Landfills

BottleHood co-founder Steve Cherry describes the company he started with Leslie Tiano as "tree-hugger meets high-tech entrepreneur." The San Diego start-up employs local labor to turn blue, green, brown and clear glass bottles into tumblers, vases and other items. About 80% of all wine bottles end up in landfills, Cherry says, because they don't have a California redemption value (CRV). "When you realize that glass takes 4,000 years to decompose, burying it is not a sustainable solution," he says.

SACRAMENTO - A key state Senate committee has blessed a compromise among bedding manufacturers, environmentalists and local governments about how best to keep about 2 million used mattresses a year from being dumped on California streets or into landfills. Still to be determined is exactly what kind of consumer fee or tax would be levied on mattress and box spring purchases, which manufacturers have estimated might be around $25. The money would create a first-in-the-nation "recovery and recycling" program that would be run by the mattress industry and overseen by California regulators.

Landfills, with the tendency to belch noxious greenhouse gases, have long gotten a bad rap from environmentalists. But now several clean-power technology companies believe waste can be a source of environmentally friendly energy. FlexEnergy, an Irvine company, showed off a pilot generator Thursday that converts previously unusable methane gas seeping from a Riverside County landfill into 100 kilowatts of electricity. That could be used to help run the sprawling landfill operations or light up more than 100 homes.

Upcycled fashion is no longer just for hard-core environmentalists. The idea of wearing items made from cast-off skateboards, inner tubes, plastic trash bags, car seat belts - even wartime bombs and bullets - is no longer considered bizarre but beautiful, as consumers pick up today's conservationist zeitgeist. "Upcycling" means taking something disposable and creating something of higher value with it - making a purse from a tire, for instance. (Recycling, on the other hand, decomposes items into materials that can then be used to create something else, such as turning wood chips into paper.)

In response to Howard C. Lockwood's letter regarding the new fees being imposed by the city of Los Angeles for residents who put out more than two rubbish cans per week, we need to realize that trash service is like any other utility--water, electricity, natural gas, etc. Those who use the most should pay the most. Although we have a third of an acre of land, our family puts out less than one can per week, and we should not have to pay the same collection fees as those who put out many more.

How quickly we forget! The article "Plan to Import Trash Causes Stink on Panel" (April 9) explains that our officials have come up with a clever way to balance the budget. That is to increase the amount of trash in our landfills, by selling the excess capacity to San Diego and Los Angeles counties. Justification for this scheme is that 10,000 tons a day of imported garbage for the next five years could generate $520 million in revenues. But the down side is that it would shorten our 44-year landfill life span by two years.

Mayor Tom Bradley, reviving a proposal that once cost a predecessor his job, announced a comprehensive trash recycling program Friday aimed at cutting by nearly half the amount of garbage destined for landfills. If enacted by the City Council, as expected, the plan would require residents of all 720,000 houses and small apartment buildings in the city to put their glass and plastic bottles, aluminum cans, newspaper and yard wastes into separate containers for garbage collection.

What a farce! Orange County officials want to take Los Angeles County's trash because a local hauler doesn't want to pay the high prices and has cut a better deal elsewhere. Orange County residents have spent a lot of time, energy and money to implement recycling programs, to save space in our landfills and work toward meeting the state-mandated goals of AB 939. I suggest Orange County officials start acting like any other astute business owner and start cutting back on its expenses to offset the decrease in its revenue.

Everybody loves solar, the shiny superstar of renewable energy. But scratch the surface of the manufacturing process and the green sheen disappears. Vast amounts of fossil fuels are used to produce and transport panels. Solar cells contain toxic materials. Some components can't be easily recycled. That has some environmentalists worried about a new tidal wave of hazardous waste headed for the nation's landfills when panels eventually wear out. A report to be released today by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition warns that the industry and lawmakers need to set policies now to ensure that a clean technology doesn't leave a dirty legacy.

As search teams again picked through dense park foliage Tuesday for clues in Chandra Levy's disappearance, District of Columbia police officials scuttled their plans to search the city's landfills. The ambitious search would have been too costly to mount--nearly $32 million, a police spokesman said. "It turned out to be just not practical for us," said D.C. Police Sgt. Joe Gentile.

