Here's all about:

LA's Dumps - How should we handle our trash?

The issue:

Los Angeles produces many tons of garbage every day ... and has been in the process of deciding how to deal with it.

It's been proposed that the Sunshine Canyon landfill be significantly expanded, even though it's at capacity already.

One of our LANCissues members, Kim Thompson of the Granada Hills North Neighborhood Council, lives next to the dump. She feels this is a Citywide issue, and one which every Neighborhood Council should be aware of ... because everyone in the City has a stake in helping determine how LA will handle its trash.

Kim offers the Material Recovery Facility as an alternative that makes sense.

Below you'll find Ms. Thompson's article, a recent Editorial from the LA Daily News, and a third article by Wayde Hunter, President North Valley Coalition, an Environmental Affairs Commissioner City of Los Angeles, and a Member of Mayor James Hahn's Landfill Oversight Committee.

Please use these materials to begin to educate yourself about the issue ... and let Kim know if your Neighborhood Council needs more info, or decides to take a stand ...

---

Alternatives to Sunshine Canyon Dump
How about a Material Recovery Facility?

Why neighborhood councils should care ...

Nobody wants to live next to a dump.

But unfortunately, I do.

It's been a long hard battle for the residents of Granada Hills. We've been fighting Sunshine Canyon Landfill since before the L.A. City Councilmembers voted to expand it in 1999.

Browning Ferris Industries (BFI) is the owner of the landfill. In the last few months of 1999, BFI lobbyists spent over $600,000 trying to get Sunshine Canyon expanded.

I believe neighborhood councils will become a powerful force. But it's silly to waste that power on each individual neighborhood council only when we have the ability to take on "city hall" if we want to, if we stick together and learn about issues that don't affect us at all ... and if we know about them.

Sunshine Canyon is part of the problem of the entire city and most people don't even know it.

It sits next to the city's largest water reservoir, which supplies water to 19 million people. It brings in so many trucks a day that there is a higher incidence of asthma and respiratory problems in nearby residents. Half of the dump isn't lined and the other half is lined with something equal to a Glad garbage bag.

Are you feeling safer about our ground water supply?

Then there will be the anticipated cost of the clean up process when the dunp is finally closed, which will be a burden to our children in 25 -50 years. The landfill owners will be long gone and we'll be left with contaminated groundwater and a potential toxic clean up site.

Everyone in this city should be outraged at the politicians who've received money to show favor toward the expansion of Sunshine Canyon.

There was a time in the first part of the 20th century when L.A. faced problems like corruption, bad politicians and no basic infrastructure, and the citizens rose up to institute many reforms, such as initiative, referendum, etc. Most of these reforms ended up being adopted by the state and then later, the nation. Los Angeles was positive and progressive as it paved the way for others.

What can we so?

It's time to band together in L.A. and get all dumps out of urban neighborhoods.

Neighborhood council stakeholders ask us two questiins ... what are the alternatives and what are the costs? There's no one answer to either question. It's a multi track problem with many different possible solutions. There are numeroud components that will cost money, but not as much as you'll be told in glossy mailers or perfected power point presentations.

Mayor Hahn has promised the residents of the North Valley that he did NOT believe dumps belonged in urban neighborhoods. He vowed he would not renew the contract between BFI and the City of L.A., and one of the first things he did was to form a Task Force On Alternatives. Most of their suggestions to the Mayor have begun to be implemented.

One of the first parts of the problem is recycling. Only 55% of the citizens of L.A. recycle ... but commercial and multi unit apartment buildings don't. The Mayor started a pilot program in 100,000 of these buildings. Soon, we'll get the results of how much recycling the various haulers were able to generate, and we'll go from there.

Material Recovery Facility

Another alternative to the archaic idea of burying trash is called a Material Recovery Facility. (MRF) This is a little more short term because it still uses landfills.

MRF's are haulers who take the trash, put it on a conveyor belt, pull out all of the recyclable material and send what small amount is left to a landfill. They pull out very large percentages of recyclable material.

The County owns a landfill in Mesquite that is far away and is not in a populated area. There are no residents nearby. They are permitted and ready to take trash. Refuse could be hauled there by train, if there were MRF's sited near railroads.

This ensures that what is going to a landfill is safe.

Other alternatives

An even better, but very expensive alternative, is some sort of conversion to energy operation which would allow us to generate electricity.

There are several contractors with ideas about alternatives and techniques. The city must listen to them. We must actively seek out alternative methods of disposing trash.

Europe is planning to stop land fills after 2015. It a shame they'll be ahead of the United States.

How can Neighborhood Councils help?

BFI is visiting Neighborhood Councils to present their power point presentation, which leads stakholders to believe that they are runing an environmentally sound landflill. But they are inflating the costs of alternatives, and NC's should not be intimidated by their threats.

Informed community activists have been working on this issue for 20 years. So when someone from Granada Hills North Neighborhood Council comes to you asking for your support, please listen carfully. These residents are supported by the Congressman, Assemblyman, County Supervisor, Mayor, City Attorney, City Councilman and other neighborhood councils.

We will answer your questions. We will ask that community impact statements be sent to all Councilmembers and the Mayor. We will want you to tell them that you do not want the city's contract to be renewed with BFI.

This can only work with the help of the entire city. Eliminating urbal landfills is a citywide issue.

And someday, the residents of Granada Hills will be right there beside you when you need them ... because it's the right thing to do.

