L.A. Moves to Bring Trash Recycling to Rental Units

Under political pressure to reduce the amount of trash dumped in local landfills, Los Angeles officials are taking steps to bring recycling for the first time to 100,000 apartments in the city.

The two-year pilot program would cost the city $6.2 million and apply only to certain large apartment complexes. The program could be expanded later to include all 650,000 apartments in the city, officials said this week.

Opponents of plans to expand Sunshine Canyon Landfill into Los Angeles said the pilot program would help reduce the pressure on local landfills and move toward Mayor James K. Hahn’s goal of eventually having a landfill-free city.

“If you can get Los Angeles to bury less of its trash in local landfills, it takes away their reason for being,” said Wayde Hunter, president of the North Valley Coalition, a group that has been fighting expansion of Sunshine.

Hunter, who also is on the city’s Landfill Alternatives Committee, acknowledged that the contracts approved recently by the city Public Works Board and sent to the mayor for final approval represent a relatively small, incremental step in diverting more trash from dumps, but he said they represent a good beginning.

The city now provides recycling to Los Angeles’ 720,000 single-family homes and to multifamily complexes of four units or fewer.

Los Angeles generates 3.5 million tons of trash annually. The pilot program, scheduled to begin in March or April, is expected to divert about 100,000 tons of trash to recycling, or 15% of the refuse generated by the apartments in the test program, according to Karen Coca, who oversees the recycling program for the city.

The proposed contracts would pay five contractors $6.2 million over the next two years to identify apartment buildings in every council district in the city and provide education, recycling bags and bins and pickup of recyclables. The money would come from a user fee charged to private waste haulers of 10% of their gross receipts. The fee, which waste haulers can pass on to customers, was charged starting last summer and was created by state legislation, Coca said.

Contractors approved by the Public Works Board include refuse-collection firms Crown Disposal Co., Sun Valley Paper Stock Inc. and Nasa Disposal Services, but work is also proposed to go to some politically influential firms.

The prime contract for the West San Fernando Valley, Hollywood Hills and South Los Angeles is proposed to go to Strategy Workshop Inc., a public relations and community outreach firm that has done political work for former City Councilmen Mark Ridley-Thomas and Richard Alatorre and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles).