Trashopolis S02 E04: Los Angeles

Los Angeles where the American Dream turns into a garbage nightmare we found Santeria swords human skull half a Volkswagen and hot tubs a boom town built on movies oil and automobiles smarts killed more people than war gang violence auto accidents combined film was always a problem what do you do with it when you finish with it one way to put it it's the biggest oil spill on the planet LA we'll need some bright ideas to win the war on trash they said you want to do what Los Angeles the ultimate American metropolis sprawled between the glittering Pacific on one side and rugged mountains on the other the second-largest city in the US Metro LA is home to nearly 18 million people it's famous for movie stars freeways and endless sunshine a place where freedom rules and the American dream is there for the taking but there's a darker side to the City of Angels behind its glitzy facade la success has left a trail of rusty metal toxic garbage an abject filth in its wake to keep the dream alive this mega city will have to fight hard to stop its mounds of trash from casting shadows on Hollywood Boulevard these city investigators are on the front lines of LA's war against garbage Erin Harris and his partner Gerardo Rodriguez police illegal garbage dumping in the City of Angels they're also responsible for clearing out the illegal encampments built by homeless people homes built entirely of trash and evicting the residents is the hardest part of their job we try to approach the situation with more of a compassionate way of handling things and not like in the old days where you know beat cop would come along and you know move along hit him other nights they'd keep them going that kind of thing we don't do that the city's homeless population is headquartered on the infamous Skid Row in the heart of Los Angeles Skid Row is a lot more than just one Street it's it's an entire district within downtown Los Angeles it's several square blocks and that's where you have your majority of your homeless there are more homeless people here than anywhere else in the US and they each have a survival kit for some it's a few plastic bags for others elaborate garbage shelters there's anywhere between eight thousand and eleven thousand homeless people in the city of Los Angeles at one given time so I would imagine consider the cities over four hundred square miles that there's got to be hundreds of alleyways where this kind of thing is going on in the city's eyes the encampments are dirty and dangerous fire traps that must be cleaned up so Aaron and Gerardo have their work cut out for them this morning they're on their way to carry out a routine eviction in South LA the first location was going to is over in South Los Angeles and it's a homeless encampment where it's two people it's a male and a female apparently they've been there for a couple of years somebody recently reported them being there I guess they just decided that they'd had enough with them being in the alleyway behind their house the eviction notices have been up through a few days and Aaron and Gerardo have offered the squatters advice about where else they can go but we had come on previously warned them that we were going to come out and start cleaning up back here today the squatters have to pack up their makeshift shelter and move on well this is starting I'm just that's my boyfriend so he's used to this he knows the process so you really have to talk to you Rhonda and Starr have been living here for two years and they've mastered the art of building a house out of garbage so I came and we found some toss which is dis up here and I stuck it in some holes in a basket and I wrapped it with wide a whole little phenol to move across the bottoms and then I threw the top over the top with her help of course started most of the framing while Rhonda handled the interior then she constructed the bed over there and we still have a bed and a couch and a chair okay and then inside we got the big center table which belong to her she found and the other couch back there with sheet on she drank five blocks by herself you know we're comfortable J except were within range we got two sticks to elevate the top so it Cascades and the water goes up you know it's a pretty strong place it doesn't look strong but it's pretty strong garbage shelters them and it also feeds them when they sell it and turn a small profit you know I do yard sales and everything I work with recycle and house everything you know another man's that read you know what they say you know I go out of them everybody knows it's around here I do I sell things all over around the area weaving weaving recycled cans and bottles and stuff like that you know but their time is up in this alleyway now they need to grab what they can and move on because the city cleanup crew is moving in it took Rhonda and Starr two years to build their trash mansion it only takes ten minutes for the city's bulldozers to tear it down dump it on a truck and send it off to the landfill but there are no hard feelings it's just the name of the game in the City of Angels they were more than cooperative you know they didn't have any problem with it I mean