REWARDS FOR CITY'S RECYCLERS SANITATION BUREAU MAY GIVE PRIZES THROUGH NEW PROGRAM.

Byline: Kerry Cavanaugh Staff Writer

If your conscience can't get you to sort your paper, plastics, bottles and cans, the city of Los Angeles hopes cold, hard cash will.

The Bureau of Sanitation is proposing awards up to $1,000 for residents who keep their blue bins free of garbage and refuse and full of recyclables.

If approved by the City Council, the Recycle for Dollars program could keep an additional 162,700 tons of recyclables from the landfill, sanitation officials predict. That's equal to $10 million saved through reduced landfill dumping fees and increased recycling revenue.

``I hope we find a lot of people who are in compliance,'' project manager Stanton Lewis said Friday. ``It is fun and it is something to be rewarded for doing the right thing.''

Under the proposal to be considered by the Board of Public Works on Monday, the city would begin with a pilot program targeting neighborhoods where residents tend to stick garbage in the blue bins or where they don't yet use the blue bins at all. Those include trash routes in Reseda, Pacoima and Atwater Village.

Blue bins are supposed to hold dry paper, cardboard boxes, metal and aluminum cans, glass bottles and plastic containers. The bins are used only by single-family houses and small apartment complexes enrolled in Bureau of Sanitation collection.

Residents in the pilot areas would receive advance notice that sanitation workers would check their blue bins for two months. Each day, some 300 to 500 homes would be eligible and workers would randomly select nine bins.

If a bin contains no trash or nonrecyclables, the household would win $200. If no blue bins meet the winning criteria, the prize money would roll over.

``It could potentially roll up to a maximum of $1,000 if by chance your neighbors aren't complying,'' Lewis said.

Recycle for Dollars is modeled on the ``Cash for Trash'' program in Berkeley, where officials saw a 10 percent increase in the amount of material being recycled. And people kept recycling after the contest ended.

``What was really gratifying was we were able to effectively outreach to people who don't normally think about recycling ... we recruited new people to the team, so to speak,'' said Dave Williamson, operation manager of the Ecology Center, which ran the program for the city of Berkeley.

The Bureau of Sanitation hopes to see a similar increase in recycling in Los Angeles.

Currently, blue bins in some neighborhoods contain about 30 percent garbage. The material recovery facilities that sort blue bin contents charge the city for trash mixed in with recyclables.

The goal is to have less than 10 percent trash in blue bins.

Material recovery facilities donated $34,000 to the Recycle for Dollars program and city would cover the remaining $105,000 cost from its curbside recycling trust fund.

Kerry Cavanaugh, [phone]

kerry.cavanaugh(at)dailynews.com

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SOURCE: Bureau of Sanitation

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