Woe to the thirsty of Concord, Mass. Under a bylaw born of convoluted reasoning, a person who heads into a store in that town for some hydration will be able to buy a plastic bottle of soda, but not a similar bottle of what dietitians say should be the drink of choice: water. That's because Concord has become the first city in the United States to ban the sale of serving-size bottled water. It's enough to make New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose proposed ban on the sale of large servings of soda is up for a key vote this week, weep.

West Hollywood has become the latest in a string of California cities - including Santa Monica, Long Beach and Pasadena - to ban single-use plastic bags at store checkout lines. The City Council adopted an ordinance Monday night prohibiting hundreds of pharmacies and grocery and retail stores - including clothing stores and newsstands - in the 1.9-square-mile city from distributing the bags. The ordinance was approved as part of the council's consent calendar, along with routine items.

BEIRUT - At least 60 charred bodies were found Thursday in a suburb of the Syrian capital of Damascus in what activists described as another massacre committed by government forces. The bodies, all with their hands tied behind their backs, were found in a landfill in Qatna. Online video showed twisted corpses, some of them still burning. Hours after the discovery, opposition activists were still trying to find out who the victims were and what happened. Those slain in Qatna were among an estimated 200 people killed across Syria on Thursday as the daily death toll in the ongoing conflict between opposition fighters and President Bashar Assad's forces continues to rise.

Los Angeles County voters face two tax measures on the June 5 ballot, and they are unusual for several reasons: They ratify taxes that are already in place and have been for more than two decades; the taxes apply only in unincorporated areas of the county; and all residents benefit from the taxes although few ever will have occasion to actually pay them. Measure H keeps the hotel tax in place at its current level. Measure L keeps a tax on landfill operators in place. H for hotels, L for landfills.

A man suspected of killing his girlfriend and their two young sons is in jail while authorities continue searching for the bodies after unsuccessfully combing an Orange County landfill Friday. Shazer Limas, 31, of Orange was booked on suspicion of murder in the deaths of Arlet Hernandez, 31, and their sons — a 2-year-old and a 3-month-old. Limas was arrested late Thursday after a long police chase and standoff that closed Interstate 5 in north San Diego County near the San Onofre nuclear plant, backing up traffic for miles in both directions.

The search for a missing 6-year-old girl continued in Tucson on Tuesday as authorities canvassed her neighborhood again and began a search in a city landfill. Isabel Mercedes Celis was reported missing Saturday when her family went into her bedroom to wake her up around 8 a.m., officials said. Police were called at 8:14 a.m. and were not able to determine whether the girl was kidnapped or if she had wandered off on her own, they said. Within minutes, a widespread search began involving the U.S. marshals and the FBI. A dislodged window screen turned up during the weekend investigation, though authorities would not disclose what window it came from.

Why do you devote so much space to Nicholson--particularly to his post-articulate ramblings on the subject of post-literacy? The landfills are choked with actor interviews like these. NICHOLAS A. HORMANN Pasadena

The dilemma of our times: Do I put the garbage through the garbage disposal and use precious water or do I put the garbage in the trash and overburden the precious landfills? LILLIAN JENKINS, Culver City

NEW DELHI - The children didn't notice the ravens and occasional vulture circling overhead, or the stream of black ooze that flowed nearby, or the inescapable stench of decay. They were squealing over a 4-cent ride on a small, hand-powered Ferris wheel. The kids are growing up in New Delhi's 70-acre Ghazipur landfill, a post-apocalyptic world where hundreds of pickers climb a 100-foot-high trash pile daily, dodging and occasionally dying beneath belching bulldozers that reshape the putrid landscape.

Dennis Montano stood on a corner in Granada Hills one recent brisk morning, lifted his nose to the sky and sniffed. "Right now, I don't smell anything," Montano said. That was good news for the embattled Sunshine Canyon Landfill. The disposal site operates roughly a mile away in Sylmar but has roiled the Granada Hills North neighborhood with a potpourri of foul smells. In the face of numerous complaints and dozens of public nuisance violations, the company has organized an "odor patrol team" in an effort to improve community relations and comply with state regulations.