The Brief

Wearing gloves past their wrists, Alekos Tetradis stood guard by a cluster of compost, recycling, and landfill bins. Around them, attendees at this West Los Angeles College climate conference mulled where to toss their trash. If someone went for the wrong bin, Tetradis, a WLAC biochemistry student, stooped, reached in with gusto, and righted the wrong.

“It can seem a little daunting to know what is and isn’t compost, but that’s why I’m here,” Tetradis said.

Tetradis was excited to volunteer for this work at the West Los Angeles’ Climate Careers Conference. The conference’s stated goal was to identify new curriculum and training programs to advance sustainability careers.

LAist’s goal was to watch the food line: Would it be any different from other conferences, with rows of boxed lunches that might get tossed? Would participants be given those red “delicious” apples only to then just throw them away? What does it take to “walk the sustainability walk” when you have to feed hundreds of people?

The plan to spend money

Tetradis stepped away to consult with another volunteer about the coffee cups, which seemed compostable — they looked brown and felt rough, as if made from recycled material. Tetradis and the volunteer determined the inside had a wax coating, so it would fall under recycling.

(Editor's note: After this story published, there was some discussion about whether a coffee cup with a wax coating is recyclable. Tetradis did note that it technically requires a special facility. These things are complicated.)

“We have to care to compost because if you're not thinking about the effects, if you're not thinking about honestly how easy it is to separate your trash before you throw it away, you just toss everything into one bin,” Tetradis said. “It's so much easier.”

Jo Tavares, the director of the California Center for Climate Change Education, said the planning committee began meeting several months in advance, “making sure that we were aligned with practices with the things that we're telling the world that we all need to change. Perhaps not overnight, but culturally speaking, right? Like a culture of reducing waste in general.”

Jo Tavares is the director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West L.A. college.

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For instance, the committee spent more on aluminum water bottles than plastic — at around $2 an aluminum bottle, four times more. Before the event, participants were also encouraged to bring reusable bottles.

“When you plan an event, you have a budget, and you have to make sure that you try — especially when you're using public money, which is our case — you have to try to minimize costs. But everything that we do has a hidden cost, right,” Tavares said.

For example: the pollution from a single-use plastic water bottle isn’t reflected in the consumer price of 50 cents. And the aluminum water bottles can be recycled.

The necessary provisions of calories and caffeine

Then there’s the first meal of the day: A breakfast of bagels, danishes, muffins, quick breads, cut fruit, and of course, coffee.

Coffee’s contention with sustainability includes the environmental cost of production, including substantial water use and other issues.

But, Tavares said, “we’re still in a situation that I cannot have a conference that starts at 8:30 a.m. and not offer coffee to the participants, right? It's something that culturally would be absolutely unacceptable."

A cart carrying the leftovers from breakfast gets wheeled away.

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Mid-morning, a cart carrying half-full bowls of cut fruit, muffins, and bagels made its exit. Research from the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment and World Wildlife Fund identified those items as among the most common kinds of food waste at events.

The committee decided to pay a local organization to manage the compostable waste and leftover food, which cost $2,000 spread over three days of events. There are composting centers available for drop-off, but Tavares said it made sense to pay another organization to manage the waste and leftovers.

“What is it that is important to you? What are these trade-offs that you're willing to do? And, you know, do they really need to be sacrifices all the time? Are there substitutions or new ways of looking at the way things ought to be?” Tavares said.

A lot of events stick with the tried and true.

“I’m looking at breakfast buffets and hotels — it’s sugar, it’s pastries, and things like that,” Tracy Stuckrath, a certified events planner, told LAist.

Struckrath works for thrive! meetings & events, which specializes in safe, sustainable, and inclusive dining. She also runs a podcast called Eating at a Meeting, and said she asked her audience what they wanted to eat for breakfast.

“They said they were looking for protein and you don’t get that on a continental breakfast,” said Stuckrath, who pointed out adding eggs, bacon, and sausage could add $20 per person.

