Living on the Edge : Families Scramble to Make Ends Meet : People who scavenge recyclables for a living are losing income in the new era of curbside pickup programs.

Most people are still asleep when Bilda and Hector Herrera set off in their faded old gray Datsun to rummage through trash in search of aluminum cans and newspapers to recycle. The sun is high by the time they finish their rounds and cash in the day’s haul at a paper-littered North Hollywood recycling center.

But even though they work seven days a week and have taken on a 3 a.m. paper route, the Herreras’ earnings have plummeted in the last few months. They now face eviction for failing to pay the $530-a-month rent on their North Hollywood apartment, where they sleep on a worn brown corduroy sofa bed in the living room so their four sons can have the one bedroom.

The Herreras, who came here from Guatemala two years ago in search of a better life, blame their troubles on the curbside recycling program in the east San Fernando Valley.

Although widely hailed as a solution to landfill shortages and ecological concerns, the city program is creating problems for what authorities believe are thousands of destitute people like the Herreras who earn their livings by foraging through garbage cans and dumpsters for aluminum cans, glass bottles, and newspapers to cash in at recycling centers.

The scavengers, meanwhile, are creating problems for city recycling officials, who fear the thefts will jeopardize the new program by cutting revenues and citizen motivation to recycle.

Curbside recycling now exists in about 125,000 households in the city, including 26,000 in the East Valley. By 1993, the program will expand westward to include the entire Valley--and all 720,000 of the city’s households.

Because of dwindling landfill space, a 1989 state law requires cities to reduce landfill dumping 25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000. The city’s new program gives homeowners one or more 14-gallon bins for recyclables and two 60-gallon bins into which they must fit the rest of their trash if they don’t want to be charged extra.

Officials hope this will create a financial incentive to recycle the aluminum cans, newspapers and glass and plastic beverage containers that make up an estimated 15% of an average household’s trash.

For the Herreras, the trouble started two months ago when yellow city recycling bins started appearing in the East Valley neighborhoods where they have long collected cans and newspapers left by the curb on trash day.

In the past, people seemed grateful to be spared a trip to the recycling center, Bilda said, but suddenly, some residents started shaking their finger, saying, “No, No,” when the Herreras came by. A few threatened to call the police, she said.

“Before, I could drive down the streets and take cans. But now, people don’t want me to look in their trash,” Bilda said in Spanish.

Signs on the yellow bins warn in English and Spanish that taking recyclables is punishable by up to six months in jail and/or a $500 fine. Frightened, the Herreras began limiting their recycling forays to dumpsters and streets near apartments, factories and office buildings. Their income from recycling has shrunk from as much as $30 a day to as little as $10 a day, Bilda said.

Now, she is searching for a cheaper apartment and foraging in dumpsters for clothing for her sons, Pedro, 15; Julio, 13; Acoldo, 11 and William, 10. She worries about the future.

“We don’t have enough money and we have to pay bills. The rent is very expensive and I need money to feed and buy clothes and shoes for my children,” said Bilda, 35, who worked in Guatemala taking food to prisoners while her 37-year-old husband did construction work. They have been unable to find jobs in the United States, she said.

The Herreras are not the only ones to suffer hardships because of the new recycling program.

Alicia Cardenas and her husband, Gumaro Renteria, have been hurt too. They can’t come up with the money to pay the rent.

Their North Hollywood apartment is small but neat, decorated with children’s pictures and stuffed animals.

The couple and their four children, who range in age from 3 to 10 years old, sleep in the living room because it is the only room that is heated and air conditioned, said Cardenas, a friendly, dark-haired woman who speaks only Spanish.

The family came to Los Angeles from Guadalajara, Mexico, after their son, Nestor, 4, was born with cerebral palsy. They wanted him to attend a special school here. By working from 5 a.m. until about noon or so, and then turning in their recyclable goods, the couple had managed to scrape by until the new city program took effect.

“People don’t want us to go through the trash anymore,” said Cardenas, as she stood with her husband under the hot sun at a recycling center after unloading the morning’s finds. They are lucky to earn $10 or $15 a day now, she said, less than half what they used to get.

Determined to keep Nestor in the school, Cardenas has begun to take on baby-sitting jobs and her husband is searching for work as a janitor or parking lot attendant.

At Alpha Recycling in North Hollywood, cashier Sylvia Adams said she is getting more and more complaints from poor people like the Herreras and the Cardenas-Renteria family, whose livelihoods have been slashed by the city program.

“Recycling gives people work. It’s an honest living,” Adams said. “Homeless and poor people were relying on that to make a living and now the city is taking it away.”

Mark Stubbins, 35, of Van Nuys, said he has been following the same recycling route in Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys and Studio City for several years and considers “the city as taking over my action.

“People have been putting newspapers and cans out for years for us to pick up. All of a sudden, the city puts a box out there and it makes it a crime for me to pick it up,” complained Stubbins--whose T-shirt bore the slogan “Question Authority”--as he waited in line to redeem his cans at a recycling center.

A city recycling official recently took down Stubbins’ license number and warned him that he could be jailed if he continued to take cans from the city boxes, but Stubbins still does it. “Now, I’ve really got to look over my shoulder. The fact I have to sweat being arrested for it makes me mad. Why can’t I go and give people my own plastic bins?” he asked.

City officials have no objection to scavengers picking up cans and bottles from public streets and parks but they fear that pilfering of city cans will reduce revenues intended to help offset the costs of the recycling program.

Los Angeles planners estimate that the program will cost about $46 million a year for the first five years, with about $13 million of that sum to be raised through the sale of recyclable material and reduced landfill costs and the rest coming from city taxes.

