Los Angeles 21, New York 5....

When city planners examined the waste stream at Los Angeles National Airport, they came to a startling conclusion: out of every ton of Los Angeles municipal garbage dumped at the city's landfill, four pounds consists of disposable paper pillowcases from airplane pillows. This was an exorbitant use of landfill space, but may soon change because the city is arranging to intercept the discards for recycling.

Pillowcases will soon join soda cans, newspapers, and used fast-food grease among the growing number of components being separated out of L.A.'s - and America's - garbage. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recently released progress report on waste management shows that commercial and residential recycling efforts diverted more than 17 percent of America's trash from incinerators and landfills in 1990 - up from 14 percent in 1988.

That's an impressive gain for a country where as recently as three years ago, many communities had no recycling programs at all. But as dumps fill up and close, and new landfills or incinerators are blocked by increasingly fierce resistance, it's still not enough. The recycling rate will have to leap - not creep - to a much higher level if it is to take up the slack. The trouble is, while few people seem to oppose the idea of recycling in principle, making it a central rather than peripheral part of the consumer economy is not proving easy.

The difficulty of making large-scale changes in the way we manage - and think about - trash is dramatically demonstrated by two cities, New York and Los Angeles, which between them generate more than 8 percent of the nation's garbage. Each is facing a garbage crisis, and each is aggressively trying to promote recycling. But the ways they're going about it are quite different, and so are the results. As of 1990, Los Angeles boasted a 21-percent recycling rate, while New York was creeping along at around 5 percent. Both have a long way to go, and not much time to get there.

One reason progress is slow is that Americans still tend to think of garbage as undifferentiated waste - not something they wish to closely examine in its particulars. But whereas municipal planners have looked at garbage as something to burn or bury, recycling requires re-focusing on the stuff as a resource. Instead of looking at how much mass it displaces in a landfill or how many calories it generates in an incinerator, planners need to analyze what is actually in the waste stream. What can be done with used airplane pillowcases? With unsold magazines, or congealed fried chicken grease?

A Tale of Two Cities 

New York has been slower than Los Angeles in making this conceptual shift. With rapidly diminishing capacity to landfill a substantial portion of its daily load of 25,000 tons of garbage (its mammoth Fresh Kills Landfill will be full sometime between 2003 and 2010), New York has focused on incineration. The city's Comprehensive Solid Waste Management Plan, passed in March, 1992, calls for new construction of 3,750 tons per day of incineration capacity by 1996 and leaves open the possibility of dramatically more. The city is actively seeking permits for these incineration projects. In contrast, it calls for new recycling capacity of 3,500 tons per day over the same period - but it has only, begun the permitting process for 500 tons per day of capacity.

City plans to expand incinerator capacity - especially the proposal to construct a new incinerator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard - met with outraged opposition from citizens in 1992, and the decision was delayed. But even if the Navy Yard facility is built and existing plants are retrofitted, it won't be enough to make up for the 15,000 daily tons of trash headed for Fresh Kills. A large quantity of resulting incinerator ash will still have to be buried somewhere.

Opponents of additional incineration have argued that it would be an economic boondoggle - not only because it would divert money from recycling to begin with, but also because a study done by the city comptroller shows that recycling would be cheaper per ton than incineration. The study also notes that incineration would be a poor complement to recycling because the components that burn the best are also the ones that can be most effectively recycled.

An aggressive residential recycling program has the potential to reclaim a major portion of New York's waste stream before it becomes "garbage." Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College, points to a pilot project in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. Some 3,000 households - designated as an "intensive recycling zone" - separated their trash into three categories: plastic, metal and glass; mixed paper (white paper, junk mail, newspaper); and organic wastes (food scraps and yard wastes). The zone achieved a 35-percent recovery rate after two years, with some buildings separating out as much as 70 percent of their wastes for recycling. The differences between Park Slope and the rest of New York are that a greater percentage of the Park Slope waste stream is targetted for recycling, that its residents and building superintendents are given a more thorough education on the new system, and its program makes recycling more convenient by accepting unbundled newspapers and providing recycling bins.