Kim Thompson
kimthompson@socal.rr.com
Granada Hills North Neighborhood Council

LA Daily News Editorial Sunday, September 12, 2004 Cancer connection? Dump neighbors have higher rate of cancer than others Maybe it's mere coincidence that the cancer rate in a Granada Hills neighborhood near Sunshine Canyon Landfill is more than double that of a similar Chatsworth neighborhood farther away. Maybe it's not. But the higher incidence of cancer uncovered in a recent survey is something county health officials shouldn't discount. It's never been easy to make a direct link from cancer to a cause. But there's enough evidence to suggest that the finding ought to be considered in the larger scope of the impact study. It's likely that no one will ever demonstrate a direct, indisputable link between those cancers and the proximity of tons and tons of garbage, but common sense says it shouldn't be ruled out altogether. The underlying truth is that, cancer or not, dumps and neighborhoods still don't mix.

Trash Crisis - Another Urban Myth

There is simply no shortage of places to put LA's trash. In fact, many local and out-of-state companies are even now fighting for it and expending great sums on legions of lobbyists and swelling the campaign funds of politicians. All this to get our garbage.

Why would anyone want LA's garbage, you might rightfully ask? The answer is that historically premiere motivator--money. Once more the smoke and mirror experts are again applying their craft, this time it's to statistics. Now the waste giants, BFI (Allied Waste) and Waste Management are trying to show that the only way to save the City money is to keep on dumping at Sunshine Canyon and Bradley landfills. They have submitted unreliable and inaccurate numbers. But, as the Chief Analysts for the City, Ron Deaton who can put a spin on anything said: "It's not as necessary to be right as it is to be definite."

In the case of Sunshine Canyon, we were naively optimistic, believing that no one in their right mind would put a mega-dump directly adjacent to the largest water treatment and storage facility in the nation, or allow the destruction of an oak forest containing over 4000 "protected" oak trees. Unfortunately, we failed to recognize the power of money to corrupt a city, and to corrupt it absolutely. The phrase "trash crisis" was the invented by the industry to persuade us to believe that we would be sitting amid decaying crud, if their urban dump projects were not approved. Money flowed and approvals were issued. As for Bradley, the Los Angeles County Integrated Waste Management Task Force has weighed in and said that: "Bradley Landfill and the city of Los Angeles didn't follow proper steps six years ago when the dump was given permission to raise its height 10 feet and slightly increase capacity."

The sadder but wiser now, we invite you to see how we came to the revelation that there was no crisis and that alternatives abound. Shortly after Jim Hahn came into office, he appointed a Landfill Oversight Committee (LOC) to provide him with recommendations toward establishing a trash policy for LA. The mayor appointed a number of persons living near these landfills as part of that committee, to represent the people most impacted by them. We won't go into the unfortunate plight of those who live near these creeping, cancerous monsters on the land, since such a description would take up an entire supplement to this paper. Suffice to say, we were more than eager to find alternatives which we at first assumed would be hard to find.

Surprisingly, we found these alternative technologies appeared to be abundant. Each week brought calls and visits from salesmen bearing video tapes and glossy folders, produced by companies who were anxious to take City trash and turn it into all sorts of useable products. They were even willing to build the necessary facilities at no cost to the City in return for: City support, a place to locate the facility, and a guaranteed wastestream. We asked hard questions about the environmental impacts, and many of these companies were more than willing to guarantee closed systems; systems that would not vent into the air the gases which are now constantly escaping into the air and/or are being incinerated at our landfills.

We were also astounded by the hundreds of recycling facilities that are already operational in the City, and who would be happy to expand operations, and to increase the diversity of the products they recycle. Some estimated that they could recycle more than 90% of the trash. We visited recycling plants and found some to be smelly and some to be clean. We slapped on sun-screen and visited remote sites, in desert locations to assure ourselves that they were far from people. Why, we wondered didn't LA take advantage of these offers? Again the answer was money. Private haulers head for the cheapest dumps, not the recycleries where saving resources is a priority, and sorting makes it more expensive. Nothing will change this until fees are imposed on unrecycled trash, and the price of disposal by recycling leveled.

The LOC took their mandate seriously. Among the plans that the committee ultimately emerged with was to build in each of the six designated wasteshed areas of the city, a materials-recovery facility (MRF) and a transfer-station that would recycle all materials before rail-hauling any residual waste to remote locations far from people. The Mayor accepted the plan and the committee's recommendation to close landfills in the City when its contracts expired in 2006. Now, some of the politicians are waffling. They opine that if everyone else is still going to send their trash to Sunshine, why shouldn't we, since it's so cheap. Their reasoning that doing the wrong thing is OK, because everyone else is going to do it, doesn't hold up with any responsible parent, and shouldn't reflect the ethics of our City.

Through recycling, rather than dumping, we will be able to save irreplaceable resources. This would ultimately save the costs of the cleanup of these landfills, whose incineration of gases compromises air quality, whose location poses a significant threat to the water supply, and which will continue to pollute decades after closure.

We want the City to stand firm in its resolve to build only transfer stations that have the capability of recycling all the trash before it is transferred. The City must locate these equitably throughout the city, so that no one area bears more than its share. The City should seek price-leveling by putting their current franchise fees only on unrecycled trash. And, oh yes, we want the 55% of L.A. that doesn't recycle (apartments and commercial) be included into the citywide recycling program as soon as possible. When we lose, we lose forever our precious natural resources, and we throw away not only trash, but also our children's heritage.

Wayde Hunter
Granada Hills

-President North Valley Coalition
-Environmental Affairs Commissioner City of Los Angeles
-Member Mayor James Hahn's Landfill Oversight Committee

For more info contact: Kim Thompson Granada Hills North NC kimthompson@socal.rr.com .