How Does San Francisco Keep 70% of Their Trash Out of Landfills?

May/08
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“When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage. We see food, paper, metal, glass.” The 70 % diversion rate includes recycling, composting and source reduction (meaning reusing things instead of throwing them out.) 

The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint. For example, much of the concrete from demolished buildings is recycled in new sidewalks.

Unwanted paint is blended it in 55-gallon drums: resulting in 3 colors — off-white, beige and green — are packed in 5 gallon tins and sent to local nonprofit organizations, schools or charitable institutions in Mexico.

They can collect scrap paper to re-sell because of low levels of glass contamination. Garbage trucks can compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles without breaking the bottles.

Compare 2006 diversion rates: Chicago 55%, New York City 30.6%, Milwaukee 24%, Boston 16% and Houston 2.5%.

clipped from www.sfenvironment.org clipped from usinfo.state.gov clipped from www.sfrecycling.com clipped from www.nytimes.com the city found out a few weeks ago that it was keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of local landfills one of the main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle The No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap paper Another major innovation in the past decade was the development of infrastructure for turning food wastes into baggable compost that is used in California’s vineyards and the vast farms of the Central Valley The garbage from San Francisco’s 750,000 residents is picked up on the pay-as-you-throw principle — the more garbage bins you need, the higher your monthly fee The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs, devoted to different materials, including regular garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint. Mayor Gavin Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary we can get to 75 percent clipped from usinfo.state.gov