Recycling Goal Extensions Worthy of State Approval : Legislation would cut slack for cities’ good-faith efforts

Orange County has become a kind of recycling laboratory. Cities are moving in different but useful ways toward meeting state goals. If they are making progress, it makes sense to allow them to continue experimentation without rigid penalties. This is especially so because of questions about how progress is measured.

The race against the clock to meet a state deadline of 50% recycling of trash by the year 2000 finds municipalities at various stages. The county as a whole is making respectable headway. An average 34% of all cities’ garbage is being diverted from landfills, according to the county Department of Integrated Waste Management.

But even that figure is not yet at target, and at the local level, cities around the county and the state are nervous as the deadline approaches. There is a move in Sacramento to allow the state waste board authority to make extensions for cities that can demonstrate that they are making an honest effort to obey the law.

The argument in favor of making such an extension is buttressed by the complexity of the challenge; for example, county staff acknowledges that in the past a lack of something as basic as county scales to weigh trash has forced an estimation rather than an exact measurement of garbage.

Also the formula for determining the percentage of trash being diverted to recycling has included demographic information unrelated to garbage. Local officials say this has led to misleading numbers. For example, there have been discrepancies between what San Juan Capistrano estimates it is diverting and the figure arrived at when the numbers are inserted into the state formula. Even the spokesman for the state board concedes that there have been problems calculating rates.

Then there is the matter of cities like Irvine, which argues that it should get credit for recycling done before 1990. They were farsighted enough to have programs in place in advance. It and its environmentally hip neighbor Laguna Beach have a home-grown consciousness that took root early. There would be something absurd about penalizing these vanguard cities because they don’t meet artificially constructed targets.

Getting points for good faith progress seems sensible as an alternative to punitive sanctions of up to $10,000 a day. These are called for in the 1989 legislation that demanded recycling of 50%. Cities need to show progress, of course, but the goal should not be to use this mandate as an excuse to enrich state coffers. The objective should be to get programs moving. Flexibility is called for. The problems Orange has been having in its ongoing scandal, which is now under investigation, argue for taking care to get programs right rather than playing beat the clock.

The programs around the county are varied enough to show that there are different ways to get there. Some cities like Laguna Hills, Garden Grove and Seal Beach have achieved high diversion rates by requiring some sorting by residents, while they pay an outside firm to do the rest. This middle way between having residents do it all and having them toss trash into one can to be sorted later at recycling plants deserves consideration by those still struggling to meet objectives.

It is worth the trouble to get residents involved in some way. Last weekend, some 4,052 volunteers scoured the coast along our beaches, gathering soda cans, wrappers and other beach junk as part of Coastal Cleanup Day. The amount of trash on the shoreline is amazing; at one beach, Salt Creek, about 300 pounds of trash and 70 pounds of recyclables were retrieved.

We all have a job to do to preserve this sunny place for future generations. The move toward recycling is part of that developing awareness.