Aiming to help San Diego achieve its goal of shrinking the amount of trash produced locally to zero by 2040, city officials say they must start setting a better example for residents to follow.
Shortly after the city adopted its “zero waste” plan in 2015, a survey showed that only 27 percent of materials from city-owned facilities were being recycled. That’s far short of a citywide goal of 75 percent diversion by 2020. So San Diego is creating a strategic plan to boost recycling by city departments to at least 50 percent by 2020.
The plan, which the City Council endorsed on Monday, will include more outreach to employees, adding dozens of recycling bins in city parks and detailed suggestions for overcoming many small obstacles to recycling that city departments face.
“City facilities were not doing their fair share in contributing to the success of zero waste,” said Mario Sierra, director of the city’s Environmental Services Department. “We knew we had to do more.”
The new strategic plan was preceded by a recently completed year of “benchmarking,” where department heads met with city recycling officials to discuss challenges and to determine exactly how much material was being recycled.
Sierra said the number was actually higher than 27 percent, which was the city’s rate of recycling with Republic, its refuse hauler. Republic doesn’t service many of the 250 sites throughout San Diego where the city conducts operations. In addition, many departments were making separate efforts that recycling officials didn’t know about.
Those included Development Services providing 90 gallon recycling cans for large project plans in copy areas and other strategic locations, Environmental Services equipping kitchens with reusable silverware, and Fleet Services recycling scrap metal and tires.
Much more must be done, however, for the city to achieve zero waste, which would mean reducing the material deposited in the Miramar landfill to essentially nothing.
City officials said some of the challenges they face are the far flung nature of city facilities, which include 50 fire stations, 40 library branches and hundreds of parks.
The zero waste plan lays out dozens of specific strategies that would help San Diego boost its overall recycling rate of about 67 percent to 75 percent in 2020, which is required by state law, and then to 90 percent by 2035.
They include less production of waste and the development of new markets for recycled and composted materials. Councilman Scott Sherman said he was confident the city would soon be setting a better example. “I think you guys are well on your way to the right program,” he told city recycling officials.
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