Hauling Away the Holiday Residue

This was the city’s Christmas gift to refuse collector Randy Torres: 1,000 60-gallon containers belching cardboard boxes, slick wrapping paper and uncounted tons of bottles that helped revelers celebrate.

“Just by the containers that are set out,” Torres said, playing retail economist for a moment, “everybody had to have spent some money.”

In the Encino neighborhood he cruised Friday, picking up recyclables in a rumbling teal truck, nearly every house produced a hefty haul of holiday detritus.

“It doesn’t pack” like other trash, Torres said. “It’s like a sponge. It just keeps on absorbing.”

Almost any other week of the year, Torres would “pack out” once or twice in a day--that is, visit the recycling center to dump a full load. But this is trash hauling’s peak season, when the consumerism of Christmas and the festivities of New Year’s combine over two weeks to almost double Los Angeles’ trash tonnage. Torres expected to pack out three times Friday, adding several hours to his workday.

“It’s going to be a long day today,” he said in the morning. “I told my wife: ‘Make me four sandwiches. This is a four-sandwich day.’ ”

Torres, who is 40 and has five children, welcomes the overtime.

“It pays off my Christmas,” he said.

Thanks From Grateful Customers

In the eight years he has been collecting trash for the city, Torres has received his share of gifts from grateful customers. When his route included affluent hilltop neighborhoods, the maids would hustle out to hand him bottles of champagne as thanks for carting away the recyclables of million-dollar households.

“They get all these different newspapers,” Torres said. And, he added, “They’re wine drinkers up there.”

In the more modest neighborhood that Torres was “pulling” Friday to help out a driver who had called in sick, Bryan Antin left a wrapped package on each of his three trash bins and waited with his 2-year-old daughter to wave as the corresponding trucks rolled by. The guys who collected the disposable household waste and the yard clippings both received fudge. Torres picked up a jug of Mississippi Mud beer.

“I figure he gets glass because he does the recycling and the other guys get sweets because they smell the [garbage] all day,” Antin explained.

Gifts from residents like Antin have become rarer since Los Angeles’ Bureau of Sanitation added mechanical arms to hoist trash containers into the dump trucks. Torres used to climb out of his cab at every house and sometimes talked to customers as they left for work, raked the lawn or picked up the newspaper. The giant pincers, which he manipulates using three toggle switches next to the steering wheel, have increased his efficiency but added five inches to his waistline.

“I think a lot of drivers wouldn’t mind going back to throwing trash,” he said. “We’re all gaining weight.”

The robotic trucks do draw children, however, particularly now, when school is out.

“They come out in their pajamas, you honk your horn and they run back in the house. You make a little kid’s day--that’s great,” Torres said. “I don’t know what it is about this truck.”

‘Worth Dumping a Few Extra Times’

One boy shuffled down his driveway in sweatpants Friday morning--not to marvel at the truck but to ask if Torres could bend the rules by hoisting a few extra loads of cardboard boxes.

“To me, if they want to recycle, that’s worth dumping a few extra times,” the driver said.

His truck shimmied as it shook into its maw the evidence of a Toshiba television, Nike sneakers and some sort of game.

“Some kid had a good Christmas,” he said.

Overall, the tonnage reports that drivers compare at the end of their routes suggest that 2001 was a good Christmas for a lot of folks.

“I think everybody wanted to be more family-oriented,” Torres said. “There was more giving. There was more love, I guess, to spread around.”