It should come as no surprise that LA Sanitation was named 2017 Sanitation Department of the Year by Waste Dive Magazine. Operating in the second largest city in the country, LASAN collects an average of 6,652 tons per day of refuse, recyclables, yard trimmings, horse manure, and bulky items from more than 750,000 homes.  But beyond the numbers, LASAN’s culture of ingenuity and commitment to serve its customers and improve the quality of life for all Angelenos is apparent in every facet of its work.

In recent years, LASAN has embarked on new programs to address streets that could pose a threat to public health by removing unsightly, bulky items and abandoned waste to move toward a Zero Waste city. Informed by their innovative CleanStat technology, LASAN has led the way in establishing Los Angeles as the first city to map the cleanliness of every one of its blocks.

To generate the data for the innovative program, LASAN’s five two-person crews drive over 22,000 miles every quarter to assess the cleanliness of 42,000 blocks in the City using video and geographic information system (GIS) tools.  It’s a time-intensive process that could not be completed without the dedication of the agency’s workforce to continue making Los Angeles an even more resilient city than it already is.  All this hard work has resulted in 95% of the grids being noted as green in the last indexing quarter.

Just this last year, LASAN also began rolling out recycLA, a groundbreaking public-private partnership that, for the first time in the history of the City, offers customer-friendly and efficient waste and recycling services to all businesses and large multifamily buildings. Though the program offers a number of citywide benefits including reduced traffic and improved air quality, recycLA will ultimately reduce our dependence on landfills to achieve the City’s goal of diverting 90 percent of its waste from landfills by 2025.

As the agency completes the largest transition of its kind in the nation, LASAN remains steadfast in its assurance to provide efficient and equitable service to all recycLA customers.  From the team staffing the 24-hour Customer Care Center, which averages 2,000 calls daily, to the crews on the street picking-up additional collections, and all the employees in between, it’s employee collaboration and attentiveness to customer service are what will undoubtedly make recycLA a resounding success.

LASAN’s “back to basics” approach to high-quality customer service continues to propel LASAN and its 3,000-person workforce to make LA a more sustainable and greater city. And by recognizing the benefit of having a workforce that is representative of the customers it serves, LASAN is better equipped to assist the diverse needs of a large city like Los Angeles.  Through Earth Day and Open House celebrations, the Environmental Learning Center at Hyperion, social media and their 24-hour customer service and dispatch center, LASAN remains accessible and encourages feedback to continue upholding its high customer service standard.