HTLA: So… What CAN I Recycle in LA?

Episode 24

Brian De Los Santos  00:00

You probably already know this by now, but we humans produce a lot of trash.

00:05

[music in] [man] Can I throw this can in the trash?

00:07

[woman] Yeah, we have to rinse it out first.

00:08

[man] Are you sure?

00:09

[woman] Yes!

Brian De Los Santos  00:10

In 2018, the US generated more than 292 million tons. That's about five pounds per person per day.

00:18

[man] I have a LaCroix that I know I can recycle.

00:22

[woman] So I've got this plastic container that some parmesan cheese came in. It's got a sticker on the bottom. What do I do with this? Do I have to take off the sticker?

Brian De Los Santos  00:33

Of that trash, 69 million tons were recycled, and 25 million tons were composted. That means we're only recycling about a third of our trash.

00:42

[woman] I do find my roommate putting in some soiled things every now and then. So I secretly transfer it from the recycling to the trash.

Brian De Los Santos  00:53

From LAist Studios, this is How to LA. I'm Brian De Los Santos. [music out] So it's 2022. We all recycle. Like it's the moral thing to do, right? According to the EPA, recycling rates have been steadily rising for decades nationwide. In California, one of the big ways to recycle is through the beverage container deposit program. [music in] But redemption rates have fallen drastically over the last decade. Consumer Watchdog reported earlier this year that we're sitting on $350 million in unclaimed bottle deposit funds. That means more bottles are in the trash. And we've already got more landfills than any other state in the nation. I know. We're supposed to be the green environmentally conscious paradise, right? But there is good news. Some of the recent changes to our state recycling laws might really help boost those rates.

Susan Collins  01:48

It's the biggest expansion that's happened [music out] in 10 years in any state for the bottle bill to exist in the 10 states.

Brian De Los Santos  01:57

That's Susan Collins. She's the president of the Container Recycling Institute, a research and advocacy nonprofit based out of Culver City. We called her up to find out what these new changes might mean. But before we get into that, we wanted to better understand why redemption rates fell in the first place.

Brian De Los Santos  02:13

You know, growing up in a low income household, the way that I got my domingo or my [ ] thing, the money that kids get from their parents. What is it called? Allowance. [laughs] My mom would be like, Oh, you gotta work for it. Go get like, you know, just uh, save up the cans and the, and plastics from the house. And you know, let's go redeem it at the center. I saw that the state's beverage container deposit program had seen a loss of 50% in its redemption containers. What happened there?

Susan Collins  02:39

So yeah, back in 2013, we heard that 100 redemption centers had disappeared. And so we started tracking those numbers very carefully and reporting on them.

Brian De Los Santos  02:49

Susan explained that there were a couple of things going on: instability in the scrap marketplace, plus a major mishandling by our government. To make up for market fluctuations, the state is supposed to subsidize these recycling centers. But state payments can take more than a year to process. So a bunch of centers basically went out of business.

Susan Collins  03:09

It occurred over about a seven year period, but we lost more than 1200 redemption centers in the state. And that was more than 50% of the redemption centers that existed in the state. And it means that entire neighborhoods became redemption deserts, or sometimes it was even entire counties that became redemption deserts.

Brian De Los Santos  03:30

Can you put that a little bit into context of how a redemption center desert can impact communities?

Susan Collins  03:35

You know, I think the most heart wrenching story was one that happened to me personally. Our office is at my house, and sometimes it gets listed as a redemption center on Google or whatever. And there was this man who came to our house. He was completely destitute. He was carrying some cans with him, thinking that he was going to a redemption center, and he was on a bicycle. He thought he was going to be able to, you know, cash in these cans and get some money so that he could eat. And he was pretty much at the point of tears when he got to our house and realized that it wasn't a redemption center because he had been on his bicycle, and he had ridden for 20 miles going to these places that were listed as redemption centers still on the website but had since closed down.

Brian De Los Santos  04:20

So clearly, having these redemption centers is important, because they not only help eliminate trash, but they're also a form of income for some in our city. Let's move on to the recent changes of our California law, this container deposit law.

Susan Collins  04:34

So it's going to take a year for the biggest part of it to kick in because they need time to prepare, but it's a big expansion of the law.

Brian De Los Santos  04:44

It builds on the original bottle bill that was passed in the mid-80s. It includes a major increase in funding to do things like open more redemption sites. And starting January 1st, 2024, Californians can start bringing all of our wine and tequila bottles to these sites. That alone is cause for celebration. There's a twist though. We will be paying 10 cents extra for a bottle of wine or hard liquor. But we can get that money back if we return the bottles to our redemption center, which will really boost recycling rates.

Susan Collins  05:15

That's 300,000 tons of material that won't be going to landfill anymore. And it includes the small 50 milliliter, or 100 milliliter liquor shot bottles that are so frequently littered. So those are gonna be covered by this law, and that should really reduce the littering of those small liquor bottles.

Brian De Los Santos  05:33

That means more recycling in our state and less landfills. Yay! [laughs] But like all things, these changes aren't imperfect. Susan says the only way this can succeed is if we spread the word.

Susan Collins  05:47

I think it's gonna be important for us to educate the public and to continue to talk about this so that they know that these new containers can now be taken to redemption centers. I think that's gonna be a big thing going forward because that's another one of the things that was left out of the bill- was the need for public education. Whenever you have a big change like this, you have to let people know.

Brian De Los Santos  06:04

[music in] So hope we're all motivated now to collect and turn in our plastic water bottles, beer cans, and even the little shot bottles. Help our state's landfills and make a little extra cash. And as new facilities pop up because of the changes to the law, it should be easier for all of us to do that. But all this got us thinking, what about all the other recycling we're putting into the bins at home? Where does it even go in LA? And how is it sorted?

