More jobs, cleaner air one trashcan (and recycle bin) at a time in LA

Last week, Los Angeles hosted an environmental stakeholder meeting to discuss potential reform to the way the City handles waste and recycling. This meeting is one in a series of stakeholder meetings that includes business, hauling, labor and community interests.  Overall, environmental organizations endorsed making the current waste collection system more efficient system by moving to an exclusive franchise approach. 

Here’s a brief synopsis of the issue: Despite significant efforts to increase recycling rates, the City still sends somewhere between 3 and 4 million tons of waste to landfills annually.  Approximately 70 percent of this waste comes from large apartment buildings and businesses.  Under the current permit system for apartment buildings (called “multi-family” sector) and businesses (called “commercial” sector), the City cannot effectively create conditions for hauling waste for the city.

Hauling trash is an essential public service and companies providing this service can make a hefty profit.  It appears that pretty much all parties to this debate have conceded that a franchise system makes sense as opposed to the permit system free-for-all that currently exists.  However, the current disagreement centers on whether that franchise is exclusive or not. 

While I don’t agree with the arguments against an exclusive franchise and for increased use of waste-to-energy projects (often called "waste conversion technologies") in Ron Saldana’s op-ed in the LA Business Journal, it crystallizes the point of some of the opponents to an exclusive franchise system.  However, the environmental stakeholder meeting confirmed that environmental groups overwhelmingly support the exclusive franchise model based on this non-exhaustive list of reasons: 

• Increasing our recycling rates reduces harmful air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and creates more jobs.  For every one job in a landfill, there are 10 jobs created through recycling, and even more job creation can happen through reuse of materials.  At the meeting environmental groups argued an exclusive franchise will translate into maximum diversion and recycling because it will result in long-term, comprehensive partnerships – and planning – between hauler, city and community.  It will allow for uniform public education, city or franchise area-wide rate incentives for recycling, and greater investment in diversion infrastructure and goals because the waste company will be competing for, and benefiting from, economies of scale and heightened efficiencies.  This creates the potential for genuinely meeting and even exceeding recycling goals.  It also allows for more oversight to make sure materials are actually recycled.  Currently, the City claims that approximately 70 percent of the waste is being recycled or diverted from landfills; however, because of the nature of the status quo system, we cannot verify that we have actually reached these rates of diversion.  Also, it is a misunderstanding that an exclusive franchise system would not foster competition.  The opposite is true; it would force companies to compete to see who can do better.  It will not just set a floor that companies would need to meet.  
• The City needs a system that minimizes the use and operation of garbage trucks.  Garbage trucks are amongst the most polluting vehicles on the road, getting on average three miles to the gallon.  Under the current system, a block containing many apartment buildings can have more than two companies servicing that same block, which means at least double the trips by these gas guzzling vehicles, double the traffic and double the pollution spewed by the idling trucks.  This wasteful, inefficient practice, increases air and noise pollution and makes our neighborhoods and commercial areas less safe.  While new trucks are cleaner than older trucks, we still need to reduce overall operation because even the newer trucks still emit significant pollution and use precious fuel resources.  As we all know, Los Angeles can ill afford to have more pollution given our poor air quality.  The exclusive franchise ensures only necessary truck trips are made, which prevents overlapping truck routes.   
• Inefficient use of garbage trucks also has impacts on our city streets, which requires use of our scarce city funding.  Pavement Engineering, Inc. estimated that one garbage truck has the equivalent impact of 9,343 Sport Utility Vehicles (see following chart from the Bay Area Pothole Report for June 2011). 

By ensuring more efficient operation of garbage trucks throughout our neighborhoods and commercial district, the City can cut down on overlapping routes, which means it can reduce the potholes that currently scour our streets.  Money spent repaving our streets can now go to better uses like expanding pedestrian and other infrastructure vital to our community.   

Overall, an exclusive franchise with strong standards makes sense for Los Angeles.  It most effectively allows the city to address two goals concurrently; 1) reduce harmful air pollution and 2) recycle more, which will reduce our carbon footprint, create more jobs, and reduce our dependence on space hogging landfills.