The Kotanjian family has been picking up L.A.'s garbage for more than 100 years. First there was Simun Kazarian, who walked dirt roads picking up trash in the 1900s with a horse and wagon. In the 1920s, his son George started AAA Rubbish. George's nephew, Samuel Kotanjian, bought him out after returning from service in World War II. He passed it to his son, Greg, who runs the Bell Gardens–based business with his wife, brother and two sons, Phillip and Matthew.
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Matthew, Nancy and Greg Kotanjian: Small firms, with their secure local jobs, expect to be wiped out.
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"When we were 8 or 9 years old, my grandfather would pick us up from school in one of our trucks," Matthew Kotanjian recalls. "He taught us how to operate controls. We just love what we do."
He adds: "Now they wanna throw us out."
In Los Angeles, businesses and apartment buildings aren't served by the Sanitation Department trucks that stop at single-family homes but by private, independent waste haulers who take some 2.1 million tons of trash to landfills yearly.
A plan being pushed through the City Council by the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club Angeles Chapter would set up exclusive franchises by carving L.A. into 11 sectors, with haulers bidding to entirely control one.
Trash removal from apartments and commercial buildings, now akin to ordering cable or satellite from various choices, would become more like having the monopoly public utility DWP, where there's no choice. And like the Department of Water and Power, the rates would no longer be set by the market but decided by — and upped by — the L.A. City Council.
Matthew Kotanjian sits in the tiny cab of his truck, about the size of a middle row in the coach section of a 747. He wears a Bluetooth headset, wraparound shades, and a poker face. His seat squeaks incessantly as the truck bounces along the desperately cracked streets of South Central.
Matthew says that if unions and environmental groups push the monopoly system through this month, his family's 100-year-old business likely will be wiped out.
With nine drivers and 1,400 hauling accounts, AAA Rubbish is not quite big enough to become a monopoly picking up big-building trash for 9 percent of L.A. They're a boutique company that specializes in custom service. "Every single customer we have, I know the sound of their voice," Kotanjian says.
Anyone who thinks garbagemen would not be proud of what they do hasn't met the Kotanjians. They love to work.
"When I'm on my deathbed, I'm gonna say, I wish I coulda worked harder," says Matthew. Which explains why AAA Rubbish is still around.
"We've taken on big companies, Fortune 500 companies," Matthew says. But, "I never in my life thought that the City of L.A. would be our biggest competitor."
But Greg Good, of the union advocacy group LAANE, insists, "Today, we have an antiquated and archaic system. ... It's a system that perpetuates overlapping truck haulers." He claims that, in some areas, "Five, six, seven waste haulers all drive on the same streets."
LAANE, the Sierra Club and NRDC officials theorize that, by installing exclusive monopolies, the lucky 11 haulers selected will create efficient routes to minimize miles driven. This will, they hope, reduce garbage-truck traffic and air pollution.
However, the proponents aim extremely high by claiming their plan will radically increase recycling and help achieve L.A.'s mythic-sounding "zero waste" goal.
By touting that goal for the year 2030, city officials really mean "very little waste." Getting to zero "is impossible," agrees Hillary Gordon of the Sierra Club. "But [cutting] 90 percent to 95 percent is possible."
Greg Kotanjian, the patriarch of AAA, scoffs, "It's not gonna happen. For a township to have zero waste, you're gonna have to burn off the excess."
AAA Rubbish produces zero waste — sort of. Its trucks take their trash to a transfer station, where it is separated. Some is recycled; the rest goes to an incinerator that creates energy that can be used instead of fossil fuels.
But to Gordon, that does not qualify as "zero waste" — which is more a philosophical ideal than a concrete benchmark.
"Incineration, even if it creates energy — it's destroying all those resources," Gordon says. "Material that goes into the incinerator is not there anymore."
Gordon dreams of a monopoly franchise system in which companies compete to recycle far more than they do now — in hopes of impressing City Hall and being awarded one of the lucrative 11 franchises.
But recycling costs more than dumping, and that means apartment dwellers and businesses in L.A. can expect to pay more if the City Council approves the plan. "Basically they're saying, 'We're going to raise the cost of running a business in Los Angeles in order to hopefully increase the amount of recycling we do,' " says Adrian Moore at the Reason Foundation.
Because the haulers would be monopolies, "Almost universally ... quality goes down and cost goes up, because there's no incentive to improve quality and reduce cost," Moore says.
The plan defies the trend in many U.S. cities, where mayors and city councils are privatizing services. "Leave it to L.A. to say, 'How can we kill more jobs?' " Moore quips.
