Bidding Good Riddance to Hazardous Rubbish

Dave Lowe had been waiting more than a year for this moment.

His green 1962 Chevrolet station wagon, its dashboard cluttered with pine cones and bird nests, was now filled with the fruits of his labor. Old alkaline batteries. Used motor oil and antifreeze. Pool chemicals he found on the freeway.

Pulling into the parking lot at Mission College, Lowe sat in the car and watched as workers from the city’s mobile hazardous waste collection unit unloaded his stash.

“It doesn’t matter the antifreeze has ants in it?” he asked a worker, who nodded no.

Lowe, wearing a cowboy hat and denim jacket, shifted a toothpick in his mouth.

“They say we live in a throwaway society, [but] if somebody is taking the trouble to take care of these recyclables, I’m all for it,” said the 41-year-old Sylmar man. “It’s a pain in the butt, though, an endless battle, I guess. If I’m doing the right thing, I can have my conscience with God secure.”

Hoping more people will do the right thing--and not put old cans of paint in their household trash--the Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation regularly sets up temporary collection sites around the city. Last year, about 30,000 vehicles dropped off 2.6 million pounds of waste, said Lupe Vela, division manager of the city’s recycling division at the sanitation bureau.

Despite the cold and rain on a recent Sunday, about 400 people came to Mission College to drop off household products illegal to dump in landfills.

Paints, fertilizers, pesticides and florescent light bulbs are typical donations, but workers never quite know what to expect.

“You’ve got to know what you’re doing--that’s when your training comes in,” said Tony Martinez, an environmental specialist at Philip Services Corp., one of two companies the city contracts with to staff the collection centers. (MSEM Environmental Services is the other.)

Variety of Waste Items

Through the years, people have brought in ammunition, explosives and radioactive waste--none of which can be accepted by the centers. Science specimens, used biological needles and home chemistry labs also get turned in.

“We get it all,” Martinez said.

Chemistry sets are accepted, but not biological waste. Residents are urged to take their ammunition to police. And when someone shows up with explosives, hazardous materials workers summon the bomb squad.

As a precautionary measure, program coordinator Alfred Tong keeps a Geiger counter handy to measure radioactivity. During a collection at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Van Nuys about two years ago, the instrument kept clicking as he aimed it at an elderly man’s items.

Then the man remembered that he had been injected with radioactive dye as part of a bypass surgery, Tong said. The Geiger counter was clicking at him.

“Maybe I should get rid of you,” the radioactive man’s wife teased him, Tong recalled.

Another time, workers in Westchester received a black container filled with ashes. “We suspect it’s human, but we haven’t tested it,” Tong said. The container still sits in a city office.

The centers frequently have to fend off people bringing in mercury, said Stephen Eckert, an environmental manager at Philip. Eckert said some people acquire large amounts of mercury--one man had 300 pounds of it--in the false belief that they can sell the dangerous metal for profit.

“We tell people, ‘Don’t collect mercury. There’s never going to be a market for it,’ ” Eckert said, explaining that serious buyers won’t touch scrap mercury because it is likely to be contaminated.

During collections, vehicles queue up to the so-called “hot zone,” an area with blue plastic sheeting on the ground to guard against runoff from hazardous materials. About 35 workers unload the waste and sort it. Several chemists are also nearby in case workers need help identifying a mysterious substance.

Drivers are not allowed to get out of their vehicles and must turn off their engines and extinguish cigarettes. Workers wear safety goggles, double latex gloves, boots, and white jumpsuits.

Although most people bringing items to the center are doing a good deed, workers are on the lookout for people trying to skirt hazardous waste guidelines.

Since the program is intended for people cleaning out their homes and garages, limits are set on the amount of waste per carload. Some get around this by making repeat visits--sometimes in different cars to throw off the workers, officials say.

Workers who suspect commercial dumping jot down the offender’s vehicle description and driver’s license information. But employees tread a fine line, Tong said, because a dumper who is turned away may illegally discard his waste a block away.

There is less temptation for businesses to abuse the service now because about two years ago, following lobbying by printers, the city began a program for small firms. Companies pay the city about $1 per pound to collect the waste as part of the program called Conditionally Exempt Small Quantity Generators, Tong said.

Augmenting Collections

At Mission College, workers became suspicious when Manuel Escalante brought more than 200 pounds of wood paint finisher in his pickup truck. His wife, Lucy, preceded him in line, with her own load of the stuff.

But Lucy Escalante, 33, of Sylmar, said the couple inherited the cans when they bought a new house. She said her concern for the environment, and a postcard about the collection in the mailbox, motivated them. “What kind of place are we going to leave our kids if we dump this waste?” she asked.

The program’s budget is $4.3 million, but it will be cut to $3 million next year as part of a leaner budget, Vela said. The bulk of funding, about $2 million, comes from the county. The city receives a percentage of the fee that private haulers pay the county to dump refuse into county landfills, Vela said.

To augment collections, the program is planning to open five permanent sites for household hazardous waste by 2005, Vela said. Facilities will open in Sun Valley, the West Valley and Harbor areas, South-Central and West Los Angeles.

But for now, there are only temporary sites--and a constant parade of odd substances.

During a collection at a Sunland Kmart parking lot last year, a man brought a mysterious liquid inside an antique bottle, said James H. Lee, a program management assistant. The resident wanted workers to pour the liquid out of the bottle, which he wanted to keep, Lee recalled.

“I told him to pour it out at home and to use another container to bring it back,” Lee said. “He never came back. I don’t know if he blew himself up.”

The next collection will be from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. March 10 and 11 at the Boeing-De Soto facility’s south parking lot at 8900 De Soto Ave., Canoga Park. For information about other upcoming collections, call (800) 988-6942.