that's just part of the lifestyle being transient moving from one place to another so it's part of how the game goes with them there's another side to this city of extremes the side most people associate with Los Angeles the rich side up the hill from Skid Row lie some of the poshest neighborhoods in North America home to LA's wealthiest from filthy rich executives to silver-screen heartthrobs Roosevelt white jr. drives one of the city's most lucrative garbage routes this is basically a rich area where a lot of the movie stars live you meet a lot of celebrities in this particular area where you probably won't get too much of that downtown here in the Hollywood Hills there are no alleyways full of junk and certainly no homeless encampments these streets are home to a different class of trash in this particular area here we get a lot more recycle because these people are pretty well-off and they don't save the stuff and try and resell it themselves and the stuff that they leave out you know it's good because they don't put it in the trash can they put it next to the can and don't even leave a sign on it telling you that it's good big-screen TVs computers monitors and there's an added bonus to servicing the rich and famous very very good tippers in an area like this the tips usually range from 600 to a thousand a year la recycles an impressive 65% of its waste more than any other large American city the rest of the trash whether it's from Beverly Hills or Skid Row ends up at the city's transfer stations every year over a half million tons of trash are dumped at this station alone nearly 2,600 smelly tons per day operations manager Paul Blount keeps the rubbish moving this is a central hub where trash from the los angeles city collection comes to this facility by the city force's City trucks they deposit to load from their routes which are fairly close in up to 370 garbage trucks a day dump waste onto the 45,000 square foot tipping floor that's an acre of LA's finest trash they're pushing the refuse it's been brought in by the trucks into ports in the you need those ports or semi-trailers and they're being loaded with the refuse that will be destined for the landfills [Music] the trash transfer means that fewer trucks have to drive out to one of LA's five landfills that makes good economic sense for the trash to be loaded here a semi-truck will take three the so the economies of scale are at work and once the semis are loaded it's time to haul trash scratch the surface of sunny Los Angeles and you'll dig up some dirt LA's glitzy facade hides a vast trash wooden urban jungle with an infrastructure that strains under the weight of its 18 million residents and Counting but back in the 1830s when la was a tiny outpost of just 800 people throwing out the trash was pretty straightforward as historian William Devereaux explains the idea was simply to get it out of the way and so Los Angeles has a tiny but quite effective River in the 19th century the Los Angeles River cutting right through the center of the place where trash and the bodies of dead horses and the occasional bodies of individuals were tossed presumably to either decay or at the very least go downstream a little bit for Angelenos the river was a perfect dumping place for trash but in the early 20th century as the city expanded the river limited the city's growth it flooded regularly a nearby land could not be used for real estate since it was underwater for parts of the year so the decision was made to pave the river to turn it into an 83 kilometers on concrete Channel Lewis McAdams is the founder of the Friends of the LA River it was a major real estate decision to channelize the Los Angeles River it allowed for vast real estate holdings to be freed up to sell but it was a vast public works project in the lab darkest days of the depression there was 17,000 people caving the Los Angeles River by hand or 3 million barrels of concrete were used real estate boomed but at a cost but you can say it's a successful project but as you can see the only living things pretty much that are down here are us now this iconic concrete geometry is mainly home to skaters vagrants and Hollywood car chases and it's still a perfect dumping ground for trash we do a river cleanup and we can find anything in this river bloody Santeria swords we found a human skull we found half a Volkswagen and found hot tubs telephone this I mean there can literally be anything but it's the smallest pieces of trash in the LA River that caused the biggest problem for environmentalists Marcus Eriksen and Anna Cummins the LA River plays a part in a global trash disaster the vast quantities of plastic that end up in huge ocean whirlpools they're checking out a storm drain part of a giant underground system that washes rain water and tons of garbage into the LA River the problem starts here 80% of all the ocean bound trash starts on land and flows out to CVR storm drains and it's from consumers it's blowing out of garbage trucks it's people either intentionally or accidentally littering look how many bags one two three four bags there's five over 2,400 kilometres of underground pipes drained the entire LA basin and they're often choked