Whole Life Times: Blue Bin Blues

April 2005

Blue Bin Blues

With an enviable recycling system in place, why is L.A. throwing away up to $6 million a year to ferry misguided trash out of the recycling center to the dump?

by Claudia Pearce

Leonard Lang, general manager of a plant that handles blue bin contents, is gazing at a huge pile of trash and shaking his head. Even though it’s a bracing winter day, flies are buzzing over the moldy heaps of food, dubious-looking plastic sheeting, plant waste, pots and pans, old pool covers and even a propane tank.

“We’re supposed to get clean paper, cardboard, bottles and cans, period,” asserts Lang. “And bottles should be empty before they are tossed.” He picks up a decaying tennis shoe and a jar half-full of putrid peanut butter. “What we get [instead] is all of this,” he laments, pitching the artifacts back onto the pile.

Sun Valley Paper Stock’s Recycling Center is one of five plants the city pays to process recyclables for all of Los Angeles. The hulking processing plant sits on a sprawling lot surrounded by piles of recyclables. To the untrained eye, the heaps look more like useless trash than reusables in the process of being sorted and shipped. An unpleasant odor emanates from the huge mounds as they are dumped out of incoming trucks, pushed to the plant by bulldozers and channeled by endless conveyers through various chutes and contraptions.

When Lang gives the grand tour, however, it becomes clear that not all trash is the same. A slim, fit man with thick, curly gray hair, Lang looks quite a bit younger than his 58 years. As he bounds up and down stairs and in and out of dank passageways pointing out various processes, a pattern emerges: bales of mixed paper shooting from that ram baler there; clear plastics dumping out of the giant chute here; green, clear and brown glass being sorted into separate bins over there.

One might think that someone who runs a chain of successful recycling plants would be seriously concerned about saving the planet. Yet Lang’s SUV sports a Bush campaign sticker, broadcasting his support for one of history’s most notorious environmental offenders. Lang does not note the irony. Clearly a man of integrity who takes his job seriously, the general manager is single bottom-line oriented. Instead of a noble cause, he thinks of recycling as a necessary business. And a business at which he clearly excels—especially when considering the sheer magnitude of junk Lang and his workers process.

“We get about one-third trash for every two-thirds of recyclables from the blue bins,” explains Lang. “Last year the trash we had to pay to dump averaged 32.7 percent of our output, so it’s very expensive trash.”

In addition to dump fees, this trash also costs the factory in lost time and labor. Lang points to a worker slicing through layers of cassette tape and plastic wrap that have wound around a cog. “So much of the non-recyclable stuff becomes hazardous to our equipment,” he says, “and recyclables often get attached to the trash, so they get dumped instead of recycled.”

Shortly into the recycling tour, certain types of trash reveal themselves as diabolical: cassette tapes, pieces of wood, metal and PVC pipe, old shoes, grocery bags, coat hangers and toys. All these bits sabotage the works, causing the systems to grind and groan so that the maintenance people have to shut everything down and jump into the belts and conveyers to cut off or pry out the offending objects, all the while keeping an eye out for the occasional hypodermic needle.

All in all, it’s a messy business—even though, as it turns out, much of the separating task is automated. After the city trucks dump the blue bin recyclables from East Valley’s 145,000 households, tractors push the piles on to the tipping floor where they travel up two large conveyers for the presort. Two workers with heavy gloves stand by, chucking cardboard into receptacles and tossing obvious contaminants to trash piles below. The sorted recyclables are then sent through a Rube Goldberg-like series of contraptions and conveyers to their final destinations. Conveyers made of ceramic squares on axels separate the newspaper (which goes over the top) from the small paper, glass, bottles and cans, which drop through; shaker screens sift the heavier glass items from the small paper before sending the piles down to the trommel, a large, high-tech barrel full of holes, in which magnets on one side attract cans, and blowers shoot lighter items (like paper) up to the higher conveyers.

All this automation doesn’t come cheap; Ram balers cost at least $300,000, says Lang, and conveyers for these balers run about $1,000 per foot. So equipment maintenance is a high priority and workers are stationed at common trouble spots.

Through this painstaking process, each type of reusable—plastic, paper, newsprint, aluminum cans and cardboard—ends up baled and carted off in separate trucks to be transformed into a plethora of products, some of which you’d never guess. Take for example, colored glass. While clear glass is easy to recycle into jars and other glass products, colored glass is trickier, because the color can’t be removed. So, if it isn’t recycled into darker glass products, colored glass may be given a second life as road-surfacing material. Some dumps even use ground glass as landfill cover.

And while recycled paper and cardboard pulp is used to make more paper and cardboard, its market is being driven by a surprising contingent: the Chinese now purchase more than one-third of all used U.S. pulp.

Other recyclables are more predictable. Aluminum cans, for example, are usually back on the grocery shelves as cans (again) in about three months, in a process that utilizes 95 percent less energy than producing cans from virgin ore.

The non-recyclable trash also gets baled, but it goes to the dump to fester uselessly. Lang says that in addition to separating and processing costs, this plant spends $65,000 to $100,000 per month just to remove trash the plant can’t recycle. Combined with the other four LA plants, that’s a bill of up to $6 million a year.

And that’s city money down the drain. Sun Valley—and the other four Los Angeles recyclers handling blue bin contents—pays the city based on the trash tonnage they receive. If the recyclables are fairly clean and there’s not much trash contamination, their expenses are lower. When these contract recyclers make more profit, they pay the city more, making the recycle program more economical. So LA has financial as well as environmental reasons to encourage people to pay attention to what they toss in their bins.

But many people are still unclear about which items they can and can’t recycle. And, says Lang, the law requiring all plastics to sport a triangle label and recycling number “just confuses people and makes them think they can toss any plastics with the recycle sign into the blue bins.

“People should stick to the basics,” continues Lang. “Clean paper and cardboard, household bottles and cans only. Don’t toss something in the blue bins with hopes that we might be able to use it. When in doubt, throw it out.”

But while the larger benefits of recycling might not be of obvious importance to Lang, they’re invaluable to the planet; recycling saves trees and forest environments, reduces smog and strip mining and conserves the resources of our increasingly finite earth. So before you “throw it out,” check the chart (204k pdf) to see if it’s possible to recycle it another way. After all, as our human population continues to grow, and as more and more of the earth’s surface gets eaten-up by landfills, the concept behind the term “throw it out”—in fact, the very idea of “trash”—becomes more and more a luxury of a bygone era.

Claudia Pearce is an LA-based freelance writer who no longer puts yogurt cups in her blue bin.

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