Trashing Landfill Fears

By GARY POLAKOVIC

Aug. 15, 1999 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

There is good news about trash in Ventura County. The much-ballyhooed landfill crisis has failed to materialize. And though it’s too soon to celebrate the end of the throwaway society, the success of recycling programs has made all the hysteria over bulging landfills seem like so much trash talk.

In fact, 10 years after a landmark law designed to jump-start recycling was passed in California, the county is diverting 44% of its waste from landfills. At the current pace, most local cities will easily reach the goal of cutting waste disposal by half in 2000, according to officials.

This is despite a galloping economy that is causing people to consume more things, and, consequently, throw more things away. Less refuse actually reaches county dumps than a decade ago, in spite of population growth, as communities and businesses find innovative ways to recycle.

Ventura County is doing much better than the rest of California, where the average city has cut its contributions to landfills by only a third. Although that rate is three times better than a decade ago, it is well short of the Dec. 31, 2000, goal set forth in the Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989, the law that drives California’s recycling efforts.

Behind the numbers is a cultural transformation that has changed the way Californians think about garbage. It used to be, use it up, toss it out. Then people began realizing that covering the landscape with landfills was not only wasteful, but environmentally unsound. Rubbish in landfills can pose multiple environmental problems, from hazardous gas seeps to chemicals that poison drinking water supplies. From air pollution to hazards for dump workers.

Just 200,000 households statewide were served by curbside recycling in 1988, the year before the big push began to save landfill space. Today, the number is closer to 9 million, said Mark Murray, executive director for Californians Against Waste.

“It was like a big experiment. The transformation that has taken place is remarkable,” Murray said.

Ubiquitous, colorful carts on curbs are now commonplace. Parents and teachers instruct children to sort their throwaways. Collectible bins in lunchrooms are a standard part of office decor.

Around Ventura County, recycling programs that began with bottles and aluminum cans now include newsprint, computer paper, yard clippings, sewage sludge, plastic soda bottles, motor oil, car batteries, scrap metals, tires, textiles and concrete. All this trash is being reborn in products ranging from egg cartons to toys to shampoo bottles.

As a result, county landfill life is being prolonged and controversial solutions, including plans to incinerate trash or rail-haul it to distant desert dumps, are on the scrap heap.

You can see the change in Thousand Oaks, where officials have already trimmed waste disposal by 53%, the best showing in the county. Those efforts keep 22,700 tons of garbage out of dumps each year, said Carolyn Greene, senior management analyst with the city’s public works department.

Firms Devise New Uses for Trash

Residents save $4 on their monthly disposal bills for using special trash carts. Companies save 10% on waste bills if they recycle a quarter of their garbage, Greene said.

Other cities having recycling success include Simi Valley, which diverts 45% of its waste, Ventura, 42%, and Ojai, 44%, according to the California Integrated Waste Management Board.

Business increasingly recognizes that waste means inefficiency. “Waste is a cost and stuff that gets thrown away is a waste of money,” said Chris Schmidle, supervisor with the state waste board.

In Ventura County, firms have come up with innovative uses for trash.

Rincon Recycling Inc. of Oxnard modified an old grape press to squeeze liquid from waste wood pulp to make egg cartons. The process saved Procter & Gamble Paper Products Co., which produces the pulp fiber, about $300,000 and keeps 1,000 tons of waste out of the landfill each month, said Bill McGowan, Rincon’s chief of sales for Southern California.

Vic’s Novelty Inc. in Oxnard uses scrap plastic from other companies to make toys and movie props--from tombstones to reptiles, which have been sold at Disneyland.

El Cajon-based Toro Ag Irrigation has begun recycling agricultural drip tape from growers in Ventura County. About 1 billion feet of black plastic strips, used to irrigate strawberries, celery and other crops, are a major source of agricultural waste along the Central Coast. Toro collects the plastic and recycles it into pallets, fence posts and containers. That saves farmers $110 per ton in monthly removal and disposal costs, said Jim Donworth, district sales manager for the company.

Poly-Tainer Inc. of Simi Valley uses recycled plastic from milk and water jugs to make squeeze bottles for cosmetics, including Sebastian and Redken products, company President Paul Strong said.

Government agencies also have come up with new ways to cut waste.

When Ventura officials required that concrete removed during the rebuilding of the Victoria Avenue and Ventura Freeway interchange be ground up and reused, they averted the need to dispose of 12,000 tons of demolition waste, said Bill Lykins, senior waste management specialist for the city.

Oxnard sends its sewage sludge to Kern County, where it is used to enrich the soil. Grass cuttings from Ventura parks that once went to the dump are now converted to mulch.

Not all local communities, however, are having equal success cutting waste.

Fillmore diverts only 25% of its waste, while Santa Paula recycles 30%. They will be hard-pressed to meet the recycling target, officials say.

In Santa Paula, public participation in curbside programs is low because the city provides no recycling bins. The city finally decided to spend $1 million for 12,000 new recycling bins and two new trucks, which will cost residents $3 more per month in trash bills, Santa Paula Public Works Director Norman Wilkenson said. But it may be too little, too late.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to make it, but we’re going to give it our best shot,” Wilkenson said.

But state regulators may be forgiving. Failure to meet the 50%-by-2000 goal technically exposes cities to penalties of up to $10,000 per day. But municipalities can apply for a series of extensions lasting up to five years and ultimately could obtain permanent exemptions if the state waste board concludes they have made a “good faith” effort.

Despite the success of recycling programs, the battle against trash is not won. Keeping ahead of the garbage flow will be a greater challenge as time wears on, because Californians produce more and more waste each year.

Across the nation, 217 million tons of trash--about 4.5 pounds per person per day--was discarded in 1997. That is 8 million tons more than the year before, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

A resurgent economy is partly responsible. More wealth means more construction and demolition debris, more jobs and bigger paychecks to buy stereos, TVs and furniture with more packaging to discard, and more food consumed and disposed at home and restaurants.

In Ventura County, kitchens and offices, construction sites and farms produce nearly 4,000 tons of trash each day--enough to fill a line of rail box cars stretching from Ventura to San Francisco. Inside the typical Ventura County trash can, more than half the rubbish is from yards and paper products. One-fifth comes from farms. Plastic, metals and glass make up 17%, according to the county Solid Waste Management Department.

Ojai residents are the most wasteful, producing an average of 9 pounds of garbage per person each day, more than twice as much as a resident in Fillmore, according to the county waste management department.

Low Dump Fees Work Against Recycling

In general, more affluent and rural communities produce more waste. They have more income to buy things, more land that generates yard clippings, and big lots with animals that add to waste, said Gerard Kapuscik, manager of the county waste department’s planning and recycling division. Urban counties also have industries that typically generate more waste, according to the EPA.

“We consume a lot. We are a resource intensive society in terms of what we generate, what we use and what we demand,” said Heidi Hall, chief of solid waste for the EPA’s California office. “Industrialized countries in general generate a lot of waste and we don’t reuse very well.”

Also, some policies, such as low fees charged to haulers and weekend garage cleaners to use the dump, make recycling less attractive. The charges, called tip fees, at the Toland Road Landfill near Fillmore, where about 40% of the county’s garbage ends up, are $23 per ton--far below the statewide average of $38, according to officials.

“The higher the tip fee, the more incentive the consumer will have or the waste hauler will have to reduce waste and increase recycling,” said Murray with Californians Against Waste.

But the burden of reaching the Dec. 31, 2000, recycling goal will mostly fall on business. Whereas households in the county recycle about 45% of residential waste, businesses recycle just 15%, Kapuscik said.

Over the long haul, the best opportunity to cut waste is to reduce trash before it’s created. This is known as “source reduction,” and calls on companies to find ways to make products with fewer materials.

It can be as simple as reducing packaging, replacing wooden pallets that break apart with plastic ones that last, and reusing foam peanuts and bubble wrap in boxes. Environmentalists say state laws that require companies to use recycled materials would trigger another wave of waste reduction.

“Recycling is good for citizens because they’re participating and they feel really good about it, but as we get more sophisticated we’ll go to more source reduction and not produce the waste to begin with,” said Schmidle of the state waste board. “That’s where the big savings are.”

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Trash: A Statistical Breakdown

Americans make a lot of trash. But recycling has been successful in Ventura County. Here is a breakdown of the county’s garbage and a look at which cities have done the best job of keeping trash out of the landfill.

What’s in Ventura County trash?

Yard & wood waste: 27%

Paper products: 25%

Organic, food, agriculture, textiles: 19%

Concrete, asphalt: 9%

Metals: 8%

Plastic: 5%

Glass: 4%

Other: 3%

1998 Ventura County jurisdiction’s total disposal at all landfills

Lbs. Per Capita/day

Oxnard: 7.25