Thanks to almost a decade of organizing by the Don’t Waste LA coalition, the city of Los Angeles is in the midst of rolling out the largest transformation of a recycling system in American history. The goal is to recycle 90 percent of the city’s waste by 2025. The long-term aspiration is a zero-waste system that “strive[s] to reduce, reuse, or recycle all municipal solid waste materials back into nature or the marketplace.”
California’s Integrated Waste Management Board adopted that goal in November 2001. Although it’s taken Los Angeles more than 15 years to catch up with the new recycLA plan, its environmental impacts will be staggering. Once fully operational, the system will divert one million tons of commercial waste from landfills every year and cut emissions by 2.6 million metric tons — equal to removing 517,000 vehicles from the road. For the first time, all Angelenos — condominium and apartment dwellers, small businesses, everyone —will have the same kind of efficient recycling service that single-family homes now enjoy.
But environmental benefits aren’t the whole story. Labor rights and jobs, community health benefits, environmental justice and food recovery all figure intimately in the story of how the plan took shape and how widely its benefits will be shared.
The Don’t Waste LA coalition was founded by The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, LAANE. It is growing out of conversations with labor and environmental organization partners.
“A lot of zero waste work up until this point had been at the level of what can people do individually in their lives to take responsibility for the waste they are generating?” recalled Hillary Gordon.
Gordon was chairwoman of the Sierra Club’s Zero Waste Committee when she was asked to join.
“What really really impressed me, when I was told about the goal of this coalition, was that this was really addressing it at the systemic level — the huge level of what [do you do] when you have a city as big as Los Angeles, and you got 4 million Angelenos who want to recycle, but have all kinds of impediments in the way of them actually doing so?” Gordon said.
But labor issues were just as compelling, according to Rob Nothoff, LAANE’s director of Waste and Recycling Campaigns. “We took a look at what was happening here within the waste industry…. We found that working conditions were awful. It’s constantly in the top five most dangerous professions in the country.”
“The No. 1 thing was living wage,” said Maurice Thomas, a waste management worker who’s been deeply involved with the coalition. “No. 2 [was] work environment, (which he called, ‘truly unsatisfactory’). We’re in an industry that makes as much as the NFL. The NFL is a $14 billion a year industry…. So why is it that, those who are not properly represented, why are the wages below living wages?
“I’m quite sure that you take your lunch, you wouldn’t want to have to fight off roaches, or rats or mice while you eat…. To be in that kind of work environment, at some time you’re going to get ill and for you to have to have to get a payday loan to go to the doctor,”
The solution turned out to be simple: change the business incentives, by adopting a limited geographic franchise system, with a single waste hauler serving one each of the 11 districts created. It’s similar in logic to the Port of Los Angeles’ original Clean Trucks Program, as well as the majority of already successful recycling systems LAANE found when they surveyed California.
“The highest performing cities were exclusive franchise models: San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, were all exclusive franchises,” Nothoff explained.
“Out of 88 cities in Los Angeles County, at the time, I think it was 67 or 68 were exclusive franchise models. If you want to create a model in which you have a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom, you have to actually create some business certainty in an environment that allows for investment, and super high levels of transparency and accountability.”
It also gave the city a tool for beefing up state labor standards, said Kevin Riley, director of Research and Evaluation at UCLA’s Labor Occupational Safety and Health Program, an early Don’t Waste LA partner.
“We want to reinforce [labor standards] through the language of this ordinance,” he said.
“What the new program is trying to do is essentially level the playing field and take away competition at that level, and say the safety of the workforce is just as important as environmental issues concerns.”
Before recycLA, the city had roughly 125 waste haulers competing for a contract, most engaged in a fierce race to the bottom: Investing in worker safety and training — much less a living wage — ran counter to their whole cost-cutting ethos. The same applied to investing in recycling infrastructure. So they priced recycling prohibitively, leaving millions of Angelinos frustrated.
“It was prohibitively expensive for a lot of the apartment complexes and commercial businesses to recycle,” Nothoff said, because the haulers made it so. “The haulers didn’t have any financial incentive to invest in the infrastructure.”
Cut-throat competition had other negative impacts as well: First, price-cutting for large businesses was offset by high prices for small businesses.
“Small businesses were paying four or five times as much as some of these larger businesses,” Notoff explained.
While big businesses dominated business organizations — like the LA Chamber of Commerce — that opposed the franchise plan, there were many losers, he noted.
“We started to identify some
additional small business partners (who joined the coalition in later stages of struggle),” Notoff said.
Unlimited competition also flooded neighborhoods with repetitive truck trips.
“Different council members were moved by different aspects of the policy,” Nothoff recalled. “We showed Joe Buscaino a map of Gaffey Street, with 10 different haulers on it and that was a real, ‘aha!’ moment for him. It’s patently absurd in 2017 to have 10 different trucks servicing a block that can be just as easily serviced by one truck.”
Repetitive truck trips meant wasted fuel, excess pollution, and increased street maintenance costs, with more than 9,000 times the impact of an SUV.
“The structure of the system was designed to allow these waste companies to direct their dirty trucks to LA, instead of sending their cleaner trucks,” Earthjustice attorney Adrian Martinez said. Only cities with a franchise system were covered by an Air Quality Management District rule requiring the cleaner trucks.
The sheer accumulation of so many different impacts proved overwhelming in the end. But there were positive new promises as well, especially in the areas of recycling food, both composting and food recovery, as described by Claire Fox, executive director of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council.
“A third of municipal waste stream is comprised of organic waste, and a lot of that, the majority of that is food,” Fox said.
Since organic landfill waste produces methane gas, which is roughly 30 times worse than carbon dioxide for global warming, the cost of neglecting it is enormous. But the recycling benefits are huge.
“Food that is post-consumption is really not trash, it’s a resource,” Fox said. “And it needs to be looked at differently…. There’s a very long tradition in the food movement of recovering food that is still edible.”
There also is traditional recycling and new businesses based on using food waste.
“We met a guy who grows crickets on clean food waste streams and he processes the crickets into protein; they create … protein bars and protein cookies, all kinds of weird stuff,” Fox said.
It’s not for everyone, but it doesn’t have to be. But the more options there are, and the more care is built into the system from the beginning, the more will be used for its highest value.
No place in Los Angeles shows the potential impact of recycLA better than Pacoima, home to 14 landfills in the northern San Fernando Valley. Pacoima Beautiful is a 21-year-old environmental justice organization that was an early partner in Don’t Waste LA. Yvette Lopez is its deputy director,
“The presence of landfills alone is enough to cause health impacts on the community members who live here, but they come with other things — the diesel trucks that are traveling to the neighborhood,” Lopez said. “There’s also a lot of community members who work at the site and they weren’t necessarily at some point the safest places to work.”
In short, Pacoima is a low-consumption community bearing the burden of a high-consumption society around it.
“We’ve been conserving, because that’s what we have to do,” Lopez said. “Our incomes are lower, we may not have houses so we are living in smaller spaces that don’t require so much, so much water so much energy or that produce so much waste…. When it comes to waste, we see it come down our street every single day and then you smell it and it’s impacting our lives and impacting our health.”