with trash this network of underground storm drains literally covers the entire LA basin right now we're underneath Los Angeles so this is the way that a lot of our trash gets out of sight you see it winding its way down a storm drains now to see but we're right now in the belly of the beast yes did a rain storm it's like a massive column of water the water would be like I'll live to the ceiling of this I think you can see look at this Hammond click up here there's a little bits of styrofoam look at that yes this has been scoured for the past two months with all the rains that we've had so we're not seeing any trash here but you can see remnants of the storms living up here on the wall hey check this out this spiderweb look at all the plastic hangers in the spiderweb here so that there shows you how high the water level came known as web oh really what the Black Widow you don't often think from the street level that underneath the city is this massive network like the arteries of the city carrying our carrying our waste into the environment back outside Anna and Marcus inspect the garbage that's been washed out from the storm drains so most of the big trash that we're finding here is food packaging it's styrofoam plates it's styrofoam to go packaging from fast-food it's water bottles lots of bottle caps plates most of this trash is plastic and all plastic is made from oil the really unfortunate thing about this is that we're taking petroleum which is a very valuable resource it's an extremely valuable material and we're turning it into products like this which you use one time you throw it away but this is designed to last the LA River is prone to trash because it's the most downhill point of the city [Music] so everything washes down to the river and into the ocean once trash washes into our ocean it gets swept up in these massive current systems that we call gyres kind of kind of like a huge whirlpool spanning the entire North Pacific Ocean the bags and bottle caps break down into smaller and smaller pieces becoming increasingly toxic once they get really small these small particles are absorbing all kinds of toxins they're already out in the ocean like PCBs and DDT other kinds of agricultural waste sticks to plastic making it very toxic and at that point animals are eating it you know what you see here in this one jar that might be three miles three miles of ocean that we skimmed back and forth and condensed into this jar so imagine a handful of plastics true note over three football fields of area it's impossible to clean it up want me to put it it's the biggest oil spill on the planet [Applause] [Music] the only way to clean it up is to stop the trash on land before it gets out in the water and the city of La is trying to be just that they use truck mounted vacuum cleaners to clear out the thousands of street level catch basins that feed the city storm drains basically works as a vacuum like your house vacuum only 50 times stronger and several of the major storm drain channels use a giant sock to catch debris in trash before it goes out into the ocean every year the city stops over 2,000 tons of trash from reaching it boomtown Los Angeles lures Americans with the promise of year-round Sun fun and freedom the Pacific Ocean with its sandy beaches and killer waves has beckoned to surfers since the city's early days it's just fun for these water babies who like nothing better than to be rolled in the cradle of the deep but dive beneath the surface of LA's beach bum surf culture and you'll find a contradiction [Music] what a day surfer Joey sent Lee lays it out it's really odd that most surfers you know we're environmentalist by default because we spend our time in the ocean we're protectors of the ocean yet you know we ride these surfboards that are made out of manmade chemicals and petroleum products and there's a little bit of uh you know conundrum there surfboards used to be made out of wood but those days are over now they're made of polyurethane foam and surfers go through a surprising number of them every year three quarters of a million are produced in the United States most of them end up in landfills pros go through 50 boards a year or a typical surfboard surfer might go through three boards in a year typically the board ends up in a landfill this thing will not biodegrade worse when a surfboard is made 20% of the material is wasted when the boards are shaped there's just a tremendous amount of waste to dust created I brought a bag of it this is this material is what ends up in the landfill every day and that's really bad dust is really bad for the environment for the landfills because it's high volume low density and hard to contain so Joey set out to design and build a board using this wasted material in a secret process the dust is compressed added to new foam and reshaped Joey's new boards are made of 60% recycled material what we're doing is we're just taking this and recycling it back into a new surfboard so that it gets another ride keeping it out of the landfill for now the end product is still not biodegradable but Joey wants to take the next step and turn surfing completely green I think that in the next few years we're gonna see blanks that are 100% recycled and the boards are gonna write this as good as they do now it's just we're gonna feel really good about being surfers and not being hypocrites riding toxic bombs in the water [Music] year-round sunshine has always been one of LA's major selling points and back in the early 20th century sunny skies and wide-open spaces made the los angeles area a perfect location for movie shoots as the studios moved in la turned into Tinseltown and Hollywood was born the next great boom had begun Los Angeles's look and feel are very closely identified with the film industry for good reason it's a powerful piece of our culture it's a powerful piece of our economy and in its best really attractive come here start anew get famous the Hollywood Dream Factory transformed a rough frontier town into a glamorous playground of celebrity and excess but behind the glamorous facade of the movies the trash from film sets to old celluloid film stock was piling up Gary Martin runs the lot at Sony Studios film was always a problem what do you do is when you finish with it [Music] I mean it could be Herman legend but the legends are they literally took him to the desert dug a trench and buried him there was no way to reuse it this is the former home of MGM the studio that famously had more stars than there are in heaven when Sony Pictures moved in they invested a hundred million dollars to refurbish the lot and the transformation is not only cosmetic Sony is leading the new Green Revolution in Hollywood and his name is zero waste Katie hammock zero waste means actually diverting over 90 percent of material from landfill for us to actually launch this era waste initiative I think it's an example not only for our industry but entire corporations worldwide from top to bottom the studio recycles and reuses everything it can the caters we use now are using reusable utensils or things that we can actually recycle even set construction on Sony's back lot has gone green well this is a New York Street set that we had made pieces of it come from different zones like spider-man and some were refurbished and transformed from a Spanish LA home that was built here for burlesque and we transformed to New York set so we can get a New York set back here on the line it's a huge shift in thinking in the old days it used to be out of sight out of mind you've heard of whole sets that were plowed under on beaches and so on so a lot of things were just buried and forgotten the sets processo be tamils Ten Commandment still lie beneath sand dunes near Santa Barbara but now instead of burying the movie trash the studio shifts it out so what happens ultimately all the trash that is generated on the lot is transported with buildings and grounds place in our compactor and transported up - a composting facility we have a partner in Culver City it helps us we do a lot of composting with them actually send some of it back here for our people to use if they feel the need for it Los Angeles was built on movies and one of the best places to see them was the city's glamorous movie theaters famous for their glowing lights and neon signs but now many of those signs are being trashed era clinks Wyler is an expert on LA's vintage neon one thing I see with neon around Los Angeles is that it disappears at the drop of a hat more often than not these neon signs just get dumped I'd say we only have about 5% of our original neon signs from the heyday of neon in the 30s 40s and 50s Eric will do just about anything to rescue them believe it or not I've actually jumped into dumpsters in order to save neon signs today Eric is hunting for an elusive sign at Ellie's variety arts theater in the 1920s here in Los Angeles this was quite a spot this building has one of the rarest signs in all of Los Angeles it was removed from the facade just a few years ago and I heard through the grapevine that that neon sign was placed in the basement these are the guys holy cow they're bigger than I thought they look fantastic I'm I love it I love it I love seeing these things I'm just glad that they're not in the dump I thought that for sure they'd have been thrown away by now they are so unique because they're the last example of Los Angeles's rearranged about neon letters we just don't have any left in the city at all anymore and it's just sometimes to see them in great shape too [Music] Los Angeles is one of the glitziest cities in the world this perpetual boom town is the place to live out the American dream but Tinseltown hides a down-and-dirty secret beneath the suburban subdivisions and high-end boutiques live vast reservoirs of crude oil oil that transformed the fortunes of early Los Angeles geologist Don Clark Los Angeles the history is very very much based on oil most people don't realize it in 1892 LA's billion-dollar oil industry was born with the arrival of two failed gold prospectors Edward Doheny and Charlie Canfield they noticed oil seeping out of the ground in downtown Los Angeles close to present-day Dodger Stadium they were miners and they they took their skills together and they dug a hole it was about four feet by six feet and they dug it down 155 feet and they fashioned a big long piece of eucalyptus tree it was about 60 feet long and bang the rest their way down [Music] oil actually came and filled the bowl the oil produced a very very cheap source of energy very very much more efficient very much cheaper than coal and that was very very significant oil was very portable you could give it a number of places in a nutshell you know it just blew up from there it was very spectacular five years later there were more than 500 oil wells operating within Los Angeles prospectors prostitutes and con men arrived by the hundreds hoping to get a piece of the action inevitably some of them cut a few corners now we had a lot of problems in the old days people weren't so careful there was a lot of goo that was getting out nasty smells inconvenient stuff people would even pour the oil in the streets there were massive oil spills and spectacular refinery fires was anything but clean well because of this this is the place where the environmental regulations got started because it was right in the middle of the city and they're still pumping oil in LA today including on Signal Hill on the outskirts of the city Signal Hill is one of the most oil prolific places on the entire planet but drilling in the middle of an LA suburb is a challenge for any oilman just ask kevin Laney we have to be very conscious of the neighborhood we try to run as clean of operation as we can you know it takes us it takes us a bit longer it costs more money but you know it's just a mat it's just part of doing business in an urban environment some of LA's other active oil wells are camouflaged to blend in with the urban environment they even fool passers-by I think it's a synagogue actually but I'm not sure it's actually an oil well some rigs are disguised as office blocks while this rig is on the grounds of Beverly Hills High School you're right in the middle of one of the most significant oil areas around but if we sniffed the air I doubt you can smell any oil in it it's really pretty good the industry strives to keep everything trash free they want to have it look good they want it to smell good and they don't want any of the sound the sound that I have in the background right here they don't even want that going out so they have microphones all over the exterior of the buildings that monitor it and if it gets to a certain decibel level everything shuts down [Music] at the turn of the 20th century urban crude powered the city's growth and it also powered LA's favorite mode of transport the automobile a craze that was just getting revved up ever since the Model T car crazed Angelenos have always been mad about their rides behind the late 1920s Los Angeles is easily the highest per capita ownership of automobiles anywhere in the world and that of course fuels a kind of excitement about life in Los Angeles and personal freedoms that car culture has become to be identified with and Los Angeles is still desperately in love with its cars this is the American dream of freedom on wheels but there was a cross to LA's freewheeling car culture smog airborne garbage in the middle of World War two smog suddenly descended on Los Angeles author chip Jacobs sets the scene it hit like a London pea-soup fog except it was accurate and made people tear up and caught and a rumor went around that the Japanese had a submarine parked off the LA coast and were lobbing chemical weapon shells at us there was a bit of hysteria people didn't know what it was it looked like somebody had just slapped down a layer of disgusting unhealthy Brown air city officials considered the problem carefully and then did almost nothing except start a new fashion craze the first reaction I would say was all as well we have it in hand they didn't consider it unhealthy in fact they hold out public health officials and said smog is harmless to your health and boy were they wrong turns out later we find out smokes killed more people than war gang violence auto accidents combined the authorities finally found something to blame not cars but garbage back in the 1940s and 50s Angelenos relied on a very basic method to get rid of paper cardboard and other dry trash they burned it there was a backyard incinerator culture hair who would know Los Angeles was really a city of pyromaniacs people were very attached on a Friday night or whatever designated day they had to dumping trash and a barbecue like incinerator and seeing it go up as the smog got worse the authorities banned backyard trash burning the news was not well-received they fought like mad to keep their incinerator one lady said she was so upset about the intrusion she was going to come out to the politicians with a hatchet instead of burning trash it was trucked off to giant landfills in the city to the smog persisted incineration was only a small part of the problem finally a scientist from Caltech figured out that the major culprit was the car will you stop honking back we ain't going nowhere car exhaust fumes react with the LA sunshine to create ozone and ozone turns into smog so California set the first tailpipe emission standards now every car has to undergo a regular smog check and industries that pollute are also forced to lower their levels of