A visual explainer · 2 minutes
Every number here comes from RecycLA’s own reports, obtained under the California Public Records Act, and from the state and county disposal records used to cross-check them.
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The system
RecycLA is the city’s commercial waste franchise: 8 haulers operating 11 exclusive zones. From January 2022 through December 2024, their reports track 4,828,942 tons of waste from restaurants, offices, and apartment buildings.
This is commercial waste — not your home cart. Residential collection is a separate system this data doesn’t cover.
Why this slice matters
This story covers only commercial waste — but that isn’t a side story. The City’s own analysis found commercial and multifamily properties send about 2.5 million tons a year to landfill — 70% of what Los Angeles disposes. Statewide, roughly 48% of disposed waste comes from the commercial sector — a share derived from CalRecycle’s 2021 tonnage tables (its “commercial” includes multifamily housing).
It’s also where the food is: EPA estimates 60% of the nation’s non-industrial wasted food comes from commercial sources — restaurants, groceries, cafeterias, hotels — versus 40% from households.
Whether businesses out-recycle households varies by city — Seattle’s commercial sector performs near its residential programs; New York’s was pegged far lower in one advocacy-coalition study — a figure the industry disputed. In LA, commercial diversion was reported at about 19% when the franchise launched in 2017, against a Zero Waste goal of 90% by 2025. That gap is why RecycLA exists — following this stream means following most of the problem.
The promise
Every commercial customer sorts into the same three bins, and every Angeleno is told the same thing about where each one goes.
Black bin is destined for landfill; green bin for compost; blue bin for recycling.
That’s the promise printed on the side of the bin. The records let us check it.
LASAN RecycLA customer materials (external; bin color definitions)The records
Take a real path: a green bin is emptied on the Westside and the load surfaces in the reports at its first stop — Puente Hills MRF (16,723 green-bin tons made that trip in 2022–24).
Then comes the second hop, and the reports usually go silent. Onward to a landfill? Waste-to-energy in Long Beach? Wastewater digestion in Carson? Another facility? Compost? The facility’s own county ledger shows the aggregate — 92.98% of everything leaving Puente Hills is disposal — but no record ties this load to any endpoint. This audit joins the haulers’ reports to CalRecycle’s records to follow both hops.
The visibility wall
Landfill — confirmed disposal, 58.3% of the total. Recovery-typed facility — compost, recycling, or sorting, 18.5%. Transfer — a way-station whose onward destination the reports don’t give, 22.2%. Unknown — the trail simply ends, 1.0%.
“Unknown” doesn’t mean landfill. It means the trail goes cold — and this piece never counts it as anything else.
Fate one · the black bin
Black-bin waste is supposed to go to landfill — and it does. Of the black-bin loads routed through transfer stations that could be matched to state disposal records — 666,440.50 tons — an estimated 98.88% continued to landfill. Most black-bin tonnage goes straight to landfill and never needs the trace.
Expected, and clean. It also proves the tracing method works when the records cooperate.
Fate two · the green bin
Green bins carry organics — food and yard waste meant for compost. The records track 227,976 tons of commercial organics. Where did it go first?
More of it went to sorting facilities (37.5%) than to compost facilities (33.8%). Another 23.3% went to transfer stations, and 4.9% couldn’t be traced.
The records can’t show what happens downstream of a sorting facility — so for most of this stream, they can’t confirm composting.
Fate three · the blue bin
When a load reaches a sorting facility — a materials recovery facility, or MRF — the diversion rate counts it as diverted. That’s 489,226 tons at facilities matched to state records.
CalRecycle’s disposal data describes the same facilities differently: an estimated 93.6% of that tonnage — 458,018 tons — went on to disposal, about 9.5 points of the citywide total. Facility by facility: Crown Recycling 86.8%, Athens Sun Valley 99.8%, Puente Hills MRF 97.4%.
Close-up · one facility, three ledgers
Take one sorting facility from the last scene. In RecycLA’s reports: 78,646 tons arrive there and are counted as diverted. In CalRecycle’s records (which log disposal, not recycling): 97.4% of the facility’s reported outbound tonnage is disposal.
And in LA County’s independent ledger of everything leaving the facility — all material, not just RecycLA’s — of 958,627 outbound tons: 92.98% disposal, 5.61% food waste, and 1.28% recovered commodities — the only line the county ledger records leaving as recyclables.
Three ledgers, one building. Only the first one calls it diversion.
Fate four · transfer & unknown
941,811 tons went to transfer stations that could be matched to state records. Under those records’ disposal-stream reading, an estimated 98.7% continued to landfill — for the non-black-bin portion of these loads, the same two-readings caveat as the sorting facilities applies: a ceiling, not a point estimate.
And 46,859 tons can’t be traced at all. This piece shows that tonnage as fate unknown — it is never quietly counted as landfilled, and never counted as diverted.
One independent check: at Puente Hills MRF, LA County’s own all-stream reports show 92.98% of 958,627 outbound tons were disposal.
Bottom line · the black bin
Landfill, as printed on the lid. Traced black-bin loads: an estimated 98.88% to landfill. Of the three promises, this is the one the records bear out.
Black bin · on the map
The black bar resolves to real places: 3,960,300 tons, its 14 largest destinations mapped here (smaller ones grouped as “other”). Four landfills — Simi Valley (777,057 t), Sunshine Canyon (769,269 t), Chiquita Canyon (792,211 t), and Frank R. Bowerman (354,554 t) — took 68.0% of everything.
Colors are the records’ own trail types: gray dots ended at landfill; light-blue dots are where the trail stops at a transfer station; teal, a sorting facility.
One recorded ambiguity, handled in the open: 42,165 t was reported under a synonym naming either El Sobrante or Chiquita Canyon — two landfills 70 miles apart. It’s apportioned between the two in proportion to each site’s unambiguous tonnage (most of it to Chiquita Canyon); see the methodology’s “Ambiguous two-facility destinations” note.
Black bin · end of life
Follow every black-bin path to its end: 70.8% confirmed at landfill, another est. 20.0% under the ceiling reading, 3.61% burned for energy, and 5.20% the trail can’t follow.
The black bin’s best case for recycling: even crediting every unaccounted ton at the matched sorting plants as commodities — tonnage the state records can’t distinguish from unreported disposal — it tops out at est. 0.40%.
Bottom line · the green bin
Of the commercial organics stream, 33.8% went first to a compost facility. More went to a sorting facility (37.5%), 23.3% to transfer stations, and 4.9% is untraceable. Composting can’t be confirmed for anything past the first stop.
Green bin · chunk one: sorting facilities
Highlight the largest slice of the organics bar — the 37.5% that went to sorting facilities — and it lands almost entirely at two: Crown Recycling in Sun Valley (67,896 t) and Puente Hills MRF (16,723 t) — 99.1% of the chunk.
Organics arriving at a sorting facility count as diverted; composting can’t be confirmed downstream.
Green bin · chunk two: compost facilities
The compost-facility chunk has a center of gravity far outside the county: 90.4% of it went to one site — Recology’s Blossom Valley Organics–South in Lamont, Kern County (69,717 t), roughly a hundred miles from the city.
The remainder went mostly to Greenwise Soil Technologies in LA and Athens’ American Organics in Victorville.
And arrival is not composting: compost facilities report their own residuals onward to landfill. In CalRecycle’s records, Greenwise itself reported 1,392 t to landfill in 2024, and Recology’s Blossom Valley Organics–North — the northern sibling of the Lamont site — reported 55,373–72,453 t a year (2022–24). The South site’s own outbound isn’t in the public extract.
Green bin · chunk three: transfer & unknown
The 23.3% that went to transfer stations — mostly Sun Valley (49,604 t) — is where the reports stop.
And 11,117 tons has no traceable destination — most of it recorded only as “the orex”, which appears to name an organics extrusion press: a machine that squeezes food waste into a slurry, typically for digestion at a wastewater plant. The reports never name a facility or a destination for its output, so this tonnage stays unknown — there is nowhere to draw it on a map.
Green bin · end of life
Followed to the end, the green bin splits three ways: 33.8% demonstrably reached a compost facility; an estimated 33.0% lands at landfill under the ceiling reading of its sorting-plant tonnage; and 28.5% — the transfer-station tonnage — can’t be followed at all.
That last slice is shown as unconfirmed, not landfilled, deliberately: the audit’s own cross-check cuts against the landfill reading here — CalRecycle’s SB 1383 data shows these transfer facilities routed 90–96% of source-separated organics to recovery. The audit states both readings and chooses neither; so does this chart.
And “reached a compost facility” means arrival, not composting: compost sites report their own residuals onward to landfill — Greenwise, one of this data’s compost destinations, reported 1,392 t landfilled in 2024 in CalRecycle’s records. Cross-checking every compost facility’s outbound is an open item.
Bottom line · the blue bin
Every ton reaching a sorting facility counts as diverted — 489,226 tons at matched facilities. Under CalRecycle’s disposal-scoped reading, an estimated 93.6% of it went on to disposal. That’s the ceiling reading of records that permit two — and the records allow no better confirmation.
Blue bin · on the map
The blue bin’s 640,666 tons fan out to a ring of first stops: Athens Services’ Sun Valley MRF (190,750 t), the Bradley East station next door (156,661 t), Puente Hills, Potential Industries in Wilmington (55,627 t), Universal Resource Recovery in Santa Fe Springs, Burbank Recycle Center, and the Compton and Gardena transfer stations.
Every teal dot is a place where the diversion rate says: counted.
Blue bin · end of life
Under the ceiling reading, an estimated 73.4% of the blue bin ends at landfill. The records equally permit a second reading — that sorted blue-bin loads traveled outside disposal reporting entirely; the audit states both readings and chooses neither. This is the ceiling the unfavorable reading permits, not a measurement.
Another 24.4% reaches facilities the state records can’t see into at all — that tonnage could include real recycling. The residual the reading can’t place — commodities sold, or unreported disposal — is est. 0.29%. Almost none of the recycling bin’s promise is confirmable end to end.
The bottom line
All 4,828,942 tons, followed to the end: 58.3% confirmed at landfill, an estimated 27.7% more under the ceiling reading — 86.0% in all. Reached a compost facility (arrival): 1.60%. Burned for energy: 3.02%. The residual the records can’t place — commodities or unreported disposal — 0.53% (25,583 t). Another 8.85% is tonnage whose trail simply ends.
Under the audited definitions, only about 18 to 24 of every 100 tons can be counted diverted — 18.48% conservative, 24.05% among classifiable tonnage — and far less than that is confirmable end to end.
Green bin ≠ guaranteed compost. Blue bin ≠ guaranteed recycling.
The blind spot
The state’s tracking database, RDRS, records what facilities throw away — it does not record what they recycle. No load is tracked end-to-end. Residential waste is a separate system entirely.
So this audit followed what the records show — and where the trail goes cold, it says so, on every chart.
Why it matters → the stakes, from official records: the city’s own inventory says the problem is 90% addressable, the law already demands it, the harms are local, and the money isn’t where the mandate is.
What could change this → how we made this, and the five reporting requirements — to the City Council and CalRecycle — that would make the answer a query.
docs/methodology.md · docs/audit/transfer_fate_analysis.md §7 (scope & limitations)The dashboard behind this story holds the full audited record — every hauler, every facility, every month, with each cross-check shown and every uncertainty labeled.