Recycle plan set for city tenants. (Up Front).

The City of Los Angeles is about to take another stab at setting up recycling services for apartment dwellers.

Proposals soon will be arriving from dozens of businesses and non-profits vying for two-year contracts to provide recycling containers to, and pick up recyclable materials from, some of the 600,000-plus multifamily structures throughout the city.

If the two-year pilot program proves successful, it could lead to a citywide apartment-recycling program.

"Multifamily structures are the only major untapped sector of our recycling program," said Enrique Zaldivar, assistant director of the city's Bureau of Sanitation. "In 15 years, we will probably not be disposing any trash within L.A. city borders; it will have to be shipped outside the region at great cost. That's why tapping this market is so essential."

But the move is not without its opponents and skeptics. Apartment owners oppose it out of fear they will be held liable if the program flops. Waste haulers, who already pay for the pilot program through a special fee the city started levying on them last year, are concerned about getting stuck with millions of dollars in additional costs if the program gets expanded. And others say that getting tenants to recycle will prove to be difficult and not cost-effective.

"It's all a matter of what people are willing to do," said environmental advocate Betsey Landis, who sits on the county's Integrated Waste Management Task Force. "The further away you get from a landfill, the more complacent tenants get about recycling."

Unlike single-family homeowners, who have more of a stake in their surrounding community and are usually willing to recycle, tenants tend to be transient and less willing to cooperate. Also, with severe overcrowding in many apartment buildings, disposing of trash through conventional means is a problem, let alone separating out the trash.

"Many people think they are using the trash bins as basketball hoops; if they miss, they just leave the trash lying around," said Harold Greenberg, past president of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles. "I even saw one unit where people were using the bathtub as a trash receptacle. You're telling me that you expect these tenants to recycle? That simply won't happen."

Individual contracts

In many smaller cities, all waste hauling is done by exclusive franchise. That gives a municipality leverage to demand that the franchisee provide recycling services. One such city is Arcadia, where Waste Management Inc. holds the franchise and provides both conventional and recycling services to multifamily units.

In L.A., the multifamily and commercial markets are wide open; a landlord or commercial building owner can contract with any waste hauler willing to serve them, which makes setting up a recycling program more difficult.

But with nearly 60 percent of the city's residents living in multifamily buildings, the market is too large to ignore, especially with diminishing landfill space and recycling mandates. As of 2000, the last year for which figures are available, 60 percent of the city's solid waste did not end up in landfills, exceeding the state mandate of 50 percent.

The City Council passed an ordinance in 1994 requiring that the city divert 70 percent of all solid waste from landfills by 2020. L.A. officials say they have wrung most of the gains from homeowners and that further progress must come from apartment dwellers and the commercial sector.

"Tenants, just like homeowners, are willing to do their part to reduce the amount of solid waste that has to be carted off to landfills at longer and longer distances using up fossil fuel," said Sheila Bernard, president of the Lincoln Place Tenants Association. "It really behooves our city to have an ordinance that includes renters."

But first, said Karen Coca, program manager with the recycling division of the city Bureau of Sanitation, the bureau wants to find out if such a program can actually work.

Major waste haulers like Waste Management are expected to designate all recyclable materials to be deposited in centralized bins, ranging from 64 gallons to 1,200 gallons, depending on the size of the apartment complex. Materials would then be taken to sorting centers, where cans, bottles and paper products are all separated out and taken to various recycling collection centers.

Smaller non-profit entities that don't have the trucks to pick up large bins may periodically distribute small containers to individual apartment units.

Second try

In 1997, the city set up a test program in the West San Fernando Valley involving 300 apartment buildings. Results were mixed, according to a 1998 report prepared by the Bureau of Sanitation for the L.A. City Council. The chief problem: Up to 25 percent of the recyclable material was contaminated either with non-recyclable materials or liquids, rendering it unusable.

"It's so easy to contaminate the recyclable waste stream," Landis said. "If someone throws in one nearly full bottle of soda into a bin for paper, much of that paper is permanently contaminated. And something like kitty litter contaminates whatever it lands on."

Other problems cited in the report include apartment managers failing to place the recycling bins at the agreed-upon location for collection and an increase in scavenging activity by homeless persons or others seeking to turn in cans and bottles for money. There were also glutted markets for many of the recyclable materials, resulting in very low revenue generation.

After several months, the program was discontinued because of a lack of funds.

Last year, the city levied a 10 percent gross receipts fee on all waste haulers. Revenues from the fee must be applied to recycling programs. (This fee is over and above the standard gross receipts tax levied by the city.)

That fee, according to Coca, is generating $12 million a year--$3 million of which the city will use for the apartment-recycling program. Later this year, they intend to use another $1.5 million of that fee to launch a pilot program for recycling at small businesses.

Dozens of entities, from major waste haulers like Waste Management to community groups like the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, are expected to submit proposals.

Haulers, though, are concerned that expanding these programs beyond the scope that can be covered with the $12 million in fees would mean additional fees imposed on them. With more than 600,000 multifamily structures, even an extremely modest subsidy of $200 per structure would add up to a total of $120 million.