Heal The Bay: Hold The Plastic

Los Angeles County is a patchwork of 88 cities and dozens of unincorporated communities, and each one sets its own rules on carry-out bags, polystyrene foam, straws and utensils, beverage containers, and more. For a resident or business owner, finding out which rules apply at a specific address meant digging through city codes. A mailing address doesn’t always help, because many addresses with a city name are actually in unincorporated county territory.

For its Hold The Plastic campaign, Heal the Bay needed a tool anyone could use to find their local rules, and that its own staff could keep current as laws change. Kaufman International built a web application, embedded on ReusableLA.org, that turns an address into a clear summary of the laws that apply there.

Address-Based Law Lookup

• Address autocomplete: Google Places suggestions, limited to Los Angeles County, help visitors enter a valid address quickly.

• Accurate jurisdiction detection: The Google Civic Information API determines whether an address is inside an incorporated city or in unincorporated LA County, rather than trusting the city name in the mailing address.

• Clear, consistent results: Every jurisdiction is presented in the same 13 topics, from carry-out bag fees and polystyrene bans to recycling requirements, enforcement, and how to report a violation, with an “At a Glance” summary for businesses.

Content Management for Heal the Bay

• More than 100 jurisdictions: Every city and unincorporated community has its own page of rules, managed by Heal the Bay staff without a developer.

• Countywide defaults: Jurisdictions without their own local rules automatically show default content, so every address returns useful information.

• Easy editing: Inline rich-text editing, drag-and-drop ordering of topics, and shared content blocks that are written once and shown on every jurisdiction.

• Secure administration: User management and two-factor authentication protect the editing tools.

Fast, Always-Current Results

Address lookups are cached in Redis, so repeat searches return instantly and calls to Google’s APIs stay low. Whenever staff edit a jurisdiction, the cache is cleared automatically, so visitors always see the latest rules.

Engineering

Kaufman International built the application with Laravel 12, PHP 8.4, Livewire, Flux, Alpine.js, and Tailwind CSS, using Google Places and the Google Civic Information API for address lookup and Redis for caching. Automated Pest tests and linting run on every push through GitHub Actions, and the application is deployed with Laravel Forge and embedded in Heal the Bay’s Squarespace site.

Technology: Laravel · PHP · Livewire · Flux · Alpine.js · Tailwind CSS · Google Places API · Google Civic Information API · Redis · Pest · GitHub Actions · Laravel Forge