How do you throw away a cup of coffee in San Francisco? You take the lid off and put it in the recycle bin. The soiled cup goes in the compost bin. Nothing goes to a landfill. That’s the law.
“For us, sending organic material to the landfill, there is no value to it,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, spokesman for the San Francisco Department of the Environment. “It absolutely has no value.”
Instead, San Francisco turns food waste into nutrient-rich and profitable compost. It’s a complicated process that hinges on residents, businesses and tourists all buying in. So far, most have. That’s led to a monumental reduction in garbage sent to landfills. Program advocates say the compost made from municipal waste helps farmers survive drought and pulls carbon from the atmosphere.
San Francisco paved the way for cities such as New York to ramp up curbside composting for its residents.
By comparison, only three of Arizona’s 10 largest cities offer any sort of curbside compost collection, and those programs prohibit residential food waste in the bins. With the opening of a new industrial composting facility, Phoenix could be on the verge of making food waste a win. San Francisco found a way to.
Composting the Way to Zero Waste
Before 2009, composting in San Francisco was done much the way it’s done in other American cities. Environmentally minded people, restaurants and farmers collected food and organic waste for personal use.
After 2009, composting in San Francisco became something very different. It was now something everyone in the city was required to do by law.
Eight years ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed the Mandatory Recycling & Composting Ordinance. Among other things, it requires everyone, from residents to tourists, to separate their trash into one of three bins: recycling, landfill and compost.
When it comes to food waste, that means the vegetable peelings in your kitchen or the leftover sandwich at the deli cannot go in the trash with everything else. They must be put in a separate organics bin. Then, that waste is composted and sold in bulk to farms and wineries around California.
The law requiring food waste to be composted is part of San Francisco’s aggressive goal to hit zero waste by 2020. In other words, in less than three years, the city wants all of its waste to be recycled or composted, rather than sent to landfills.
San Francisco was the first high-profile U.S. city to adopt such goals. At 80 percent, it has the highest landfill diversion rate in the country. Diversion rates measure the amount of waste that is redirected from ending up in a landfill.
Phoenix, by comparison, has a diversion rate of 20 percent with the goal of hitting 40 percent by 2020. Nationwide, the average is about 35 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
To read the full story, visit http://www.azcentral.com/story/entertainment/dining/food-waste/2017/08/03/san-francisco-mandatory-composting-law-turns-food-waste-money/440879001/