If you live in an apartment building in Los Angeles (as I do), you may have this sticker on your dumpster:

I first noticed it a few months ago. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I called the number to see what the deal was. Apparently all the trash that gets put into the dumpster is picked up by Crown Disposal and then, instead of heading straight to the landfill, it is dropped off at Community Recycling in Sun Valley. Over the phone, I asked what, exactly, did they recycle. “Paper, plastics, glass, you know, everything.” My first instinct (being a cynic) was suspicion; was this for real or was it just a hollow PR smokescreen to make residents feel like they didn’t have to take responsibility for doing any recycling because it’s all being done for them?

So I asked for a tour. And they said yes.

From the outside, Community Recycling starts with a large, flat expanse covered with huge piles of garbage. Bulldozers move the different piles around while garbage trucks arrive to drop off their precious cargo. Just beyond lies the facility itself, an interesting-looking jumble of structures connected together like a hamster’s habitrail. One box-like structure, a couple of stories up off the ground, is connected to the next by a downward sliding cylinder. Unfortunately, I was only allowed to take one picture while I was there, and here it is:

This is Mr. Basura, who sits in the Community Recycling main offices when not out teaching children about garbage and recycling. I was told this by Nicole, Community Recycling’s PR person, who would be giving the tour to me and couple of other community members. This was going to be the first tour specifically for community members. Nicole had previously been giving them only to schools. Once we’d all arrived, Nicole brought us up to a presentation room where the tour would begin.

At this point, I am going to stop using the word ‘tour.’ Because, as it turned out, the morning consisted mostly of a slideshow that Nicole narrated for us, followed by a brief walk around the outside of the facility on the sidewalk (basically the same view anyone driving by would get). While it was generous for the company to bring us in and give us some information, tour is a bit generous of a word.

The first slide was of a pie chart, labeled 1999 California Waste Characterization. As Nicole explained, the chart represented a breakdown of all the different types of garbage California threw away in 1999. It represented trash not just from residents, but also businesses and industry. Easily the biggest pie slice was Organic Waste, which includes food and yard waste. (The chart may be based off this study by the California Integrated Waste Management Board. According to this study, organic waste also includes rubber, textiles and carpet.) The next biggest slice was Paper. Then C&D (Construction & Demolition). Much smaller were the slices for Plastic, Metal and Glass.

In order to recycle as much as possible, Nicole said, Community Recycling devised three separate processes to handle almost all the different categories.

The first process handles ‘traditional’ waste, which includes the trash collected from my dumpster, along with other residential and office-based garbage. When the garbage trucks drop off the trash, it is first loaded into a trommel, a big cylindrical tumbler that shreds the waste out of the garbage bags and separates it for the next step. The waste leaves the trommel and is loaded onto a conveyor belt where workers pull out whatever looks recyclable.

At this point I asked Nicole about the privacy concerns associated with having people go through every piece of garbage someone throws away. She indicated that there was no hard and fast policy in place, but there were supervisors watching over the workers at all times and the pace of the work doesn’t really allow the trash to be inspected that closely. She did advise that sensitive information should always be shredded before being thrown away.

The workers separate out the recyclables into their appropriate categories: paper, metal, plastic, and glass. These are then pressed into large bales, where they can be sent out to other plants for the actual recycling process.

So once again, we are faced with a bit of a misnomer. Community Recycling doesn’t actually recycle these materials. It sorts waste and sends it along, either to be recycled or (what’s left over) to the landfill. Perhaps we simply haven’t yet thoroughly enough defined the concept of ‘recycling.’ The Community Recycling facility mostly sorts waste and then sends it off to other places. Does that count as recycling? It’s a noble and necessary process either way, but we may need some new terms to parse down the steps of what ultimately is ‘recycling.’

Tangents aside, the bales are sent off to other recycling plants. For the majority of materials, this means a trip overseas.

I asked Nicole about contamination. Doesn’t having all the trash mixed together result in a lower-grade product? Nicole’s answer, which I can’t really argue with, is that if the recycling plants are buying it, it must be good enough. So apparently separating and cleaning the different classes isn’t really that big of a deal for people throwing things away.

The only real piece of advice Nicole had for residents was to hold onto ‘hazardous’ materials. These include batteries and CFLs, which should be recycled at a dedicated center that handles those types of items.

I then asked Nicole how much ‘traditional’ waste gets recycled and how much gets sent along to the landfill. She said about 20% is recycled. It doesn’t sound like much, but it must be remembered that most of the products we use and throw away were never designed to be recycled, as I’ve mentioned in a previous article. Even items that can be recycled, like a plastic bottle, cannot be recycled into new plastic bottles. They are ‘downcycled’ into less valuable plastic items, like park benches or speed bumps. For products that are made from several different classes of items, like a toy with metal gears inside a plastic shell, the work necessary to break the item down is not cost-effective. It gets sent to the landfill.

The second process is exclusively for the ‘organic wastes,’ mostly food. Community Recycling takes the wastes to its composting facility, the biggest in the nation. One hundred and fifty acres of compost. Here the waste is laid down in huge, seven-hundred-yard long mounds. As the composting process takes place, the centers of the mounds reach well over one hundred degrees. The facility has a machine that rolls over the mounds, churning the compost to ensure that every bit is processed.

One of the great things about this process is that most of the waste doesn’t come from you and me. Community Recycling gathers the food waste from those who throw it away the most: restaurants, cafeterias and grocery stores. When produce goes bad, grocery stores load it up into the cardboard boxes in which they receive it and hand it over to Community Recycling. An interesting part of the process is that the food is dumped onto the composting mounds as it is received, boxes and all. These boxes may be laced with plastic or wax, but they’re left on the mounds during the composting process. The big churning machines break up the foreign material into strips, which makes it easy to filter out at the end of the process, resulting in clean, pure compost. It generally takes about three months to get from food to compost. This is sold to local farmers, or used at one of the four thousand acres of Community Recycling-owned farms.

The final process is strictly for C&D. Constructing or demolishing a building results in a completely different kind of waste than living in a home with a family or working in an office, but the opportunity for recycling is still great. The main types of waste from this process are wood, metal and drywall.

The metal is sold off to be melted down and recycled.

The wood is processed into woodchips, which are then transported to one of Community Recycling’s two biomass power facilities in Central California. Together, the two facilities generate over thirty-five megawatts of power.

The drywall is broken down into its component parts, namely paper and gypsum. The paper is recycled and the gypsum is broken down into a dirt-like powder. This powder can then be used for fertilizer or for erosion control because of its excellent water absorption and retention properties.

As one who is familiar with the economic arguments AGAINST recycling (namely that recycled material is more expensive than pure, virgin material), I asked Nicole whether or not the plant pays for itself. Nicole said the plant was owned by a private company and did indeed pay its own way.

At this point, the presentation ended and Nicole led us out of the building to the sidewalk, where we looked at the facility a bit. She showed us a large pile of compost and offered for us to touch it. We declined.

It was a bit anti-climatic, but still an informative morning. As I mentioned earlier, this was the first ‘tour’ specifically for community members. Community Recycling is slowly reaching out to the public, as their currently half-unfinished website demonstrates.

Community Recycling is important not just for the work it does, but also because it demonstrates that recycling can be a successful business in and of itself. As the Revolution progresses, Community Recycling could become a model for others entering the Green Industry.

But for now, it’s just nice knowing my own garbage is going to good use.