By Katherine Gould
This article appeared in the April 22, 2005, edition of the Crescenta Valley Sun.
Jay Freligh drives his Monday trash truck route through southern La Crescenta. As he approaches one house, a man emerges, coffee cup in hand, and watches as the truck's hydraulic arm grabs a trash can.
"That's a heavy one," Freligh says, watching as the strap in the hydraulic arm stretches against the weight of the can. When the can returns to the ground, the resident asks Freligh if he can refill the can with more broken flowerpots.
Freligh is supposed to say no. Customers are supposed to be charged for extra dumps. But the morning's load has been light so far, and the customer isn't asking for a huge amount. Freligh turns a blind eye to the rules and says, "Sure." The relieved homeowner puts down his coffee cup and picks up the flowerpots.
Freligh dumps the can again, gives a small wave, gets a wave and a thank-you in return, and drives on.
The city of Glendale employee sees few residents as he drives his routes through Glendale; mostly driving a trash truck is a solitary job. Automated trucks with hydraulic arms enable one driver to cover each route, so Freligh, like the other 15 drivers of the city's automated trucks, drives alone. He keeps the radio tuned to a country music station, and the city radio tuned to the chatter of his co-workers. They fight with the rumble of the diesel engine and the whine of the hydraulic arm for his ears' attention.
He works methodically, steering with his right hand, pushing the buttons that control the grabbing arm with his left hand, watching the arm and the cans in two rear-view mirrors. "It's sort of like playing a video game," he says.
When Freligh first worked this job, trash collection was hard physical labor. "In those days, I was in much better shape," jokes Freligh, now 51. He left the city's payroll for years, but returned when he got a bit older and started thinking about a pension.
Today, Freligh gets exercise walking the mile from the Metrolink station to the Integrated Waste Management Section yard on Chevy Chase Drive. Some waste management workers still do physical labor, positioning dumpsters and collecting bulky items, but automation has made most of the work much easier.
After collecting the trash from the brown barrels on his route, Freligh heads over to Scholl Canyon Landfill, located atop the hills overlooking Eagle Rock. He pulls into a line of trucks waiting at scales, with an expansive view of Glendale and the Los Angeles Basin below.
Ninety percent of Scholl Canyon Landfill is owned by the city of Glendale, with the remainder owned by the county. It is operated by the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, a conglomerate of agencies that together serve about half the county of Los Angeles.
After his load is weighed, Freligh drives up dirt roads that wind through the green hillsides of the landfill to the area where today's trash is being dumped. This is the only area of the landfill that smells bad. Here, the air is heavy with the thick odor of rotting food. Freligh backs up to the pile, raises the front of the truck's holding area and opens the tailgate on the back. He slowly drives forward as eight tons of trash pours out the back.
Returning to La Crescenta, he drives his route again to collect green waste. Normally, drivers cover their routes three times -- once for trash, once for recycling and once for green waste. Because the small La Crescenta lots generate little green waste, Freligh has arranged to share routes with another driver. He'll collect all the green, the other will collect all the recyclables.
As the cans dump into the truck's hopper, the opening at the top of the truck, Freligh watches for trash mixed in with the green waste. If it's there, he'll have to fish it out at the landfill, or his load won't be labeled clean and the city will have to pay the highest rate to dump it. Customers who habitually mix waste in the recycling or green bins get their bins tagged with yellow cards. Later, the customer will receive a letter from the city. Repeat offenders may have their cans taken away.
"If they're contaminating it, that's not recycling. They're just using it as an extra trash can," Freligh says, grumbling as he watches a can full of trash dump into the hopper. But he knows the customer is normally compliant, so he doesn't tag the can. Near the end of the two routes, Freligh's truck is full. He lifts the truckbed and even gets in the hopper to crush the load himself, but can't make room for the last 12 cans.
He returns to the landfill, loaded this time with nearly 11 tons of lawn trimmings, small tree limbs and weeds. He dumps the load with the rest of the green waste, then gets out of the truck to fish plastic bags and a milk carton out of the pile. His receipt is stamped clean. "I don't think [customers] realize we have to go through the green waste and put it back in the truck," he says.
At Scholl Canyon, 10 percent of the green waste is composted for an avocado farm. The rest is ground up and used, along with clean dirt, which the landfill accepts for free, to cover the more than 1,000 tons of trash received each day. The cover keeps the lightweight trash from blowing away, holds in bad odors, and eliminates oxygen inside the trash pile, killing any rodents and preventing fires, says Joe Haworth, a spokesman for the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, which operates Scholl Canyon and two other publicly owned landfills in Los Angeles County. Covering the trash is one thing that distinguishes a dump from a sanitary landfill.
Another is the complex system of pipes that draw gas from the rotting refuse. Scholl Canyon produces about 8,000 cubic feet per minute of carbon dioxide and methane gas, which is transported to Glendale's Grayson Power Plant to help provide power to the city.
This clean and relatively odorless trash processing is a product of the last 20 years or so of innovation, says Haworth. Beginning in the 1950s, when the county banned backyard incinerators, public landfills accepted all solid waste. With everything piled together, landfills attracted rats, birds and insects. They sometimes caught fire. And, they smelled very bad. Freligh, who grew up in Glendale and lived in Montrose until a few years ago, remembers playing Little League at a field near Scholl Canyon Landfill. "We always hated to play there because it stunk," he says.
As engineers learn more about handling waste, landfills began to cover the trash, cutting down on vermin, fires and odors.
By the late 1980s, county households were producing nearly 50,000 tons of trash a day, so much that officials feared they would run out of landfill space, Haworth says. A law forcing cities to divert 50 percent of waste from landfills sparked cottage industries in recycling. Most cities complied. "By the year 2000, we were getting 50 percent recycling, but by then we were getting more trash," Haworth says. "Now it's about 70,000 tons a day. Half of that is getting recycled."
Recyclable materials - paper, cardboard, glass and plastic bottles, and aluminum cans - go first to the city's recycling facility and then to materials recovering facility or MeRF. "All that is is a big trash-separating warehouse," Haworth says.
Different materials are sold to different buyers. Plastic milk jugs become orange plastic fencing and wood-pattered decking. Cardboard is one of the largest exports from Los Angeles Harbor, Haworth says.
And because customers don't have to separate recyclables themselves, they largely comply. But not always, which Freligh sometimes finds very troublesome. "What's annoying is what people think is recyclable," Freligh says. "Vacuum cleaners, pieces of wood."
The weirdest thing he's ever found in a recycling bin? A small block engine. "It made a big bang when it fell into the hopper," he recalls. "I had to stop and see what it was."
Mostly, though, the work is routine. The hydraulic arm reaches out, grabs a can, lifts it up and dumps it into the hopper. Then Freligh moves the truck forward to the next can. The diesel engine rumbles, the hydraulics of the grabbing arm whine, the other solid waste management employees chatter, and country singers croon about lost love and good living. Freligh settles into the rhythm of the work, a job he enjoys so much he's never called in sick in 12 years. "I figure why call in sick," he says with a grin, "it's too much fun."