L.A.'s trash industry gets ready to rumble

February 12, 2012
By Kate Linthicum and Jessica Garrison, Los Angeles Times

A war over trash is about to break out at Los Angeles City Hall. And the ensuing lobbying is expected to be long and costly, with the outcome potentially affecting residents, businesses, workers and a quarter-billion-dollar-a-year industry across the city.


The opening clash is set for Monday, when labor and environmental groups will square off against waste haulers and business interests to determine how trash is picked up from tens of thousands of the city's businesses and large apartment buildings.

City workers run the largest trash collection system in the nation, serving more than a half a million single-family homes and 220,000 small apartment buildings. But large apartment buildings and businesses are a different story. For generations, private trash haulers have vied for a share of the $224-million-a-year waste collection market there and at factories, schools, strip malls and office towers.

Now, a labor-allied group wants to reinvent that system by assigning exclusive commercial and apartment trash pickup rights to a handful of top bidders in 11 newly drawn franchise zones. City sanitation officials support the plan, which the Board of Public Works will take up Mondaybefore it begins moving through the City Council vetting process.

Union and environmental groups say the new system would increase recycling and ease traffic and pollution caused when hordes of heavy trucks from competing companies crisscross neighborhoods to serve scattered customers. They say it would also ensure safer, more humane working conditions for thousands of truck drivers and those working in rank recycling and trash-sorting facilities.

"It's about accountability," said Greg Good, who is pushing the issue for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, a group tied to organized labor. "The more companies operating, the less information the city has, the less accountability."

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