In light of this success, Commoner is "convinced that the Brooklyn Navy Yard will never be built." An effective recycling program can recover up to 90 percent of the waste stream, he says, rendering an incinerator superfluous. As of January, however, the mayor's office wasn't convinced.

Los Angeles, beset with air quality problems, gave up on burning its trash five years ago, amidst massive public protest over a proposed giant incinerator. But Los Angeles has also encountered growing opposition to its landfills, which have buried a number of pristine canyon ecosystems - some of them the habitats of endangered species - under the city's avalanche of solid waste. And the permit for L.A.'s principal dump at Lopez Canyon will run out in 1995 - even sooner than New York's. As a result, Los Angeles has been pushed more rapidly into taking a hard look at the components of its trash.

Over the past two years, the L.A. city government has worked with 18 different industrial groups, including hotels, grocers, restaurants, hospitals, printers, and department stores, to design recycling plans appropriate for their industries. "Garbage varies widely across industries," explains Commissioner Felicia Marcus of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works. "The most effective way to reduce it is industry by industry."

As an example, Marcus notes a city-initiated study of Los Angeles International Airport, which alone produces more than I percent of the city's garbage. By actually looking at the trash in the airport dumpsters, planners learned that 15 percent of the airport trash is discarded wood. About half of the wood is from discarded cargo boxes. The rest is from the wooden loading pallets on which loads can be hoisted by forklifts. Ellyn Hae, chief consultant for the study, found that pallets were often used once and tossed. She solved the problem by setting up a clearly identifiable area for airlines to drop off their unbroken pallets. Pallets in the area are fair game for anyone who wishes to re-use them. When they finally break, Hae has a separate designated area for the pallets to be recycled - along with the broken cargo boxes.

Airplane pillowcases - which make up an incredible 14 percent of the airport's waste - are slightly tougher to recycle, primarily because the paper fiber they are made from is relatively low-grade. Hae has found a mill to accept the pillowcases, but they have to all be the same fiber and they have to be stacked and baled. So Hae is working with airlines to get them to give up their signature colors and switch to uniform, white fiber cases. It will take a year or two to change, because airlines must change their covers nationwide to ensure that they can be recycled in Los Angeles. But airlines, seeing huge savings in disposal fees as well as an ecological bonus, have been responding enthusiastically, according to Hae.

Best Intentions

Although Los Angeles has been creative in its commercial recycling initiatives, its curbside collection program for residential recycling still has a long way to go. As of January, only 7 percent of garbage was being diverted for recycling in those areas with recycling pick-ups. Since only half of households served by municipal waste collection have recycling, the city-wide residential recovery rate remains under 4 percent - a long way from Commoner's vision of efficient residential recycling.

While L.A. has made progress conceptually, it is still handicapped economically. Because canyon landfills don't charge the true costs of dumping (they do not include the full costs of the environmental damage they inflict), they remain a seductively cheap disposal option for the region. Tipping fees (the landfill's charge for each truckload dumped) are between $20 and $40 a ton in the area's outlying landfills, making recycling seem comparatively expensive. Landfilling is to Los Angeles what incineration is to New York - a destructive but distracting temptation.

Despite the temptation of its artificially low landfilling fees L.A. has benefited from the booming market for recyclables in East Asia. L.A.'s smashed plastics go by boat to Taiwan, where they fetch a good price. More than 90 percent of its used newspaper goes to Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore. In fact in the view of Joan Edwards, director of L.A.'s Integrated Solid Waste Management Office, the demand for recyclables in Asia has been the real key to the program's early success. New York also ships its recyclables to Asia, but by a longer, more expensive route.

Edwards' insight may offer a clue to the question of how these two urban giants - and the other 92 percent of the garbage-makers who are watching them with considerable interest - are going to make the much larger leap that will be needed by the time Fresh Kills, Lopez Canyon, and most of America's other obsolete garbage dumps close. If an Asian market for recyclables is what makes trash recycling in the United States at least viable, perhaps a fully-developed domestic market is what will make it truly thrive.