San Francisco, which already boasts one of the most aggressive recycling programs in the country, has raised the ante, vowing to levy fines of up to $1,000 on those unwilling to separate their Kung Pao chicken leftovers from their newspapers. I just read the posting below in The Huffington Post. This is very encouraging. Trash and the amount we generate has always been a topic that I am especially adamant about. I don't think most people have ever been to a landfill so it is easy to forget that there is no "away" when you throw something away. LEED has adopted standards to encourage recycling of construction and demolition debris, but too often this does not go far enough. It should be a prerequisite first of all, and because there is no distinction between inerts and other debris, the LEED requirements can usually easily be met by recycling concrete. Not that that is a bad thing, but there is so much more that could be done with little extra effort.
Congratulations to San Francisco for making this a priority and setting their goals high. I have no doubt that the people of San Francisco will meet their goals and set a great example for the rest of the country.
Mayor of San Francisco
Posted: June 23, 2009 12:00 PM
The Nation's Most Ambitious Recycling Law
Composting will prevent tons of material from going to the landfill, create healthy soil for our local farms and help us fight global warming.
Today at the Farmer's Market in front of San Francisco's iconic Ferry Building I am signing the nation's first mandatory composting law. It's the most comprehensive recycling and composting legislation in the country and the first to require residents and businesses to compost food scraps. Watch the press conference live at 10:15 AM PST.
A number of years ago, San Francisco set a lofty green goal--we wanted to divert 75 percent of our resources from the landfill by 2010 and achieve zero waste by 2020. At the time, many people thought our targets were overly ambitious. However, San Francisco is poised to meet these goals. We are currently keeping 72 percent of recyclable material out of our landfill.
We recently conducted a waste-stream analysis and discovered that about two thirds of the garbage people throw away--half a million tons each year--could have been recycled or turned to compost. If we were able to capture everything, we'd be recycling 90 percent--preventing additional waste material from going to the landfill, and creating hundreds of green-collar jobs.
San Francisco already converts over 400 tons of food scraps and other compostable discards into high-grade organic compost every day. It's so nutrient-rich that the final product is almost jet black in color. It's snapped up by farms and vineyards across the Bay Area, we can barely keep up with the demand. By requiring all residents and businesses to compost, we'll increase the amount of "black gold" available for sustainable regional agriculture and improve our environment.
When food scraps break down in an oxygen-starved landfill it creates large quantities of methane gas, a greenhouse gas 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide when measured over a 20 year period. It also creates acids that can leach toxins from the landfill.
Composting food scraps produces little to no methane because there is sufficient oxygen in the process. And using the resulting compost reduces greenhouse gases by returning carbon to the soil, increasing plant growth, and reducing emissions associated with chemical fertilizers, pesticides and irrigation. Recent studies show that farming one acre of land using conventional industrial methods releases 3,700 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere each year. Farmed sustainably, with compost and cover crops, that same acre will put 12,000 pounds of carbon back into the earth.
I believe that composting will become second nature for Americans, just like sorting bottles and paper. It will take time, but I believe mandatory composting will spread across the country--improving the air we breathe and reducing our need for landfills.
For more info on our recycling programs please visit - www.sfenvironment.org/.
Follow Gavin Newsom on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GavinNewsom
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