Community Recycling & Resource Recovery

I just bought a place in Sylmar that had ugly dark carpeting that I had to tear out. Made the place look like a cave.
On top of that, the previous owners were pack rats and left behind piles and piles of random crap. A lot of it was six inch long pieces of used wood with nails, seriously Gene, what was it about this six inch long piece of wood that made you think it could be reused with seven rusty bent nails sticking out of it?
The piles had to go too. I really didn’t want to send this much stuff to the land fill… so began the search for a recycling place that took old man crap piles.
I searched quite a bit and this place showed up as a C&D (construction and demolition) recycler. I did some more research and according to the City of Los Angeles Department of Public Works Bureau of Sanitation this place diverts more then 80% of what comes into their facility. I lot of these places that process C&D, it’s barely over 50%.
So, I rented a truck from Home Depot (FYI $ 30 for 2hrs and the N. Hollywood one always has trucks) and loaded it up. It was stacked taller than the roof of the truck! Got it to center with no problem (9189 De Garmo is the office, not the drop off, by the way). Drove up on the scale, paid the flat rate of $ 59 and unloaded all my junk onto a pile of crap that was probably 50 feet high. I’m not sure if this is the pile that accounts for the 20% that goes to the land fill, but it’s not like they make it easy to recycle in this town, this really was the best I could do.
The people on site were friendly. There was only one guy walking around who didn’t seem inclined to help, but I had a buddy with me and the poor guy looked busy. It was easy to get in and out quickly. The best feature is that they were open ²⁴⁄₇ while most places are only open during normal business hours because they cater to contractors.