Trash Haulers, Public Expected to Pay More

This week’s decision to close a Glendale landfill to trash from Los Angeles and Burbank has some refuse haulers worried about higher costs, more travel and longer waits at already crowded Valley dump sites.

The Glendale City Council on Tuesday banned the dumping of rubbish from Los Angeles and Burbank at the city-owned Scholl Canyon landfill. Officials projected that the dump would reach capacity in about 14 years at its current rate of use.

By allowing only trash from Glendale and a few San Gabriel Valley communities to be dumped at the landfill, its life expectancy will be increased by about 35 years, council members said.

Nearly half of the refuse dumped at Scholl Canyon comes from Los Angeles, mostly from private haulers who serve apartment buildings and commercial businesses.

Glendale officials have said that the amount of dumping at the Scholl Canyon site has tripled in 10 years, as other regional landfills have closed.

When the ordinance becomes effective Dec. 28, Valley-area landfills will be filling up more quickly as haulers with garbage from the Valley and from other parts of Los Angeles are diverted from Scholl Canyon to dumps in Sylmar or Sun Valley, according to landfill operators and refuse haulers contacted.

Los Angeles city officials say most of the city’s trash already goes to Valley-area dump sites.

“We’re going to have to dump somewhere, and the only place to go is the Valley,” said Dave Hammer, assistant manager of Sarian Disposal in Sun Valley.

Refuse haulers will suffer an increase in fuel costs because they will be forced to travel farther to dump sites, Hammer said. “It’s going to be a mess . . . our prices are going up higher and higher.”

Ken Cruff, president of Interstate Disposal Co. in Sun Valley, said, “Rates have already gone up about 20% from last year as it is. We could go up another 30% or 40% now.”

Meanwhile, officials at Valley landfills predicted a marked increase in business, which might require expansions and mean higher rates for haulers. Those increased rates will probably be passed on to consumers, said Glen Wolthausen, operations manager of the Sunshine Canyon landfill in Sylmar.

Browning Ferris Industries, which owns the Sunshine Canyon landfill, has applied to the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning to expand its 300-acre facility by 700 acres. But the plan has met with resistance from neighbors worried about health hazards.

“We’re running out of space,” Wolthausen said. “Every landfill in the area is running out of space, not today or tomorrow, but soon. And, as more close, the worse it can get for the ones that are open.”

A decision on the proposed expansion awaits an environmental impact report.

Some trash haulers worried that they may have no place to dump refuse with so much opposition to the expansion of landfills and to the opening of new ones. According to a county sanitation report released last year, all existing landfills could reach capacity in seven years.