Adding a lot of meat has other costs, too, though. But it’s still early; we’ll save that discussion for lunch.

The tedious but rewarding chore of sorting trash

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, food waste accounts for about 20% of municipal solid waste in U.S. landfills, but makes up nearly 60% of annual landfill methane emissions.

California has made it a requirement to divert organic waste from landfills and reduce methane emissions since the passage of SB 1383. By 2025, the state aims to reduce organic waste in landfills by 75% and redirect at least 20% of currently disposed edible food for people to eat.

Alekos Tetradis, a second year West L.A. student

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West L.A. College student Alekos Tetradis sorts through the compost bin.

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To help sort through its own waste and minimize harm, the center conference relied on friendly student volunteers, like Tetradis.

Tetradis talked to LAist about “greenwashing,” how items may be marketed as plant-based, but in reality may be mixed with chemicals that ultimately renders them not compostable. They believe the labeling should be more transparent.

Examining the cutlery at today’s event, Tetradis found out what it was made of: “Oh, the forks are metal! Oh this is perfect.”

They would be washed and reused.

The perennial headache of the RSVP list

Not surprisingly, the best way to reduce food waste is to make less food to begin with.

Fabio Miranda’s locally based company City Fare catered the event. City Fare has been incorporating more compostable disposables and more vegan options, which he anticipates there will be increasing demand for. In theory, he said, catering for an event means preparing food for a set number of people, so there would be less waste than the uncertainty restaurants face.

With catering for events, however, “there’s always attrition,” Miranda said. “There’s always last minute no-shows even though individuals have RSVP’d, and that’s a little difficult to kind of gauge and estimate. How many people will be no-shows?”

He points out that no one hosting events wants to run out of food either.

Fabio Miranda represents the catering company City Fare at West L.A. college.

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Stuckrath, the events planner who specializes in sustainability, told LAist, “it really comes down to monitoring your attendee arrivals and departures schedules.”

There have been financial and cultural incentives for providing extra food, said Jackie Suggitt, director of capital, innovation and engagement at ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste. Vendors would need to compensate attendees if food runs out and event attendees “regardless of what we say about our sustainability preferences, we like the options, even if we’re the last one going through the buffet.”

Suggitt said one of the solutions their organization proposes from their own event planning experience and case studies is to actually underproduce. ReFED will produce food for 50% to 85% of the people registered for the event. (By day two of an event, “No one actually comes down for breakfast, they just want coffee,” she said.)

“I mean, that's hard, right? Like over the fear of running out of food. You may run out of one of your dishes and that happens. Right?” Suggitt said.

She observed this earth friendly mindset could be acceptable at a conference about food waste, but elsewhere “can be kind of a difficult norm to break away from.”

The environmentally conscious plant-based lunch

The climate conference lunch was a taco bar buffet spread with traditional fixings of rice, beans, tortillas, guacamole, salsa, and, among other items, plant-based beef fajitas.

Besides food waste in landfills, the raising of livestock also contributes significantly to U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Vegan beef fajitas are served for lunch as part of the taco buffet bar.

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Meat and plant-based preferences is something the organizer Tavares did wrestle with, worrying that students, particularly high school students attending this week’s events, may not eat the vegan options.

But Jade Allison, a conference participant, said the plant-based lunch menu showed the organizers are aligned in practice with their sustainable messages.

Some liked the plant-based meat. “I love rice and beans, and I like the Beyond Meat steak,” said Andrea Abrego, a West L.A. student who participated in an internship panel.

Ayman Sharafat, though, preferred a meat option. He's doing a fellowship in Texas with the Climate Action Network, but originally hails from Jordan. While the lunch was “delicious and healthy,” when asked how he would design the ideal conference lunch, he said, “some people like lamb, some people like pork, beef, and chicken.”

The necessary origin of the food

Seated at a round table, conference participant Beth Yirga chimed in to a conversation about the food’s origins and final destination.