Brian De Los Santos  06:38

So we just pulled up to an LA county [music out] materials recovery facility. I don't really know what that means, but we'll find out today.

Habib Kharrat  06:46

Hi, my name is Habib Kharrat, Solid Waste Operations Manager. I'm gonna have to put some PPE on you. [Brian: Okay.] Protective hard hats, vests. [Brian: That sounds fun.] So you're at the Puente Hills Material Recovery Facility.

Brian De Los Santos  07:01

Habib took us up to the mezzanine overlooking the whole operation. It felt like we were about to board a spaceship. This place is huge.

Habib Kharrat  07:09

Just to give you an idea of the size of this building, it’s 217,000 square feet. So you can fit three jumbo jets in this building.

Brian De Los Santos  07:16

And let me tell you, I don't know if you've ever toured a solid waste sorting facility, but I was not prepared for the smell of our food waste and trash. [facility ambi: people reacting to the smell: "On no." "Not bad. Yeah. It's becoming bad."] But anything for the story, right? [facility ambi continues]

Habib Kharrat  07:34

On the left here is where the recyclables are placed, and as you can see, there's an excavator that's picking up the recyclables.

Brian De Los Santos  07:41

We got the chance to ask Habib some burning questions we all have had about recycling. Like, do I really have to wash out my plastic spinach containers before throwing them in a blue bin?

Habib Kharrat  07:50

Correct. The least amount of food that's in your recyclables, the better. But if somebody was to say, I've got a peanut butter jar, and now they got to rinse it three, four times before it's clean, then there's a big question. Okay, well then are you using too much water to do that? And is it better off, you know, throwing it away? I don't know what the answer is. But these are the questions that are coming up.

Brian De Los Santos  08:10

Habib explained a lot of what's happening here is sorting out materials that are contaminated with bits of food or whatever, and therefore it can't be recycled. This is because the countries that take up our recycling, places like Laos and Bangladesh, have contamination requirements that have gotten stricter in recent years. And as of now, only .5% contamination is allowed in each item.

Habib Kharrat  08:30

[facility ambi] At the very end when the material's coming in clean, if there's anything still dirty, a robot will recognize it and remove it.

Brian De Los Santos  08:38

Okay, now we're heading down the sort line with Habib.

Habib Kharrat  08:42

These optical sorters use infrared technology to detect the type of material that's coming through and also recovers it to a separate stream to make sure that it's cleaner. Right up there is a magnet. It'll pick up all the metals. In the distance over there you see the cardboard.

Brian De Los Santos  08:59

And let me tell you the smell that we're all complaining about is so much stronger down here.

Habib Kharrat  09:06

Then you've got other trucks that come in here that might have food waste, and then the food waste goes into the big blender, and it gets blended into uh, slurry form. And then tanker trucks will come and take this food waste slurry down to our wastewater treatment plant in the city of Carson. And we have discovered that it has doubled the gas production of methane by adding food waste to the biosolids digestion at the, at the wastewater treatment plant. With that gas we produce electricity. We've also used that gas to fuel natural gas vehicles. That truck is ready to go, and it's getting weighed before it leaves.

Brian De Los Santos  09:49

I don't know about y'all, but it was pretty interesting to find out that the methane produced by our rotten vegetables can help power our cars. [facility ambi] After the materials are sorted and packed here, where do they go?

Habib Kharrat  10:00

Um, we have brokers, that bid on our commodities. We'll tell 'em we've got X number of tons of aluminum, please give us your price, and multiple brokers will bid on them. Some of them could be here in the United States where they end up in getting recycled. A lot of 'em go to the Asian Pacific Rim.

Brian De Los Santos  10:19

What other things would you advise people who are not really into recycling, but they're like, Okay, let me try it, especially now that there's messaging of waste and, and climate change and more things to come.

Habib Kharrat  10:31

So I think the misnomer mostly is people think that you know, anything that's not you know, food or trash, your what not, you can put into your recyclables bin. Well, that's not correct, because some of the material could be hazardous. What used to go into the blue bin 10 years ago might be different than what goes in today. If people threw a box, you know, of pizza, and maybe left a piece of pizza in there, maybe it wasn't such a big deal. Nowadays, that is a big deal. The entire box has to go to trash. If there's one piece of pizza in that bin, that pizza like squishes out and then contaminates all the other clean stuff that's with it. And therefore we can't sell that material and we cannot recycle it.

Brian De Los Santos  11:12

Can one household really help out when it comes to the work of climate change, or just you know, reducing waste?

Habib Kharrat  11:20

Every person can help out, no doubt. Different cities have different programs. Sometimes they're blue bin, sometimes they're brown bin. You've got the green waste bin. The regulations are changing, the [music in] standards are changing. So it's really up to the cities to, to um, inform and educate the residents in terms of what goes into each bin.

Brian De Los Santos  11:42

Okay, I'm going to buy an air freshener for my car. [laughter] [man adds: And lunch.] [woman says: I want to get in the shower. Thank you! Wow.]

Brian De Los Santos  11:53

Okay, folks. School is over. Pro tip. When you tour a recycling facility, try to wear some sneakers and not your new Doc Martens like I did. I don't know about you, but I'm feeling motivated to do a little bit more recycling at home. At least I know what to wash out and where to place things. That's it for How to LA. I'm Brian De Los Santos. See you next time.

Brian De Los Santos  12:18

Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes LA a better place to live. This program is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people. [music out]