Q&A: Apartment recycling in Hollywood

Your eco-questions answered:

Question: Hey Green LA Girl, New to city.  Just moved to Hollywood.  Landlord does not have recycling at building, none of tenants recycle.  My recyclables are building up in my room.  Are there any drop-off centers I could take them to? Thanks, Erika.

Answer: Unbeknownst to many Angelenos, Los Angeles apartment-dwellers finally got their own recycling service in April. All multifamily residences -- including apartments, condos, town homes, and mobile home parks -- can now get blue bins!

And luckily for me, I've written about this before -- and so below is a modification of an old -- but still relevant! -- post.

The trick: The service is free, but you gotta ask for it. Either the tenant or the owner of the residence has to sign up. In this scenario, I’m guessing that’ll be you, the tenant.

So: Contact the L.A. Bureau of Sanitation by calling 800.773.2489, or e-mail multifamily@lacity.org. Have your contact info — as well as your building owner, property manager or condo association’s contact info — handy. Tell them you want blue bins. Once you sign up, you’ll get blue recycling bins and free weekly recycling service pickup.

While you wait for that service to start up — or in case your blue bin quest somehow gets derailed — I would suggest making friends with your nearest blue-binned neighbor. Ask if you might share their bin on trash day. That’s the arrangement I had with my neighbors across the street when I lived in West L.A. Downside: You’ll need to store your recyclables until trash day, then hurriedly haul it out when your neighbor rolls her / his blue bin out into the street. Upside: You might make a new friend. :)

If all fails, you can recycle stuff with CRV value (bottles and cans) all over the place — Just plug in your ZIP Code here, then pick one, hopefully within walking distance. Used grocery bags can be recycled at major grocery stores, but really, opt for reusable bags.

But do first try to get your blue bin and let me know how that works out. From what I hear from Kate, who tried this in Los Feliz, the recycling service people are helpful on the phone -- but rather slow in delivering blue bins. She is, however, now happily using her blue bins, as are her lucky neighbors.

Got a question? Ask me: greenlagirl@gmail.com.

Photo by ClydeHouse via Flickr

Comments

[Kate]

Hi, Siel! There may be two Kates posting comments on GreenLAGirl,com, but I think I'm the one who found that the Sanitation people were helpful on the phone but slow to act. I got my building and several others registered (I don't live in Los Feliz, BTW, but I think the person who originally asked did). It's been several months, and we still don't have our bins. Every time I ask, I'm told that they have huge demand that they're working through, and they have to do education for residents before providing bins for a building.

So I'd encourage people to sign up--but I'd also caution them that it may be a long, long time before they see anything. My building was registered in early June, and we're still waiting.

[Siel]

Wow! Since June?! That's a long wait indeed. I'll try giving 'em a call next week to see what the actual lag time is. Interesting!

Yes, there do indeed seem to be 2 Kate's -- what to do 'bout these common names? (Not a problem I have to deal with personally, for obvious reasons) One has indeed received her bins and is happy -- unfortunately, you're not her :P But hopefully you''ll be a happily recycling Kate soon :)

[Kate]

I'm envious of the other Kate--at least once a week, my husband and I turn to each other and ask, "Where are our recycling bins?" Alas, the Bureau of Sanitation keeps asking us to be patient.

[Emily]

I finally got my recycling bin in October after initially requesting it in February! The Sanitation people were helpful and patient, although it took my calling the contractor to track down a mistake in my landlord's phone number that was responsible for at least some of the delay. My advice: don't be too patient!

[Siel]

Good work, Emily! Way to take things into your own hands :) Though I do wonder how long it would've taken sans the phone number snafu --

[m]

These are just kinda random questions that I don't know if anyone has the answers for, but they are along the same topic lines.

-Is there a reason that multi-family buildings are not auto-enrolled in the program? Is the demand just too great/not high enough right now? Does it require too much work/building access?

-Are there plans to do a similar thing with green waste? Is this not happening because it does not bring in as much money? It would be awesome if "green" waste bins were, at minimum, available in front of all grocery stores (kinda like how they have to let you return your plastic bags there so that you could return your fruit/veggie waste too)

I have found alternate places to take my recycling, but I still haven't found a place to dump my green waste besides Whole Foods, which isn't really reasonable since they are not very common throughout the city. On my street there is a single house with a green waste bin and thousands of individuals living in about 25 apartment buildings/condos (i.e. making friends with those with the bins won't quite work for me). This is with the assumption that dropping "green" waste on public property is still considered to be littering (is this true?)

I have to say that in general I don't know why adding all of these services for apartment buildings has taken so long. LA has a huge apartment dweller population.

[Kate]

Follow-up: we still don't have our recycling bins. The city tells me that the holdup is our apartment management company, which apparently is not returning calls. This doesn't surprise me, since this is the company that took four years to fix our kitchen plumbing.