“I want to know the history of my plate…I want every piece of my plate to be connected to a community that is doing this work to heal the planet," Yirga said. "And I'm, we're, supporting their efforts and nourishing our bodies at the same time.”

Mariela Bazán, chief sustainability officer for the Events Industry Council, a global organization that has established sustainable event standards, calls this “social procurement.”

Social procurement means “where are you purchasing from? Do you have a policy of sourcing from small and medium enterprises? Are you looking for diversity in your supply chain? Are you looking for fair labor, not child labor, in your supply chain?” Bazán said.

She said in the past, when considering sustainability, the events industry used to focus on materials like plastic water bottles and reducing waste, but over time, considering the climate impact of travel and social procurement has grown in importance. That means considering things like chocolate certifications, fair trade coffee, and other elements of sourcing (seafood, for example, can be notorious to track, but one can start the conversation by asking).

The final fate of the waste

Not all of this conference’s food would make its way onto people’s ceramic lunch plates.

“I think that is a hidden side of something like conference lunches and buffets that we don't really get to know,” said attendee Allison, who wanted to know what would happen to the leftovers. “Like a product’s life cycle and lifespan is much larger than it being on a plate in front of me. And I think, like, for sustainability, we have to shift our mindset to incorporate the full picture more often.”

CCCCE contracted the organization Compostable to bring the compost to partner farms and urban growing spaces within 10 miles of the event, and redistribute the leftovers to Free Food Collective, a local organization which delivers food to unhoused people in West L.A.

Becca Scheuer takes away the leftover food and compost. The leftover food will go to a local organization that will distribute the food to unhoused people and the compost will go to partner farms and urban growing spaces.

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At the end of the day, Becca Scheuer from Compostable weighed the food waste and leftover food — approximately 60 pounds of food waste to become compost, about 80 pounds of leftover food to be redistributed.

“So that is great,” Scheuer said while loading up the pickup truck. “None of that is in the landfill.”

The suspended leader of the Los Angeles Unified School District says he acted lawfully and has asked to be restored to his position.

Through a law firm, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho this week issued his first public statement since federal agents searched his home in San Pedro and his office at LAUSD's downtown headquarters on February 25.

The reason for the searches is unknown. A Department of Justice spokesperson said the agency has a court-authorized warrant, but declined to provide additional details. The FBI told our media partner CBS LA that the underlying affidavit remained under court-ordered seal.

How the district responded

Two days after the search, the LAUSD board voted unanimously to place Carvalho on paid administrative leave “pending investigation,” and appointed longtime administrator Andres Chait as acting superintendent.

Carvalho’s statement states that while the investigation is ongoing, there has been no evidence presented showing he violated federal law.

“Mr. Carvalho respects the rule of law and the investigative process and has always acted in the best interests of students and within the bounds of the law,” the statement from Holland & Knight LLP states.

“Mr. Carvalho remains confident that the evidence will ultimately demonstrate that he acted appropriately and in the best interests of students. We hope the School Board reinstates him promptly to his position as superintendent.”

In response to LAist’s questions about Carvalho’s desire to be reinstated, an LAUSD spokesperson wrote, “The Los Angeles Unified Board of Education respects his right to defend himself.”

On Wednesday, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced member nations would release a total of 400 million barrels from their strategic reserves of oil as the war in Iran continues to cause the worst disruption to energy markets in decades.

The unanimous decision by the members of the IEA, which represents some of the world's biggest oil-consuming nations, is meant to address the acute disruption in oil trade caused by the war. It's the largest release of crude oil the IEA has ever coordinated, and only the sixth time the group has released oil to balance crude markets.

IEA executive director Fatih Birol said on Wednesday that the decision by IEA members, who together control some 1.8 billion barrels of stockpiled oil, is a "major action" meant to alleviate the disruption of oil markets.

"But to be clear, the most important thing for a return to stable flows of oil and gas is the resumption of transit through the Strait of Hormuz," he said.

