A sculpture made of garbage salvaged from San Francisco's dump
Photo Credit: Sven Eberlein
A future without landfills? SF is already 78% of the way there -- but the hardest part is still ahead.
Just a few years ago, a zero-waste city was considered a futuristic scenario. Now, the city by the bay is on track to be the first and only North American city to achieve this impressive goal -- and it plans to get there by 2020.
For San Franciscans like myself, life without the “Fantastic
Three” -- the simple, color-coded cart system consisting of a green
composting, blue recycling and black, often smaller trash cart -- has become
unthinkable. Putting banana peels and used tissues into an empty quart of
ice-cream is part of our routine. Trips to cities without composting bins feel
like visits to strange planets in distant galaxies. The fact that we could so
quickly get used to skittle-sized garbage bags while our compost bags are
bulging with leftovers speaks not only to a well-conceived program and the
adaptability of San Francisco residents, but to the potential of reaching
similar milestones anywhere else in the U.S or abroad.
Cities across America have been trying to figure out how to keep their
landfills from overflowing since the 1980s. According to EPA
figures, 34 percent -- or 85 million tons out of a total 250 million tons of
trash generated in the U.S. in 2010 -- was recycled, up from only 10 percent in
1980. However, while curbside recycling and yard waste composting programs are
now ubiquitous in many cities, and have accounted for much of this uptick, per
capita solid waste generation in the U.S. has actually increased from 3.66 to
4.43 pounds per person per day in the same time span. In other words, whatever
dent Americans are making into their garbage through recycling is still offset
by increased consumption and disposal.
From huge methane
emissions due to decomposition of landfill waste to the growing garbage
patch in the Pacific Ocean, cities everywhere are waking up to the fact that
our throw-it-away culture can no longer be remediated with voluntary bottle, can
and newspaper recycling alone. This low-hanging fruit has already been picked.
Now, some cities are moving on to the bigger challenge: the organic materials
that constitute the largest component of municipal solid waste. With less than 3
percent of food scraps currently being composted nationwide, and many
non-recyclable materials like plastic bags on the rise, cities with even the
most comprehensive glass, aluminum and paper recycling programs are hard-pressed
to keep more than half of their total waste out of their landfills.
Breaking the 50 percent “glass” ceiling and moving toward zero-waste is a
multi-faceted undertaking. It requires a comprehensive, long-term plan that
involves all stakeholders, and includes several important steps.
First, you need the infrastructure and facilities to divert and repurpose
the hundreds of materials discarded daily by modern society, from electronic
gadgets to old mattresses to soiled paper napkins. Second, participation has to
be city-wide and mandatory -- including residential, government, business and
industrial sectors. Third, some sacred cows of convenience, like the
above-mentioned plastic bags, have to be banned,
or at least reflect their true cost. Most importantly, along with potential
fines for non-compliance, there has to be a broad outreach program to educate
all residents on why zero waste is beneficial to the community and the planet,
and how each of us can contribute to the goal.
San Francisco’s story shows that with the right amount of political will,
economic planning and civic engagement, it's possible to lay the foundation for
a physical and mental environment in which the word “waste” as we know it does
not need to exist.
A brief history of garbage
To fully understand how far we have come, let's go back. In 1989, when the
State of California passed AB 939,
requiring all municipalities to divert at least 50 percent of waste from
landfills by 2000, America was still fully entrenched in the throw-away culture
of the post-war years. During these dark garbage ages, 90 percent of
California’s 40 million tons of waste generated each year was dumped into
bursting landfills across the state.
San Francisco was already slightly further along for the time. It diverted
about 25 percent of its waste, thanks to a number of volunteer-run community
recycling centers dating back to the first Earth Day, as well as three buy-back
centers and a curbside recycling program. However, in a city where food
residuals alone -- most of it from the city's many restaurants -- make up over a
quarter of what’s hauled to the landfill, it soon became clear that the only way
it could reach the 50-percent diversion goal set by the state was to not only
become more aggressive about recycling, but get busy composting.
In 1999, San Francisco’s waste collector Recology introduced the “Fantastic Three,”
giving huge financial incentives to those who would voluntarily reduce their
trash volume. Within months, the diversion rate for participating businesses and
residents increased by more than 90 percent.
The blue carts
These successful trial runs and the following full-scale rollout of the
three-stream collection system proved that zero-waste was possible. In 2002, the
board of supervisors passed a bold resolution of 75 percent landfill diversion
by 2010 (which it reached in 2008) and zero waste by 2020. That same year Recycle Central, a former
185,000-square-foot warehouse on Pier 96, was converted into one of the largest
state-of-the-art recycling facilities in the U.S. Run by more than 180
employee-owners hired from the predominantly low-income Bayview/Hunters Point
neighborhood, the facility was the result of a conscious decision by the city
and Recology to recover resources at a central plant, rather than relying on
individual residents to figure out what goes where.