emissions the smog problem is not solved but it's certainly improved there's another side to LA's love affair with their cars there are so many on the road that every year thousands of tons of automotive scrap are trashed now instead of going to the landfill they get recycled this giant parts junkyard is one of the biggest in California a place where cars come to die and mechanics come to find the perfect part Tony Mendoza runs the show we have a wide variety of customers from the professional mechanic to the person who just needs a part to get their car running to get to it from work people in Los Angeles area rely on their vehicle so much that they have to keep them running at any cost and with 50 thousand cars moving through the yard every year there's some rich pickings daughter smashed another car that's life we take off certain fenders and the hood for tin from the motor and transmission we get the aluminum off of it brake drums and rotors also get taken off and recycled separately as well do aluminum wheels radiators condensers the copper in there and the aluminum that's sold in there are sold separately as well we allow the car to sit in our retail department in about 30 days and then whatever's gone is gone and whatever is not then gets crushed with the cost finally the cars are completely disemboweled crushed and compacted this is the end of the line for the car this is after the customers have pulled all the parts that they want off of it and we process it the rest of the way and then we bail the car and it gets sent to the shredder Los Angeles the City of Angels known for its showbiz glitz extraordinary wealth and traffic choked freeways [Music] to keep its glitzy image intact la relies on a few characters behind the scenes Robert had not works for the city's Department of Sanitation as a dead animal collector I've been doing this particular job 22 years so I'll give it a try it's different than being on a regular route picking up trash and Here I am 22 years later his garbage route mainly consists of cats dogs and squished squirrels when I first started doing this I got one that was really deep imposed really bad and I was just laying in the alley and he had been there probably I say almost a week I had some experience but not a lot and I wasn't careful and I got a little bit of it on me and you wear it all day you wear that smell all day long and sometimes he's asked to dispose of more exotic beasts opossum an old possum if they get in the street the cars used to get him you know they're kind of slow I got a pet Python once that was 14 feet long that was a tough call I did it but snakes are not my favorite animal to handle but it's my job so I handle it looks like a dog it is a dog a little dog all the animals are scanned to see if they have an ID chip inside no chip if they do the animal shelter is advised and they used the information on the chip to let the owner know says the cat so we'll double check X cat but the biggest will get on a pretty much regular basis in the summers a deer [Music] the animal carcasses are taken away to a special facility and disposed of but it's not a subject that the city likes to talk about this is gonna be a touchy question I got a word this was different just say they're disposed of in a humane way it's a real that's a touchy subject [Music] Los Angeles is incredible growth has given rise to another touch e-waste problem who LA's raw sewage used to flow directly out into Santa Monica Bay creating a huge dead zone where the only marine life that survived were worms and a particularly tough species of clams it wasn't exactly a glamorous place and back in the early days Terminal Island treatment plant which treats human and industrial waste was not helping matters superintendent Dave Kumar we used to violate all the time we were one of the worst operating facilities in this entire world right we violated hundreds of times a month and we went from that to a situation where we're in the top 5% in the world now in 2002 Terminal Island became the first sewage plant in the country to produce clean water from sewage using a technique called reverse osmosis [Music] everything flushed through the Los Angeles sewer system ends up at sanitation plants like this one the waste comes here we neutralize it we protect the ocean that's what we do Dave is proud of the plants turnaround and its reputation for radical thinking Terminal Island treatment plant and always banned the outcast and the ones that didn't get along things like that and they came down here so you had a lot of people that didn't think mainstream one of the new and radical things they did was to install egg-shaped digesters never used before in the US these digesters that you're standing on first and hold North American Condon raid here at ti before the sewage is treated any debris mixed in with it is skimmed out and the leftover sludge is broken down in the digesters their egg shape makes the sludge break down more efficiently we call on creatures from another world the microorganisms break down the dissolved solids by the time it's done it's pretty damn close to jar water two things come out of the other end water and digested sludge the water is