CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 21, 2010 | By Maria L. La Ganga
David de Rothschild is talking trash, lots and lots of trash. "There were 25 billion Styrofoam cups used last year. How do you even get your head around what 25 billion Styrofoam cups looks like?" he said. "Eighty-odd percent of what's purchased by Americans is thrown out within six months." On this day, though, the British banking heir is focused on some very particular refuse as he skims along the San Francisco Bay in a catamaran called Plastiki: The 12,000 or so recycled soda bottles lashed together to build his clunky vessel, and the growing heap of plastic fragments called the Eastern Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
February 4, 2010 | By Maeve Reston
In a chaotic eight-hour budget hearing Wednesday, members of the Los Angeles City Council set aside a slew of budget proposals designed to prevent the city from going bankrupt. But they did approve a reduction to one subsidy program that covers the trash fees of at least 58,395 low-income senior citizens and disabled residents in Los Angeles. Most Los Angeles customers who live in single-family homes pay $36.32 per month in trash and recycling fees, while apartment dwellers pay $24.33, according to city officials.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
January 25, 2010 | By Corina Knoll
Tina Cassar spent last week watching rain flood her backyard and overflow from her pool. So when the sun came out Sunday morning, the Los Alamitos resident took her family for brunch and a stroll along Seal Beach. There they encountered a stretch of sand littered with mangled shopping carts, bicycle tires, tennis shoes and thousands of plastic cups and bottles. "It's awful," Cassar, 37, said as she walked along the shore. "It just shows what kind of pollution comes through the river system."
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 29, 2009 | By Mike Anton
There's an unexpected beauty to this pile of junk as a troupe of heavy equipment performs its daily dance. Dump trucks cough up their contents and glide away. Bulldozers swoop in from behind, and piles of lumber, cardboard, plastic and half-eaten food roll off their blades like sets of ocean waves. The noise at the Puente Hills Landfill, one of the nation's largest garbage heaps, is unrelenting. The air is slightly sweet with decay. The ground pulses like an earthquake. Big Mike wades into the mess.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
December 11, 2009 | By Bettina Boxall
Regional water quality officials on Thursday put some teeth into their long campaign to cleanse the Los Angeles River system of the tons of trash that turn it into a movable landfill after major storms. Standards previously adopted by the Los Angeles Water Quality Control Board give cities along the watershed until 2016 to keep all trash out of their storm drains. On Thursday, the board incorporated those limits into storm water permits, putting municipalities that don't meet the requirements in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. Until now there had been no penalty for noncompliance.
WORLD
December 6, 2009 | By Henry Chu
Something is rotting in the state of Denmark. Lots of things, actually, and it's a bit of an embarrassment for this Scandinavian nation as it prepares to host a widely anticipated global environmental summit this week. Denmark is proud of its image as one of the greenest countries in the world; it's probably why it was chosen as the site of the 15th United Nations Conference on Climate Change. But beneath the gloss lurk some inconvenient truths, including the fact that, pound for pound, Denmark produces more trash per capita than any other country in the 27-member European Union.