Los Angeles 21, New York 5....

AuthorRyan, Megan
PositionRecycling garbage

When city planners examined the waste stream at Los Angeles National Airport, they came to a startling conclusion: out of every ton of Los Angeles municipal garbage dumped at the city's landfill, four pounds consists of disposable paper pillowcases from airplane pillows. This was an exorbitant use of landfill space, but may soon change because the city is arranging to intercept the discards for recycling.

Pillowcases will soon join soda cans, newspapers, and used fast-food grease among the growing number of components being separated out of L.A.'s - and America's - garbage. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recently released progress report on waste management shows that commercial and residential recycling efforts diverted more than 17 percent of America's trash from incinerators and landfills in 1990 - up from 14 percent in 1988.

That's an impressive gain for a country where as recently as three years ago, many communities had no recycling programs at all. But as dumps fill up and close, and new landfills or incinerators are blocked by increasingly fierce resistance, it's still not enough. The recycling rate will have to leap - not creep - to a much higher level if it is to take up the slack. The trouble is, while few people seem to oppose the idea of recycling in principle, making it a central rather than peripheral part of the consumer economy is not proving easy.

The difficulty of making large-scale changes in the way we manage - and think about - trash is dramatically demonstrated by two cities, New York and Los Angeles, which between them generate more than 8 percent of the nation's garbage. Each is facing a garbage crisis, and each is aggressively trying to promote recycling. But the ways they're going about it are quite different, and so are the results. As of 1990, Los Angeles boasted a 21-percent recycling rate, while New York was creeping along at around 5 percent. Both have a long way to go, and not much time to get there.

One reason progress is slow is that Americans still tend to think of garbage as undifferentiated waste - not something they wish to closely examine in its particulars. But whereas municipal planners have looked at garbage as something to burn or bury, recycling requires re-focusing on the stuff as a resource. Instead of looking at how much mass it displaces in a landfill or how many calories it generates in an incinerator, planners need to analyze what is actually in the waste stream. What can be...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT