LUMBERYARD LOGS: Mission not yet accomplished

John Arnold is getting his wish — but he’s not altogether happy about it.

Arnold has been petitioning for a year to restore the separate pickup of recyclables on his South Laguna street, Point Place. Or rather, to restore the recycling of the recyclables that he and his neighbors have been carefully separating from their trash.

For quite a few months, these recyclables — placed in an official bin labeled “recycling only” — were being quietly thrown into the trash by the garbage hauler, Waste Management.

It turns out Point Place was on a list of “hard to service” streets in Laguna Beach, and Arnold’s was one of some 280 households considered too difficult to service with separate recycling pickup because that requires a second truck trip.

The “second trip” was deemed by Waste Management as too dicey on these certain streets, especially after the trash hauler nearly lost a driver in a near-accident on Fern Street years ago.

Arnold didn’t realize the recyclables were being tossed into the garbage bin until he witnessed it one day. He hadn’t been informed that separate recycling service was discontinued, and he was furious when he realized the cans, bottles and newspapers he and his neighbors had been keeping separate from discardables were being trashed anyway.

When he complained to the city, Waste Management responded by taking away the recycling bin.

Well, at least folks weren’t being misled about where their “recyclables” were ending up.

But that didn’t mollify Arnold, who couldn’t understand why this was happening, since separate recycling services had been provided on the street for years.

Stranger still, in recent years Laguna Beach has taken on more and more of a “green” hue — banning Styrofoam and fostering energy efficiency, and even purchasing hybrid vehicles. Why would the city allow its trash hauler to stop neighborhood recycling at a time when the rest of the city was on a mission to be ever more eco-friendly?

Well, the story got even stranger.

When Arnold tried to get the city to restore the recycling service, Waste Management insisted it had never been provided on his street — a Kafkaesque response that was pretty much debunked when the city ordered the trash hauler last month to “resume” recycling on Point Place.

Arnold was delighted a couple of weeks ago to be notified that, on May 1, recycling would again be picked up separately on his street — but only on six-home Point Place, not for the other 274 or so households that still lack recycling service.

Arnold now feels that he, as the squeaky wheel, is being “greased” in an effort to shut him up about recycling.

He is having none of it, and he is still squeaking, thank you very much.

Arnold is still campaigning, and now he wants to see 100% recycling pickup service in Laguna Beach.

“I am not stopping,” he says.

As he has been saying all along, “If they [Waste Management] can send one truck, they can send two.”

He has gotten support for the recycling campaign from a man in France, of all places.

In France, small trucks carry recyclables in hard-to-service areas — trucks that would be much safer to operate on precipitous and winding roads than the huge, unwieldy trash trucks used by Waste Management.

Waste Management may be an enormous trash hauler — the largest in North America, according to its website — but apparently is no match for one determined Laguna Beach man on a mission.

And that mission has yet to be accomplished.

CINDY FRAZIER is city editor of the Coastline Pilot. She can be contacted at (949) 494-2087 or [email protected].