Details about the timing and the amounts of oil each country will contribute have not yet been announced.

Global oil prices, which have been highly volatile for days, dropped below $87 on Tuesday night, after The Wall Street Journal first reported about the pending IEA recommendation, but were hovering just under $90 after Birol spoke on Wednesday morning. That price had been around $70 before the war began, spiked to nearly $120 late Sunday night, and fell to around $90 in recent days.

The IEA was formed in the wake of the oil crisis of the 1970s. It serves as a sort of counterpart to OPEC, the group of oil-producing nations that work together to coordinate production. While OPEC represents the interests of oil producers, the IEA was established to protect the interests of oil consumers. It coordinates national stockpiles to create a buffer in the case of an extreme shock to global oil supplies — precisely like the one the world is experiencing today.

The group has 32 member countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, Japan, Korea and most nations in Europe. More than a dozen countries are affiliated with the IEA as "association countries," including China, India, Thailand and Kenya. All together, the IEA estimates that its countries account for 80% of global energy demand.

A requirement for membership in the IEA is that countries must commit to maintaining substantial reserves of crude oil or distilled petroleum products, enough to cover at least 90 days of that country's exports, as well as undertake programs to reduce dependency on oil.

Today, some members of the IEA — including the U.S. — are net oil exporters, producing more oil than they need. That means under IEA rules they aren't required to keep stockpiles. But the U.S., which is both the world's largest consumer of oil and the world's largest producer, still maintains the world's largest known stockpile.

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) were last tapped in 2022, during the most recent IEA-coordinated release of oil, in response to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It was only the fourth time the SPR had ever been tapped.

Both the Biden administration and then the Trump administration have signaled plans to refill the SPR, but officials have reported that damage to the underground salt caverns that hold the oil has slowed down those efforts.

Currently, the U.S. SPR has about 415 million barrels, out of a total capacity of 715 million barrels.

Oil markets in crisis 

Oil prices have swung wildly over the past week, as ship traffic came to a near-standstill in the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway through which approximately 20% of the world's oil and liquefied natural gas typically travels. Iran's closure of the strait is blocking millions of barrels of oil per day from reaching markets.

And it's having knock-on effects; countries like Iraq and Kuwait have had to stop producing oil in some fields because with storage tanks full and no ability to send ships through the strait, there is simply nowhere to put the oil.

Some oil is being redirected, including through a pipeline Saudi Arabia can use to send oil to the Red Sea for export. The U.S. has waived sanctions on Russian crude to ease pressure on markets. Now, IEA members are also helping rebalance markets by tapping their stockpiles

However, the oil in those stockpiles cannot all be pulled out immediately; there is a physical limit on how quickly it can flow. And oil analysts agree that, as Birol acknowledged, that all the world's responses put together cannot fully compensate for the disruption created by the Iran war.

"There is simply no substitute for restoring access through the Strait of Hormuz," Angie Gildea, the global oil and gas leader for accounting giant KPMG, told NPR in a statement sent by email earlier this week. "The tools at our disposal, including strategic reserves, rerouting some exports and floating inventories, can provide some relief at the margins, but they are not structural solutions."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Orange County has filed a lawsuit accusing its main mental health partner, Mind OC, of squandering more than $60 million in public funds.

Specifically, the county says the nonprofit group, commonly known as Be Well OC:

• Fraudulently billed millions for services it didn’t provide.
• Jacked up rental rates for county-funded behavioral health providers. 
• Routinely put its own financial interests ahead of the vulnerable populations it was supposed to protect.

Why it matters

The allegations came Tuesday in a cross-complaint filed against Mind OC in a bitter legal dispute over what was supposed to be a model public-private mental health campus in the city of Orange.

LAist reached out to Mind OC for a response. A representative said they were not surprised by the lawsuit, and were reviewing it carefully. They also called the county’s counter-complaint “reactionary,” and said it was the county who breached its agreement with Mind OC at the Orange health campus, causing the nonprofit “significant damages.”

