It’s Garbage As Usual on Eve of Area’s Earth Day Celebration

Saturday, the day before Earth Day, brought boat parades on San Diego Bay, an ecology walk at Penasquitos Canyon and a “Surf for the Earth” contest off La Jolla. And the San Diego Earth Day 1990 Coalition spent Saturday putting the final touches on today’s Earth Fair rally that will turn Balboa Park into a massive Earth Day celebration.

But elsewhere in San Diego County, the day that happened to mark the anniversary of naturalist John Muir’s birth in 1838 was just another Saturday.

The county’s Sycamore Sanitary Landfill did a booming business. Caltrans supervised crews who collected trash along county highways. The county swallowed nearly 2,000 acre-feet of imported water and the sewage treatment plant on Point Loma sent 190 million gallons of treated sewage gushing into the ocean.

San Diegans also hauled an estimated 800 tons of clippings, appliances, lumber and other refuse to the massive landfill that is gradually filling Sycamore Canyon, a once-peaceful hollow to the east of Mission Trails Park. Massive commercial haulers dumped about 550 tons of garbage and private citizens unloaded nearly 250 tons from the 700 cars, trucks and trailers that pulled into the dump.

Aware that Sycamore and other established landfills are nearing their capacity, county officials are struggling to find new locations to bury San Diego’s trash. But officials fret that whenever a new site is proposed, opponents quickly organize to block it.

As massive bulldozers covered trash dumped earlier on Saturday, Jim and Barbara Renzi struggled to unload a small trailer brimming with tree limbs, grass clippings and other biodegradable refuse.

“This is one of seven trips we’ll be making,” said Jim Renzi, who paid the $7 fee to enter the dump. “We talked to some of our neighbors and we all decided to do (a cleanup) at one time. I’m the one with a trailer hitch so I’m the one who makes the trip.”

The Renzis and their neighbors had arranged to haul a separate load of junk to the recycling center at the entrance to Sycamore Canyon. “We simply have to recycle,” said Barbara Renzi. “We should forget the politics and just do it.”

Ervin Powell, a Lakeside resident who spent part of Saturday afternoon unloading grass clippings, weeds and household junk from his truck, shook his head when asked to predict where the next generation of San Diegans will bury their trash. “When this place gets filled, I don’t know where they’re going to put it,” Powell said. “Nobody wants a dump near them.”

At the recycling operation near the entrance to Sycamore Canyon, Debbie Ashcraft watched anxiously as Universal Recycling Co. employee Jim Woods weighed the hundreds of aluminum cans that her fourth- and fifth-grade students at Ira Harbison Elementary School in National City collected as part of an Earth Day observance.

“We can buy an acre of rain forest (through an Earth Day organization) for every $40 we collect,” said Ashcraft, who broke into a broad grin when Woods determined that the class had gathered 180 pounds of aluminum. That translated into $135, which “is almost enough for four acres,” Ashcraft said. “I’m sure someone will give the extra $25 that we need to buy the fourth acre.”

Zach Gorham, a first-grade student at Lindo Park Elementary School in Lakeside, shrugged his shoulders when asked if he was celebrating Earth Day by recycling bottles and cans. Recycling is simply an “easy way to get money,” according to the seven-year-old, who used the hundreds of dollars collected in past visits to buy a horse and two cows.

“This is just another day at the dump,” said a crew worker who was directing trucks at the landfill. “And I bet that (Earth Day) will be just another Sunday. We were pretty busy on Easter Sunday.”

It was unclear if the weekend’s Earth Day activities were prompting San Diegans to cut back on water use.

The San Diego County Water Authority, which fills more than 90% of the county’s water needs, distributes about 1,800 acre-feet of water to its customers on Saturdays during April, Water Authority spokesman Mark Stadler said. (An acre-foot of water is the amount needed to cover one acre at a depth of one foot, or 326,000 gallons.)

Although individual San Diegans are using less water than a decade ago, according to Water Authority statistics, total water use has risen dramatically as the county’s population has grown.

All but a trickle of San Diego’s water is imported from the Colorado River and Northern California. Aware that availability is dwindling, the Water Authority has asked its 24 member agencies to enforce water conservation ordinances that would cut per capita use, which has hovered at about 190 gallons per day.

Earth Day activities appeared to have no immediate impact on the city of San Diego’s massive sewage treatment plant on Point Loma. Saturday would “probably be just another day” for the massive plant that daily pumps 190 million gallons of treated sewage into the Pacific Ocean, according to spokesman Curt Kidman.

The day before Earth Day was also business as usual for Caltrans, which supervised about 15 litter crews along the county’s highways.

“On a typical Saturday we have about 175 probationers, people who are assigned to us by the court for moving violations,” said Caltrans spokesman Steve Saville. “They work an eight-hour day, and each of them picks up about 10 bags of trash.”

The estimated 1,750 bags that crews filled Saturday translated into about 250 cubic yards of litter that will be sent to a local landfill, Saville said.

Litter was also on the minds of maintenance crews at the San Diego Unified Port District, which is responsible for San Diego Bay.

“Whenever there’s a big weekend there’s usually one hell of a mess left behind,” said Russ Koch, a maintenance department supervisor. “When the weekend people go out on their boats, on Monday we pick up the foam containers, the plastic six-pack holders, the napkins, the plastic bags.”

The port uses a small armada of boats to scoop trash from the bay on weekdays. “Monday is usually a pretty busy day,” Koch said. “It’s natural. People are people. We’ll probably pick up a couple cubic yards of stuff on Monday.”

“It’s not as bad as it used to be,” said Lyndon Shumake, a port employee who has been picking up after his fellow San Diegans since the late 1960s. “People are a lot more conscious about litter than they used to be.”