‘Nordstrom of Landfills’ Saves Money for Residents of Glendale, Neighbors

Without intervention, Scholl Canyon Landfill would have reached capacity three years ago and trash costs could have tripled for residents of the six cities from Glendale to San Marino, officials said.

After the Legislature in 1989 mandated a 50% cut in landfills’ incoming trash by 2000, the cities’ waste-management departments stepped up recycling efforts, which have extended Scholl Canyon’s life by 25 years.

Scholl Canyon in Glendale has done a better job of complying with the state law than the county’s 11 other landfills, said Joe Haworth, information officer for the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County.

“It’s a real labor of love and creativity,” Haworth said.

Glendale owns the 440-acre landfill and shares it with Pasadena, La Canada Flintridge, San Marino, Sierra Madre and South Pasadena, all of which have been required to increase recycling to comply with the state law.

The law required that intake at state landfills be cut 25% from 1989 levels by 1995 and another 25% by 2000. The first deadline was easy, officials said, but added that it took some doing to meet last year’s requirement.

To save space, landfill officials began selling bulky metallic items--such as refrigerators and air conditioners--to metal recyclers, and grinding up asphalt to pave and build roads throughout Glendale.

Those who enter the landfill see only a few square feet of trash in a yawning hole of terraced dirt. The 26 million tons of refuse stored in the landfill since its opening in 1963 have been covered with at least 8 feet of dirt, creating sturdy platforms for trash and water trucks to use as roads.

Signs direct drivers to different areas: asphalt, clean dirt, tires and so on. The landfill receives about 1,500 tons of trash each day, the vast majority of it discarded materials from local construction sites. Tires lie in a heap in one area, and an avocado-green cluster of ‘50s-era refrigerators stands in another.

The only odor anywhere in the complex is in the tree-grinding area, where a boxy machine spews crushed greenery into the air like a pine-scented fountain.

“In a well-run landfill, the trash trucks should be the worst-smelling things there,” said Jake Amar, senior environmental engineer for Glendale’s waste-management department. “And this is the Nordstrom of landfills.”

In the small area where residential trash is brought in, a bulldozer flattens the rubbish as pigeons eye the incoming goods. Amar shakes his head at how much of the visible trash could have been recycled, including hundreds of grocery bags and a party’s worth of empty Corona beer bottles.

Collecting recyclable items at the landfill would be too time consuming and costly, Amar said.

Glendale’s single-family home residents recycle about 40% of their trash, but they could do even better, said Tom Brady, the waste department’s recycling coordinator. Those in apartment complexes haven’t had as much success, because more than half of Glendale’s 44,000 apartment units do not have recycling containers in their buildings, Brady said.

To increase its recycling rate, Pasadena began a “pay-as-you-throw” program, making trash collection cheaper for those who use smaller containers. The city also sends out periodic reminders of what can be recycled and offers information on composting and “grass-cycling,” in which people are encouraged to leave their grass clippings on the lawn to protect it from the sun.

Each city faces different challenges, forcing some to institute more creative programs to meet the law’s requirements. State waste officials try to gauge how hard cities are trying to comply with the law rather than just looking at raw numbers, Haworth said.

Officials started restricting the cities that could use Scholl Canyon in 1987, when they determined the city of Los Angeles was contributing more than half of each day’s refuse.

After the landfill receives its final 9 million tons, trash will be loaded onto trains and taken to giant landfills in the desert. The cost for landfills to transport a ton of trash is expected to rise from $30 to about $100, said Robert Weger, Scholl Canyon’s administrator.

“We’ve prolonged the life of the landfill more than anyone hoped,” he said.