As a result, San Franciscans are now able to toss everything from cereal
boxes and egg cartons to spray cans and laundry detergent bottles into their blue carts.
Picked up by a fleet of trucks running on biodiesel and natural gas, the
recyclables end up on a series of conveyer belts and are separated by spinning
disks, magnets, and by hand. The approximately 750 tons of daily reclaimed
“waste” fills 30 large containers six days a week and gets shipped to all kinds
of manufacturing facilities that re-manufacture the high-quality materials.
Think of the beginning scenes of Wall-E, then imagine a couple hundred
friends helping Wall-E circulate the mountains of scraps back into good use, and
you’ve got the essence of Recycle Central.
The green carts
Tossing your recyclables in a bin is one thing. Saving your sloppy seconds
is another. Sure, you have your early adopters -- your urban gardeners and other
green-thumb types -- but how do you get the bulk of your citizenry that was
raised on garbage disposals and anti-bacterial soap to hang on to their avocado
pits and sandwich wrappers? Composting, it seems, is as much a state of mind as
it is a physical activity. It's like eating something you’ve never had before;
there’s a mental block that’s hard to overcome without a little help. And yet,
once we’ve taken that first bite, we quickly forget how much we used to not like
what we didn’t know.
The city knew that if it wanted to have a large-scale, city-wide composting
program to make an actual dent in the overall waste stream, it would have to be
mandatory. Its pilot program had shown that not only food scraps but yard
trimmings, coffee cups, greasy pizza boxes and even milk and juice cartons could
be broken down at Jepson Prairie
Organics, a compost facility about 55 miles east of San Francisco in
Vacaville. From there, the nutrient-rich organic fertilizer -- perfect for
reconditioning soil due to its diverse feedstock -- could be distributed to
surrounding farms, which in turn sell their produce to SF residents and
restaurants, thus closing the loop locally.
After the board of supervisors passed the Mandatory
Recycling and Composting Ordinance in 2009, people quickly adapted to the
new green carts.
According to the San Francisco Department of
the Environment, hundreds of thousands of residents and over 5,000
restaurants and other businesses now send over 600 tons of food scraps and other
compostable material each day to Jepson Prairie.
Engaging the community
Perhaps the most important element in San Francisco’s waste reduction
success so far has been education. The reason the city still sends 36 percent of
compostable materials to landfill is not so much because of willful
non-compliance, but for lack of information. In a city where English is not the
first language for many residents, one way the Department of the Environment
reaches out is by sending staff into multicultural neighborhoods to talk
directly with customers, often using pictograms and multilingual signage about
what goes where.
In the recycling department, Recology’s one-of-a-kind Artist-In-Residence Program shows
how creativity and inspiration can help people envision a world where every
"thing" has inherent and lasting value. A trip to San Francisco’s transfer
station (aka the dump) offers visitors the unique experience of marveling at
sculptures made from discarded materials. Made by local professional artists who
have full scavenging privileges during a four-month residency, the motley
creations made from old tires, plastic bottles and everything else are living
proof that the whole idea of “garbage” is nothing more than our collective lack
of imagination.
When it comes to selling the public on composting, there's nothing like
shaking the hand that feeds you. Over the past few years, countless farmers'
markets and urban gardens have shot up in every corner of the city, reconnecting
San Franciscans with the food they eat and the people who grow it. The bustling
Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market offers its customers not only fresh and organic
food, but increased awareness and familiarity with all aspects of the local food
chain. CUESA, the nonprofit Center for Urban
Education about Sustainable Agriculture, runs three weekly markets and many
educational events, ranging from making your own yogurt and learning about
seasonal cooking to demonstrations for tourists on how to use the Fantastic
Three.
Countdown to zero-waste
Getting to 78 percent waste diversion was the easy part, but the next 22
percent will be the most challenging. As San Francisco has proven, the right
incentives, technology, habits and laws go a long way toward eliminating the
most obvious and retrievable chunks from your waste stream. The first half of
the full distance can be covered relatively painlessly, and quite a few cities
across the United States have now reached that important threshold.
But once a city gets past 50 percent it gets interesting, as residents and
businesses learn to embrace their rotting food scraps. Getting to three quarters
requires letting go of some holy cows, be they plastic or styrofoam.
And the closer you get to no waste at all, the deeper you wade into territories
that are no longer about stuff, but about culture and consciousness and
understanding your place in the cycle.
Zero-waste is just another term for a collective understanding, manifest in
daily acts, that on a finite planet there is no “away” to throw things. San
Francisco is on its final steep ascent toward some uncharted physical and
cultural territory -- a journey more and more of us will be following in the
decade or two to come.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sven Eberlein is a freelance writer covering
social and environmental issues.
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