In all, the county is seeking the return of up to $64.5 million in public funds and property it says it entrusted to the organization, according to the complaint. The county also wants to wrest control of the Orange campus from the nonprofit.

The background

Mind OC, which does business as Be Well OC, was launched in 2017 with the goal of creating a world class mental health system in Orange County, including two campuses where, they hoped, patients using public services and those with private insurance would both seek care.

The Be Well OC initiative had strong support from the O.C. Board of Supervisors, including disgraced former Supervisor Andrew Do, who was a member of the board's ad hoc committee on mental health services at the time.

The first campus opened in Orange in 2021. The initial agreement between Mind OC and the county called for granting the organization a 60-year lease for $1 per year in exchange for Mind OC designing and overseeing construction of the mental health campus in Orange. (The actual cost of construction was covered by the county, private hospitals, and the county’s Medi-Cal provider, CalOptima.)

But the relationship soon soured. The county claimed in 2024 that Mind OC was in default, and then canceled the organization’s lease in February 2025. In the middle of the two actions, Mind OC sued.

A second Be Well OC campus was scheduled to open in Irvine last year, but has been held up, largely stemming from the disputes between Mind OC and the county.

On Tuesday afternoon, just hours after the county filed its complaint, Irvine held a special meeting where the City Council voted 5 to 2 to support the immediate opening of the Irvine Be Well campus — with Mind OC as the operator.

The nonprofit took in $50 million in revenue last year from providing mental health services in Orange County, and has $182 million in assets, according to its latest tax filing.

The legal allegations

Here are some of the major allegations in the county’s complaint:

The county alleges that Mind OC fraudulently billed the county $7.4 million for services it didn’t fully deliver. 

The county gave Mind OC a $7.7 million no-bid contract in 2019 to design an innovative mental health system. In the county’s complaint, it says Mind OC didn’t document its work, properly maintain records, or justify its invoices on the project. The county also alleged that Mind OC sought to turn in, as its primary deliverable, a document authored by county staff. Ultimately, the county paid Mind OC $7.4 million of the contract.

The county also alleges that Mind OC charged excessive rents to the county’s service providers at the Be Well campus in Orange in violation of its lease agreement. 

The county claims that Mind OC misused taxpayer funds by charging the county’s service providers on the campus rent that equated to “approximately double Mind OC’s operating expenses and well beyond market rate.”

Mind OC said in its prior legal complaint that the county “approved the subleases it now complains about.”

The county claims there was a conflict of interest when Mind OC subcontracted with a person with ties to Do.

Mind OC subcontracted in 2020 with the then-girlfriend of Do’s chief of staff, Chris Wangsaporn. She failed to deliver, as previously reported by LAist. In its complaint, the county said the contract with Josie Batres, who is now married to Wangsaporn, was “emblematic of conflicts of interest that cloud the venture from its inception.”

Batres was paid $275,000 over two years to run community listening sessions and submit reports to help the county increase access to publicly-funded mental health services. County officials say the work was never turned in.

After LAist’s reporting on the matter, the county demanded a refund, which Mind OC paid in November 2024.

In its complaint this week, the county said “Mind OC promised an investigation into the misappropriation, a promise that, to date, has gone unfulfilled.”

Other complaints laid out in the lawsuit against Mind OC include allegations that the nonprofit violated patient privacy on the Orange health campus by installing cameras in service provider areas and having property management staff check in patients and screen phone calls.

The county also said Mind OC failed to meet a major goal of the Be Well campus — to have a quarter of all patients served come with their own private insurance, according to the lawsuit and a 2024 audit.

“Mind OC, a non-profit, took positions designed to maximize its profits at the expense of County taxpayers and residents in dire need of affordable mental health services,” a county spokesperson wrote in a news release.

How to watchdog your local government

One of the best things you can do to hold officials accountable is pay attention. Your City Council, board of supervisors, school board and more all hold public meetings that anybody can attend. These are times you can talk to your elected officials directly and hear about the policies they’re voting on that affect your community.

