When people put their discards into containers at their curb, a truck comes by, and their waste goes away. But where is away?

In eastern Ventura County, most waste goes directly into the Simi Valley Landfill. Some goes to the Calabasas Landfill in Los Angeles. If you live near Santa Paula or Fillmore, your waste likely goes directly into the Toland Road Landfill, located between those two cities. Some also goes to the Chiquita Canyon Landfill in Los Angeles.

West county residential garbage usually ends up at the two local landfills (Simi Valley and Toland), but usually only after stopping first at a transfer station. A transfer station is a site where garbage is compacted into larger loads. There are two transfer stations in Ventura County, one in Oxnard and the other in Ventura.

Typically, curbside recyclables are also trucked to the transfer stations in Ventura and Oxnard. Most recyclables from the east county, though, either get sorted at a recycling center in Simi Valley or get combined into larger bins at a hauler's yard (also in Simi Valley) and trucked to a sorting center in Burbank.

The more interesting journeys for items from your curbside are the paths of recyclable items after separation. Part of the reason recycling generates 14 times more jobs per ton than landfilling is that there are so many different places for each type of recyclable item. Logistics alone is a major undertaking.

Most recycled paper and plastic is shipped to China. In fact, wastepaper is America's largest export by volume from the West Coast, and a report a couple of years ago shows that China's richest woman was paper-recycling entrepreneur Zhang Yin, with a reported fortune of $3.4 billion.

Material that isn't exported to Asia still usually leaves Ventura County before it can be recycled. Sometimes it even has to go to multiple locations. For example, glass bottles first go to a "beneficiation" plant in Vernon, where they are crushed, cleaned and separated from their labels before the resulting "cullet" (crushed, clean glass) can be trucked to the Bay Area for melting into new glass bottles and jars.

There are smelters in Los Angeles that melt scrap aluminum, but cans from Ventura County often go all the way to Texas before being recycled. Other metal cans and scrap metal can also be recycled in Los Angeles, but often instead get exported to Asia for recycling.

Even though companies in Ventura County use recycled plastic to manufacture new products, old plastic bottles still have to go at least to Long Beach before they can be turned into the flake or pellets that are returned to be used by local manufacturers.

In some cases, we have been able to keep recyclables completely local. For example, large truckloads of baled cardboard can be delivered directly to a mill in Oxnard, where old boxes are turned into a soup of pulp then rolled into new sheets of "medium," the layer in the middle of cardboard. That product is shipped to box plants, including a factory in Camarillo. Some of the boxes made locally are even used by the area strawberry industry.

Just as items you consume come from all over the world, material you discard also travels great distances.

On the Net:

http://publicworks.cityofoxnard.org/Department.aspx?DepartmentID=14&DivisionID=4&ResourceID=434

http://www.goldcoastrecycling.com