“In order to make this work, we need to put money back into the system,” city recycling spokeswoman Linda Aguilar said. “All the monies generated by the recycling collection are returned to the program so that’s less money we have to take from the city tax fund. So you can see as a taxpayer why it’s important that scavenging doesn’t happen.”

City officials also fear that residents will lose the incentive to recycle if scavengers steal from city bins.

“The motivation is kind of blunted,” said Drew Sones, manager of the city Bureau of Sanitation’s recycling and waste reduction division. “People figure, ‘If the stuff I put out is going to be scavenged, why should I go through the effort?’ ”

Other residents complain that strangers are coming into their neighborhoods or that scavengers make a mess by scattering less valuable recyclables in their haste to quickly grab the most lucrative recycling material: aluminum cans. Aluminum fetches as much as $1 a pound compared to $90 for a ton of newspapers, Sones said.

Residents have been complaining about scavengers stealing their recyclables since the city began its pilot recycling venture in 1985, and the calls have been escalating as the program grows, Sones said.

Now, he said, “We’re getting complaints that they are not only taking the contents of the bins but are taking the bins themselves.

Detective Billy Heinlein of the Los Angeles Police Department’s scrap metal detail, said curbside recycling programs make it easier for scavengers. “Now all they have to do is drive down the street and pick up those buckets that are full of cans.”

City officials have no estimates of the number of scavengers or the amount of money they siphon from the fledgling program, but Randolph Romero, supervisor of city recycling operations in the East Valley, said scavengers frequently beat the city to the filled bins. The Bureau of Sanitation received 120 calls in March from city residents complaining that their recyclables had been stolen, Aguilar said.

Although state law makes trash-stealing petty theft--a misdemeanor with penalties as high as $500 in fines and/or six months in jail--numerous California cities, including San Diego and Redondo Beach, have passed anti-scavenging ordinances to protect the financial viability of their recycling programs, according to the state Department of Conservation.

Los Angeles has a longstanding ordinance making it a misdemeanor to pilfer curbside trash set out for the city.

Currently, residents who call the city are usually encouraged to report scavengers’ license plate numbers to the sanitation bureau. The bureau then sends a letter warning that scavenging is illegal and punishable by a $500 fine and/or six months in jail.

But so far it is an empty threat since officials have made no attempt to prosecute anyone, Aguilar said.

Officials in San Fernando Valley police divisions said they have received only a handful of reports of recycling theft. Given adequate information, the reports are dutifully investigated, but Detective Richard Ramsdell said they are a low priority.

“What’s going to take precedence, thefts from city containers or burglaries and murders?” he said. “We’re spread too thin now as it is.”

City officials are unsure how the city will cope with the poaching problems. City recycling officials are preparing a report for the City Council on what other cities have done--and a new enforcement policy may be formulated, Sones said.

City Councilman Marvin Braude, chairman of the environmental quality and waste management committee, said he sympathizes with the scavengers but feels the city must crack down on them to make the recycling program work.

“At first, I was torn by this--the idea of the poor people going out and scraping to make a living,” Braude said. “On the other hand, though, if we’re going to make recycling work, people have to have confidence in the system.

“People are very uncomfortable with strangers going through their trash. People also feel that now that they have gone to the trouble of recycling, they want the benefit of that to accrue to the city, not to someone who comes and scavenges.”

Braude said the city would be unlikely to prosecute a scavenger unless he “was doing it over and over again. I don’t think we have to start making this a big law enforcement issue at all. I think if the word gets out that scavenging is not legal and that people are not permitted to do that, that will probably be sufficient to dissuade people from scavenging.”

Councilwoman Joy Picus, vice chairman of the committee, said that although scavenging is a recognized problem, she doesn’t foresee the city spending money or diverting Los Angeles police from other tasks to enforce the anti-scavenging law.

New York, for instance, has hired 200 “garbage enforcement cops whose only job is to make sure people do recycle and it’s not scavenged,” Sones said.

Last year, Redondo Beach passed an ordinance making it a misdemeanor to steal recyclables and the city deployed a special police detail to crack down on scavengers. San Diego not only passed an anti-scavenging ordinance but also scheduled its trash pickups later in the morning so shopkeepers could take their trash out in the morning and keep an eye on it rather than set it out the night before.

One Van Nuys woman said she was told that there was little that could be done when she recently called city recycling officials after a scavenger took all the aluminum cans out of her recycling bin, leaving her neat stack of newspapers strewn around the front yard.

“At first I thought, ‘At least, they’re being recycled,’ ” said the woman, who did not want to be identified. “Then I thought, ‘The city should get the money.’ I want my trash to go to the city program so the city will continue to make it easy for me to recycle. If the city only gets the newspapers and plastics, which don’t bring as much cash as the cans, maybe they won’t be able to keep doing it.”

Besides, the woman said, “It bothers me that people are going through my trash.”

But Lynn Eastman Rossi, a Studio City actress and mother of two, said she doesn’t mind when people in pickup trucks take the cans, newspapers and bottles from the city recycling bins in her front yard.

“It doesn’t bother me at all. As long as I know it’s getting recycled, I don’t care if someone makes money from it or not,” Rossi said.

Studio City resident Marta Kurland feels the same way, but her husband, Jerry, doesn’t. Last week, he asked a woman poised to put recyclables in her pickup truck to please put them back.

“This is the first week they haven’t been stolen,” Marta Kurland said, surveying the contents of her yellow recycling bin.

Aguilar was unaware that the recycling program was cutting into the revenues of destitute people, but said, “we would like to think that maybe they can find another way of making money.”

Marshall Spring, 75, of Burbank, a retired aircraft inspector who started collecting recyclables to fill his days after his wife died, said he is going to have to find something else to do.

“A lot of people set things out for me. People are very happy that I come around,” he said. “They like to have their stuff recycled, but they have no way to do it.”