Recycling

Complaints about the massive open-air recycling facility in Sun Valley flow in each month in minute, sometimes stomach-turning detail. Rats have skittered off the property of Community Recycling & Resource Recovery and into a nearby business, according to calls logged by the city. Churning dust is said to be "making everyone's eyes burn," making breathing difficult and causing bloody noses among workers at a neighborhood paving firm. Gulls scavenging from piles of food waste have scattered bits of garbage from the sky. And then there is the stench, variously described in the logs as "a dead animal smell," a "rotten egg odor" and "putrid.

Tickle your wine geek fancy with these wild wine caddies - er, metal art sculptures. Each piece in the wine caddy collection from H & K Recycled Metal Art is one of a kind, made in Europe from recycled steel and/or copper. Some are crazier than others, but all fall in the price range $29 to $119 from winecaddys.com . More than 100 styles available, with more to come. That's why, the company notes,  no two metal sculptures are exactly alike, and may vary from the website images.

SACRAMENTO - Barrels of excess water have been tumbling down the Sacramento River with nowhere to go except the San Francisco Bay and out to sea. To be precise, 58,000 cubic feet of water per second - think of one cubic foot as a basketball - have been rushing past California's capital en route to the Golden Gate. Normal winter flow when it's not storming is around 20,000 cubic feet per second, according to the state's chief hydrologist, Maury Roos. Some of that extra water is needed to flush out the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and bay. And 11,000 cubic feet is being pumped south from the delta, mostly into the San Luis storage reservoir off Pacheco Pass in the San Joaquin Valley.

Christina Winkelmann's booth at the Renegade Craft Fair in L.A. this weekend showcased her holiday wreaths made of vintage Christmas ornaments, but it was her recycled bingo-card gift wrap that had shoppers lined up. The Los Feliz crafter seemed downright embarrassed that so many fairgoers were charmed by something that was more marketing genius than personal artistic expression. Winkelmann said the bingo cards truly were recycled -- picked up during visits to Grandma out in the desert.

As one model powdered her face with some last-minute blush and another frantically tried to perfect her catwalk strut, a thin girl donning a tight, black trash bag started to panic backstage. Mariah Reyes, one of the student designers, rushed over to comfort her jittery classmate. "Four-second inhale, four-second exhale," Reyes said. "Remember, you look fabulous. " The Franklin High School sophomore had started counting the days until her school's Eco-Friendly Fashion Show weeks before it happened.

Fast fashion retailer H&M wants your old clothes. The Swedish clothier is rolling out a global initiative to encourage its shoppers to recycle unwanted outfits instead of throwing them in the trash, H&M said in a statement Thursday. "Every year, tons of textiles are thrown out with domestic waste and end up in landfill. As much as 95% of these clothes could be used again; re-worn, reused or recycled - depending on the state of the garment," H&M said.  H&M will accept clothing from any brand in any condition (now might be a good time to bring out the stained sweatshirts and dozens of cotton T-shirts)

One night past midnight behind Superior Supermarket in the City of Industry, a man was hard at work loading plastic containers into a white truck under the glow of streetlights. It was a sight Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Shelley Jones had observed many times while on patrol, and if it hadn't been for a call she'd received a few days before, she wouldn't have given the man a second glance. A local dairy executive had phoned to report a mysterious phenomenon: Every night, plastic pallets used to distribute goods from warehouses, dairies and farms to stores were disappearing from Southern California businesses by the tens of thousands.

ARVIN, Calif. - Every day, the trucks rumble into the Central Valley by the dozens, chugging over the Grapevine loaded with lawn clippings from Beverly Hills, sewage sludge from Los Angeles and rotting yogurt and vegetables from around Southern California. Los Angeles officials and others say the daily caravan is an essential step toward recycling thousands of tons of urban waste and turning it into compost and fertilizer in California's vast agrarian middle. But increasingly, residents of the Central Valley and other rural areas object to the stream of semis and their unpleasant cargo.

Anyone who's ever lived anywhere probably has done it: bought a can of paint that turned out to be the wrong color and, out of sheer laziness or confusion about what to do, left it sitting in the garage for years. Under the new California Paint Stewardship Program beginning Oct. 19, Californians can bring unused cans of paint to designated retailers and other drop-off sites that have partnered with the organization to recycle them. Customers will also be charged a fee when buying paints to cover some costs of the program.

There's so much waste in a home renovation. Piles of it seemed to grow in our backyard as the weeks of our remodel passed, no matter how much we tried to minimize it. Our designer, Jeremy Levine, came up with a few ideas for reusing what no longer worked in our little 1917 Mid-City house that was getting a much needed update. The one we love most is our desk, which runs along three sides of an alcove off our new kitchen. When we moved into our house about a decade ago, we had the original wood floors re-sanded - and were told it would be the last time that could be done.