Recycling

Sharing lunch with students at the Santa Monica College cafeteria one recent afternoon are a couple hundred thousand lowlife diners that most folks would only be caught dead with. Inside a giant, hydraulically operated bin behind the kitchen, 800,000 red wiggler worms are chowing down, as they do 24 hours a day here and at an increasing number of homes and eco-leaning facilities in Los Angeles. It's part of a makeover as dramatic as anything since a mouse got named Mickey.

State regulators found inadequate environmental safeguards at a Coachella Valley soil recycling company blamed for noxious odors that sickened children at a nearby school but said the mountains of contaminated soil do not pose a serious health threat. Western Environmental Inc., which operates a waste facility on the reservation of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians near Mecca, did not meet California hazardous waste standards "in a number of significant areas," according to a state Department of Toxic Substances Control report released last week.

There's always a place to sit, no matter how many people crowd around Rose Tourje's conference table. The huge table is in the middle of a San Pedro Street warehouse -- one that's full of chairs and other office furnishings. There are large oak-trimmed, leather-padded executive swivel chairs from law offices. Sleek cloth-covered chrome seats from bank employee break rooms. Efficient, armless task chairs from computer workstations. Castoffs all.

A lot has been made of organic cotton and other eco-friendly fabrics made from Tencel, hemp and bamboo as fashion rides the mega-trend of environmentalism. But recycled clothes purchased at thrift and consignment stores, as well as upcycled items reworked from out-of-date castoffs, may be an even greener choice. Almost half of the climate impact of clothing occurs before it reaches consumers. It was this idea I embraced when I hired a wardrobe consultant for a desperately needed eco fashion makeover.

Like the middle-aged businessman who whispers the famous "just one word" to Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," the plastics industry asserts that there's a bright future in recycling. But environmentalists and recycling officials are about as cynical as the Hoffman college grad who ignores the career advice. Major cities like Philadelphia and Newark, N.J., have stopped recycling plastic. Most everything from mustard bottles to yogurt cups to meat wrap still is dumped or burned.

EVER since it was introduced in 1976, VHS tape has steadily and inexorably beaten a path from personal video collections to the landfill. And the pace has quickened noticeably lately, with DVDs increasingly pushing VHS aside. Consumer discards, though, are just the tip of the tape-waste iceberg. Film studios, postproduction facilities, video duplication companies and other industry enterprises are dumping tapes faster than Disney can shed Miramax movies.

Calle Real does not look like a street that has made history. It is just an anonymous frontage road, choked by weeds, beside U.S. 101 on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. But crouch beside the right-turn lane near the bowling alley, study the asphalt, and you will see hundreds of tiny white flecks glistening in the sun--visible evidence that Calle Real was the first street in the country composed of ground-up toilets.

Recycling company Looney Bins will be honored at an event today for its efforts to reuse and recycle surplus materials from Hollywood sets. The Sun Valley-based recycler will receive the CalMAX Connection of the Year Award for customer service and the amount of materials recycled this year. The award is sponsored by the California Integrated Waste Management Board, an agency that manages about 56 million tons of the state's solid waste annually.

At a recycling plant in San Pedro and five other similar operations around California, giant shredding machines annually reduce 1.3 million junk cars, refrigerators and other appliances into fist-sized chunks of metal. Valuable scrap that contains iron is separated so it can be turned back into steel. Hunks of aluminum, copper and other alloys are pulled out for reprocessing.

Mario Ballin found something wrong with the new city recycling program for yard trimmings operating on weekends in Sun Valley. "There's a big thing wrong with this," said Ballin, 34, as he and helpers tossed a quarter ton of mustard grass, dry grass and chaparral off his large truck with pitchforks. "A program like this should have been started a few years ago," he said. "Other than that, it's great. And it's about time."

When the city of Los Angeles held off three years ago on banning single-use, carry-out plastic bags, it missed a chance to be at the forefront of environmentally responsible lawmaking in California. By the time it inexplicably delayed a vote again in December, close to 20 cities as well as Los Angeles County had prohibited stores from providing the bags. And since then, the bags have been banned in more than two dozen additional municipalities in the state. More important, in the last three years tens of millions of plastic carry-out bags - possibly hundreds of millions - have been distributed in Los Angeles.

