More and More People Cashing In on Trash : Environment: Redemption centers have seen a surge in business as South Bay residents, several cities and many businesses increase recycling efforts.

Doug Dixon used to find his eyes getting heavy as he passed the quiet hours at the county-run recycling center in Rolling Hills Estates.

Now there just isn’t time for dozing.

A steady stream of vehicles loaded with aluminum cans, plastic bottles, newspapers and other recyclables now pull up before Dixon and his crew at the wooden hut that is his office at the Palos Verdes Recycling Center. The center paid out about $16,000 last month in refunds, up from about $7,000 a year ago, said Dixon, the center’s operator.

“The number of cars coming in has almost doubled in the past year,” Dixon said last week as workers unloaded newspapers from the trunk of a Mercedes-Benz. Behind the Mercedes was a four-wheel-drive vehicle loaded with soda cans and plastic bottles, and waiting behind that were two other cars, their trunks full as well.

“I used to practically fall asleep here during the week because no cars would come through. But, as you can see, it’s pretty busy here.”

Other South Bay recycling centers--ranging from reverse vending machines outside supermarkets that take cans and bottles and dispense cash, to huge industries that melt down metals and bail paper--are experiencing similar increases in business.

At Action Sales and Metal Co. Inc., located on a gritty stretch of Pacific Coast Highway in Wilmington, owner Bruce Falk reports “a big upsurge in the past year.”

John Barile, president of South Bay Recycling Inc. in Gardena, says part of his job is being a traffic cop. “It’s a madhouse in here,” he said last week as 18-wheelers, smaller trucks and passenger cars battled for use of the center’s narrow driveway. “The whole world has discovered recycling.”

Recycling received a boost in 1986 when a state law guaranteed consumers at least a penny for each beverage container they turned in. It gained further energy this year with the publicity surrounding Earth Day, held in April, and a new state law that encourages city-sponsored recycling programs.

Customers at several South Bay centers said they have adopted recycling for both financial and environmental reasons.

“They charge you for the can nowadays, so you might as well try to get some of your money back,” Robert Pearson of Redondo Beach said as he unloaded $54 worth of Budweiser cans piled high in the back of his pickup truck at California Metals Recycling in Gardena last week.

Pearson said he typically uses the money he gets from returning cans every several months to bet on horses at Del Mar.

“I think about the environment and all that,” said Michael Gray, a transient who collects cans in a shopping cart in Gardena. “But most of the time I’m thinking about making enough to eat.”

Gray said he makes about $13 after a few hours of collecting cans along Vermont Avenue.

Jacqueline Gold, a Palos Verdes Estates resident who regularly brings newspapers and beverage containers to the recycling center in Rolling Hills Estates, has a different motivation.

“I grew up in the country,” Gold said. “One can in a field or meadow stands out. It’s a negative aspect of civilization that we produce all these things that are damaging the environment.”

Many businesses are also involved in recycling.

Alesis, a Los Angeles company that makes electronic studio equipment, ships its paper, beverage containers and other materials by truck to South Bay Recycling in Gardena at least once a month. Employees voted to give the refund money to the Save the Children program.

“I see it as an absolute obligation,” said Alesis President Russell Palmer. “I think it’s something we all absolutely have to do. If we continue on the way our parents passed the world on to us, the world will be as horrible a place as they and all the people before them made it. We have a responsibility as a generation to do the right thing.”

Business at the recycling centers from both large and small recyclers is booming, operators say, but as more cities adopt mandatory curbside recycling programs for their residents, the middlemen at the recycling centers say they face the prospect of being squeezed out of existence.

City-run recycling programs are spreading in the South Bay, partly because of recent state legislation that requires cities and counties to cut their flow of landfill-bound waste by at least 25% by 1995 and at least 50% by the year 2000. Cities have to produce plans by next July showing how they will meet those targets through recycling, composting and limits on the use of disposable material.

Last year, Rancho Palos Verdes was the only local city with a curbside program. Now, the beach cities, as well as Gardena, Rolling Hills Estates and Torrance, are operating such programs or organizing them for the near future.

The city-run programs charge residents monthly fees to cover costs--part of an acknowledgement among organizers that income from the sale of recyclable materials does not cover the cost of curbside service.

In Manhattan Beach, residents are charged 70 cents per month. That will drop to 20 cents a month if public participation regularly exceeds 50%, as city officials expect. In Rancho Palos Verdes, where the participation rate hovers around 50%, about $1.38 of the average $15.40 monthly trash bill goes to recycling. Gardena, which plans to begin service in October, will charge $1.50 a month.

For those who are recycling for the money, recycling centers provide an advantage over the machines outside supermarkets. Some of the larger centers pay out more than 3 cents a can, instead of the 2.5 cents that the state provides in redemption value.

Although the city programs are helping to bring recycling into the mainstream among residents, experts say that they have their limitations. Most of the curbside programs do not serve multifamily housing or businesses--both large trash producers--and do not include yard refuse, which is believed to account for one-third of all residential trash.

Ironically, as city programs expand, the mountains of recyclables they generate may create a crisis for smaller recycling centers by driving prices down.

“The city programs are wrecking the markets,” Barile said. “They create a huge supply with nowhere for it to go.”

Barile and other critics of the state legislation argue that the state should work to create new markets for recyclables before forcing cities to begin curbside programs.

“You can only help the environment so much,” he said. “You have to make money too. I have that bad habit. I like to eat a couple times a day.”