue bins, in their extreme messiness, have largely put the scavengers out of business. And, Hackney says, the convenience of the el dumpo technique has produced a doubling in the volume of recyclables, a figure that will grow as more sections of the city are converted.

So to sum up: We dump our mess into blue bins because we can afford to pay a certain class of desperate men to separate the mess for us. And because we want to stop other desperate people from stealing it at curbside.

And you want to hear the crazy part? Financially, the blue bins appear to make sense for the city.

“You gotta ask whether it’s better to sell 10 tons of waste for $100 per ton or 300 tons of waste for $10 per ton,” Hackney says. “Clearly the higher volume, even at a lower price, will come out the better deal.”

Yes, it will. You could propose that an even better deal would be for each person to sort their trash so the city could sell the 300 tons for $100 per ton.

But this is Los Angeles. And that’s unthinkable.