This storied adobe mansion outside Los Angeles was once a getaway for California's last governor under Mexican rule, a landowner so wealthy he called the nearly 9,000 acres of land around it his "ranchito. " Now, state budget cuts have reduced supporters of Pio Pico State Historic Park to begging for recyclables to cash in to keep the gates to the 1850s landmark from closing. As California moves to close dozens of state parks by July 1 to save money, those fighting to prevent the closures are growing increasingly desperate.

State workplace safety regulators issued more than $166,000 in fines Wednesday against a prominent recycling and compost company that runs a Kern County site where two brothers died last fall from exposure to poisonous gas. "These young workers' deaths were completely preventable," said Ellen Widess, chief of the state Division of Occupational Safety and Health, in a statement. She noted that hydrogen sulfide is a common byproduct of composting but said Community Recycling & Resource Recovery, which is headquartered in the San Fernando Valley, failed to provide workers with proper training, failed to test for dangerous levels of gas and did not have effective rescue procedures.

Darrell Mahler of Topanga thought he was on to something good when he saw an insert with his most recent garbage bill inviting him to apply for a 25% senior discount. Mahler, 72, did the math and realized this would lower his monthly charge from $35.32 to $26.49. But when he contacted the garbage company, Universal Waste Systems, he was told that, as part of the deal, he'd have to replace his 96-cubic-foot bins with 32-cubic-foot bins. Think about that. In return for a 25% cut in his garbage bill, Mahler and his wife would have to accept a nearly 67% reduction in the amount of trash they could dispose of. "They must think all seniors are senile," Mahler told me. I'll let you know in a moment what Universal Waste Systems had to say about this.

The beads were flying all around them, some pooling in the street, some caught by revelers and cherished for a moment — most of them destined, in all likelihood, for the landfill. It was Mardi Gras 2011, and Kirk and Holly Groh were stationed in their family's traditional viewing spot downtown, where they had watched so many parades roll by in years past. This time, they kept thinking what a waste it was. Their hometown had never seemed more environmentally fragile.

The push-back against rampant consumer culture has some new, mechanical muscle: the Swap-O-Matic vending machine, which distributes recycled goods among its users free of cost. Designed by Lina Fenequito -- a Parsons School of Design graduate -- and detailed over at FastCompany , the machine operates using items donated by some users and then snapped up by others. Donors' accounts are given "credits" every time they add to the machine's inventory; they can then "spend" the credits on others' castoffs.

California no longer allows dumping of discarded televisions and computer monitors in landfills because most contain lead and other toxic materials, making them hazardous. There is no state or national program for disposing of electronic waste, so residents looking to get rid of a monitor or television should notify their city governments or local waste haulers. Most cities have periodic hazardous-waste collection events in which they take large trash bins to neighborhoods.

Have you noticed how recycling is all the rage in government? The voters cast down useless politicians, the government recycles them in higher appointed jobs. GLENN C. COLE Bakersfield

Opponents malign it as "toilet to tap. " But a new National Research Council report says that reclaimed water can contribute a growing portion of the nation's drinking water supplies and be as safe as conventional sources. The assessment is especially relevant to Southern California, which has been a pioneer in recharging local aquifers with treated wastewater but still sends most of its runoff and treated water to the Pacific Ocean. A decade ago, public outcry and electoral politics thwarted a Los Angeles plan to partially replenish San Fernando Valley groundwater with recycled supplies.

"Twi"-guy Kellan Lutz's ab-tastic body is about the only thing shown to its best advantage in "A Warrior's Heart," a ho-hum drama whose many moving parts feel decidedly recycled. Lutz plays Conor Sullivan, a cocky, inexplicably hotheaded California high school lacrosse star, who must move east when his career-soldier father (Chris Potter) again uproots the family. But Conor's bullish ways on — and off — his tony new school's lacrosse field intensify when his dad's redeployment to Iraq has tragic consequences.