L.A. to experiment with table-scrap collection
Households in Lincoln Heights, Harbor Gateway and South Los Angeles may get a fourth city-issued trash bin for leftover food.
The Los Angeles City Council is expected to move ahead today with an experimental garbage pickup program that would ask residents to take on a fourth city-issued trash container -- a small indoor bin for leftover food, such as coffee grounds, egg shells and uneaten meals.
Council members hope to issue two-gallon kitchen pails to nearly 5,000 households in Lincoln Heights, Harbor Gateway and South Los Angeles, allowing residents in those neighborhoods to separately dispose of tea bags, meat bones and table scraps, as well as "food soiled" materials, such as pizza boxes.
City officials are hoping that participants in the table-scrap collection program will embrace the idea of separating their kitchen waste by dumping it in the new city-issued green pail and later emptying that pail in the city's green 60-gallon curbside bin, which collects leaves, tree branches and other green waste.
"It's really not that big of an imposition to ask them to do this," said Stanton Lewis, an environmental engineering associate with the city's Bureau of Sanitation. "But it is a mind-set change, to take that extra step of putting [leftover food] into our kitchen pail rather than the regular trash bin."
Los Angeles residents already lug three oversized trash bins to the curb -- blue for recycling, green for lawn clippings and black for everything else. Backers of the $140,000 pilot program hope the food waste program will reduce the amount of trash going into the Sunshine Canyon Landfill.
The food scraps will be added to the city's green waste and transported to a composting center near Bakersfield, Lewis said.
City officials say that more than a dozen other California cities, many of them in the San Francisco Bay Area, have successful food-scrap collection programs. If the pilot program in Los Angeles is successful, it will be expanded citywide -- allowing as much as 600 tons to be diverted from landfills, according to a city report.
david.zahniser@latimes.com
