Feeding Landfills and Hurting Our City

spacer click here to download PDF version

Few industries have a greater impact on communities, the environment and its employees than the waste and recycling industry. While the City of LA effectively handles our residential trash, the system serving LA’s workplaces, businesses and apartments functions without basic standards, resulting in more waste than we can handle without the expansion of toxic landfills or incinerators. In fact, we continue to send millions of tons of waste from our workplaces and apartment complexes to landfills each year.

Until we create a rational trash system that accounts for the impacts of this industry, we risk wasting the city we live in and love.

Our Environment

  • LA businesses and apartment complexes are the region’s biggest contributor to landfills because the existing system offers little incentive to recycle.
  • Many Angelenos don’t have the option of recycling in their workplace or, if they rent, their apartment complex.
  • Many trash haulers use dirty trucks to transfer commercial and apartment complex waste, polluting our streets and air with toxic emissions.

Our Jobs

  • Waste and recycling jobs are dangerous. For example, in 2008, waste and recycling haulers nationally had a higher on-the-job fatality rate than firefighters or police officers.
  • The trash we generate – everything from needles to dead animals – may be sorted by human beings often working without adequate protection for their faces or hands.

Our Communities & Small Businesses

  • Business and apartment complex owners are forced to deal with inconsistent rates and, in some cases, price-gouging for their trash service.
  • Multiple trash haulers serve overlapping routes – so they clog our streets and contribute to unnecessary congestion.
  • The trash that is picked up is likely headed to a facility where local residents are exposed to constant noise, smell, and vermin.

The Don’t Waste LA Coalition is a group of community, environmental, faith and labor organizations, working to establish region-wide standards in the commercial and multi-family waste and recycling industry.

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.