probably cleaner than your tap water and one day Angelenos may be drinking it it's gonna happen is it gonna happen in the near future I don't know about the near future but our children's children are gonna are gonna be part of this yeah [Music] Oh how's it taste today Dave oh that's good stop would you like some the word thank you very much wait to the masses during dis the water may be crystal clear but the digested sludge certainly is not most of it is trucked to far-off farms for use as fertilizer Mike Bruno a geo environment technologies believes he's got a smarter way right now they truck it long distance to rural counties and there's resistance to that so they are looking for a local solution instead his company is injecting this foul icky sludge into a well drilled 5,000 feet deep it's not something people are familiar with they said you want to do what trucks filled with sewage sludge arrived every day this is mixed with the goop piped in from the Terminal Island plant next door then the smelly stuff is sent down into the ground beneath the Los Angeles Harbor it's ejected 5,000 feet straight down into a rocky and sand formation and it's pushed into the pore space between the sand just like if you take a coke and drop it on the sand at the beach it goes into the pore space that's where this material is going the pore space between the grains that's where it's further heated by the natural geothermal heat that's a mile down the temperature ranges from 45 to a toasty 70 degrees Celsius perfect for sterilizing the sludge the natural heat biodegrades the biomass just like a compost pile in your backyard or a septic system the sludge breaks down into carbon dioxide which stays trapped underground and into methane which will eventually be piped back up and used as a renewable source of energy this process is the first of its kind in the world right now compared to the alternatives this is a significant advance our population is increasing the people want to live they continue to flush and so we need a responsible way to manage that material [Music] la is still the place to pursue the American dream but the dream comes at a cost the city's a flood plain that became a trash filled storm drain a boomtown that turned farmland into freeways and parkland into a parking lot [Applause] but there's a noticeable shift in LA's attitude toward trash and pollution especially where cars are concerned brendan mackaninee it really seems to be a groundswell of momentum across the board and so we've seen the major auto manufacturers all come out with their electric vehicles hybrid cars and electric vehicles are increasingly common on the streets of LA and could lead to a new and cleaner city but electric cars are not without their critics one the criticisms levied against that form of transportation is that the power will still come from dirty power plants somewhere out in the desert but actually here we're trying to say that no there's another solution you can provide clean renewable electricity on site with our buildings it's just a matter of incorporating it into the design this parking lot is leading the way solar panels on the roof provide power for plug-in electric vehicles Southern California is obviously with plenty of sunshine a great area for solar power it's sunny here most of the year around town electric vehicle charging stations are being installed to help make EVs as accessible and easy to use as gas-powered vehicles Brendon hopes that this will ease LA's infamous freeway congestion I hope in 50 years time the freeways are not jam-packed at all but if there are vehicles on the road obviously one would hope that their clean vehicles and electric vehicles is one way to do that another ambitious green idea is to reclaim portions of the concrete covered LA River and turn it back to its natural trash free State seeing this landscape transformed into terraces with no railroad tracks on both sides with outdoor cafes with wetlands restorations with steelhead trout returning to the place where it used to run people think that that's a full pie in the sky but to me I can see it [Music] a victim of its own success Los Angeles has always struggled to contain the giant amounts of trash it generated Los Angeles is a place of great human drama Los Angeles is a place of great human ambition and triumph but this mega city is always ready to reinvent itself to rid itself of the old and the outdated and to adopt new technology and new ways of thinking Los Angeles will always ride on the crest of the wave

Channel: hazards and catastrophes

Views: 375,208

Rating: 4.6361866 out of 5

Keywords: science documentary, full documentary, full documentaries, documentary, earth documentary, catastrophe documentary, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Movies, Hollywood, Living in LA, LA, United States of America, The City of Angels, Dream City, Los Angeles Trashopolis, Trashopolis Los Angeles, Trashopolis LA, Los Angeles Green, Los Angeles Climate Change, Los Angeles Reducing Waste, Los Angeles Zero Waste, California, California Going Green, City of Angels

Id: E58jt4TazWI

Length: 45min 42sec (2742 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018