Clean Agency

Recently, Dr. Bob Vos and I visited the Athens Services waste management facility in City of Industry, to get a first hand look at how our South Pasadena waste is processed. In South Pas, all waste from residential and commercial locations is collected in the same bins, and sent by truck for sorting at Athens. From there, any recyclable materials extracted go to a variety of local and global recycling plants, and food and yard waste go to domestic organizations for composting. Materials for which there are no viable recycling or recovery options are sent to local landfills as a last resort. 

Landfilling as a disposal route, however, even as a last resort, will soon become more problematic in California with the upcoming 2013 closure of the Puente Hills landfill. Dennis Chiappetta, Athens’ Executive Vice President and our guide for our facility tour, informed us that the closure of Puente Hills, currently the largest landfill in the United States, will mean that local waste management agencies will have to find other, likely more distant and more costly, places to send their municipal solid waste.

Athens is currently developing landfill avoidance facilities and technologies with the goal of ensuring that less and less waste will go the way of the landfill. At Clean, it’s always been our philosophy that waste = lost profits, so fostering additional opportunities to recycle and recover waste materials is a strategy we’re definitely on board with.

May 11th-15th is Bike to Work Week, and I, along with fellow Clean team member Garen, are participating. I’m biking in to our office in South Pasadena from Los Feliz, and Garen is making the trek from Glendale.

There are numerous challenges to biking in a metro area like Los Angeles: the heat, the cracked roads, the debris on the pavement—I could go on! Safety is probably the biggest challenge, though, in such a car-centric city. To help make biking to work feasible and safe for all, the League of American Bicyclists offers great resources for safe bicycle commuting.

Of course, there are a lot of benefits to biking to work, which is why we’re participating in bike week! It’s a perfect workout for the day, it’s a great way to soak & store up some vitamin D, and, of course, we’ll spare the air some CO2.

You'd never know it, but in a past life this beautiful piece of art was an oil drum. Until recently, it was hanging at Environment ’s new LA showroom during a glamorous pre-Oscar party. And soon, it will be in my apartment!

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