• Read tips on how to get involved.
• The Orange County Board of Supervisors meets on alternating Tuesdays at 9:30 a.m. at 400 West Civic Center Drive, Santa Ana. You can check out the O.C. Board of Supervisors full calendar here.
• Learn how to submit a public comment to the O.C. Board of Supervisors.

Typically on the morning of Eid-ul-Fitr, the festival that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan, Muslims wear their best clothes and head to parks or convention centers across Southern California.

After the prayer and special sermon, there is another revered tradition to be followed.

Donuts.

After a month of fasting, Muslims wait for the glazed donut for their first breakfast.

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As in, glazed donuts. Hundreds and hundreds — even thousands — of them are handed out by volunteers as people line up. The donut of choice? Krispy Kremes, although it’s not mandated.

It’s a specifically SoCal tradition that has been happening, some tell me, for at least 20 years.

Unity through donuts

Sweet treats are a staple of Eid across the world.

When family and friends stop over, they are greeted with tables laden with different sweet dishes.

In South Asian households, gulab jamun (fried dough balls swimming in a sugar syrup) take pride of place. Arab families make maamoul, a date mixture pressed between shortbread cookie dough. Cookies, called kuih, are popular in Southeast Asian households, and in Somali homes, halwa is served.

In SoCal, a region with Muslims from many different backgrounds, deciding what a mosque should serve after prayers can be tricky. A donut is a neat solution.

“ We have a very diverse community, so some of the desserts can become a little too ethnic for one group versus the other,” said Alam Akhtar, chairman at the Islamic Society of Orange County. “Donut is that one food that just cuts across all ethnicities and all taste buds.”

It’s also a way for their American identity to come to the fore.

In recent years, the Islamic Society of Orange County has switched to donuts from small businesses that pepper the Little Saigon area.

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Food, Akhtar said, has a way of uniting people from different cultures and plays an important role in celebrations.

 ”Feeding people in general is considered a very spiritual act,” he said. “It brings people together. More hands in a plate has more blessings.”

Last year, the Islamic Society of Orange County mosque in Garden Grove — affectionately called the “mother mosque” of Southern California — decided to change things up a bit and bought pastries from Porto’s Bakery.

It did not go well. People wanted their donuts and made their point of view clear.

 "This year, we're going to aim for donuts again, based on popular demand and the request from the crowd,” said Hassan Mukhlis, the mosque president.

Boxes and boxes of donuts to feed the crowd of 3,000 people.

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Krispy Kreme has been the mosque’s go-to vendor for the past decade or so, but in recent years, it has looked to support a local, small business to buy the 3,000 donuts needed to feed the crowd that gathers. The mosque is located in Little Saigon, an ethnic enclave with predominantly Vietnamese immigrants, so it plans to order from a Vietnamese bakery.

Traditions live on ... with a twist

Aliya Amin grew up attending the Islamic Society of Orange County and went on to teach at its weekend school. She now supplies desserts to the cafe on the mosque’s premises, Barakah Cafe.

The Gulab Jamun Donut available during Eid season at Bakes by Aliya.

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Her earliest memory of the donut lines after Eid prayers were when she was 9 years old. Now, the 29-year-old still says it's not Eid without the donuts. In her specialty microbakery, Bakes by Aliya, she takes the humble food and adds a creative, South Asian twist

Her version, Gulab Jamun Donut, is inspired by a gulab jamun, a fried dough ball that is soaked in a cardamom and saffron sugar syrup.

“ I essentially make a cake donut, which is cardamom cake flavored, and I have the gulab jamun sitting in the middle, and it's like the perfect balance of spiced but sweet,” Amin said.

She offers the donut only during the Eid season. It’s become one of her best sellers.

Donuts are for every age group, she said.

“I'm seeing adults eat it, too, you know, enjoying it just as much as kids,” Amin said.

The gulab jamun donuts have to be preordered by Sunday. To order, click here.