CommentsCOMMENTARY - A Glendale resident recently ruminated on NextDoor about the new policy about separating garbage from trash.
Evidently, seventy years ago Los Angeles homes had separate pails for what we now call “organic waste” for those who didn’t have a compost heap in the back yard – cheaper, and greener than buying chemicals from Monsanto.
Growing up in Montréal, we had an expression adopted from our French compatriots – “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – the more things change, the more they are the same.
Has it really taken Angelenos seventy years to return to what their grandparents did best?
As a child in the 1960s, one of my chores was washing out tin cans for my mother to drop off at the Continental Can Company for recycling.
And all bottles came with a recycle refund charge that ensured return and kept little boys busy scouring the grass along the highways and byways for bottles to turn into pocket money.
Reportedly in Los Angeles, tin cans not only had to be washed, but the consumer had to remove the label – fun for kids as most enjoy any opportunity for adult-authorized destruction.
Perhaps not so much so for their parents, since Sam Yorty was elected mayor of Los Angeles in 1961 partly due to his promising to end the policy of separating trash for pickup.
Which didn’t return until years after I made this city my home.
While those parents kept working harder and harder to buy the American dream and fill it with stuff, generating lots and lots of garbage to fill up our landfills and, when there was no more room in local dumps, to export to China.
Until China said no more.
I remember stacks of newspapers in our garage in Montréal – we took both the morning and evening papers back then, carefully collected for paper drives or reused – sometimes soaked in paraffin to serve as fire starters for our fireplaces and campfires.
Ah, yes, with the cold Québec winters, we used our fireplaces a lot, pretty on a snowy day but also purveyors of particulate pollution.
This while our American cousins burned their newspapers year round in backyard incinerators.
With the L.A. basin all too often subject to temperature inversions, incinerator smoke combined with car exhaust and diesel fumes creating the smog for which Los Angeles was infamous across the continent.
A 1956 survey by the L.A. County Medical Association had found that 94.7 percent of doctors were seeing patients with irritated eyes, respiratory tract irritation, chest pains, cough, nausea and headaches, a constellation of symptoms that was referred to as “smog complex.”
When I arrived in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I discovered that there were Smog Alerts instead of Snow Days. At times these were so bad that schools would close and anyone with bronchial issues was urged to stay home.
It didn’t take my eyes long to recognize smog as a clear and present danger, but it took several years of unsuccessfully experimenting with different drops and ointments to soothe my burning eyes until the rapidly improving smog index stopped my urge to head home, or at least to a place with cleaner air, every time I inserted my contact lenses.
A few years later, the AQMD adopted a plan to clean up the City’s air by moving to the use of electric vehicles, public transit, carpooling, renewable energy and development of non-polluting consumer goods and factories.
That was over 30 years ago, am… I hearing an echo here?
Plus ça change…
Or maybe it’s just taking Los Angeles a long, long time to get on board.
As someone posted, also on NextDoor, everything old is suddenly new. Home grocery delivery used to be a regular thing, but ordered by telephone not online from a dot com.
Ah, Amazon, savior in the time of the shut down, but a major force behind the proliferation of too much trash in search of a dump…
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
