Small goals work well. Watching one episode, reading one chapter, cleaning up one room — these are things you can wrap your head around. Trying to clean your entire apartment in one fell swoop leads only to depression and stasis. Tiny checkpoints keep us moving in the direction of accomplishment, despite the task seeming insurmountable.
Take California’s 75 Percent Initiative, an “ambitious” call instituted by Jerry Brown back in 2011 to get the state to reduce, recycle or compost three-fourths of its solid waste by 2020. With nine years of buffer, the goal was hefty but not outrageous. In 2012, the state had already reached the threshold of 50 percent of solid waste not ending up in a landfill. All we needed was another 25.
The means of getting there were five “priority strategies” proposed by CalRecycle. Listed first, due to its overwhelming importance, was figuring out how to move organic material out of the landfill. This was vital for two reasons. First, it’s a relatively easy fix, without the technological requirements of recycling. Second, it accounts for a whopping one-half of our state’s total waste.
So, four-plus years into the program, where are we in getting folks to compost?
“We’re unfortunately pretty far off from the 75 percent,” says Nick Lapis, legislative coordinator for Californians Against Waste. “It’s been between a slow burn and building blocks.”
One of those blocks was the 2014 adoption of AB 1826, which required businesses that generate “a specific amount of organic waste per week” to arrange for services to pick up that waste.
Implementation began on April 1 of this year, with the number of businesses slowly expanding on a yearly basis, depending on how much waste they generate. For now, it’s any business that generates eight cubic yards of waste a week, while on Jan. 1, 2017, it’s any business that generates four cubic yards.
To read the full story, visit http://www.laweekly.com/restaurants/can-california-keep-food-waste-out-of-landfills-7260230.