San Francisco Signs Nation’s First Mandatory Composting 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.
- » See also: Compost with a Kick: Bokashicycle Brews First Large-Scale Food Waste Fermentation Operation
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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.
I wrote on this a few weeks ago. Congrats to your city! Once residents ease into it, they’ll probably be thankful for it. It cuts your garbage waste (and smell) significantly. I’ve composted in every place I’ve lived in VA since I moved here 7 years ago, even if I wasn’t using it in a garden.
Now, my DH and I love what our compost does for our garden. We have a few piles at various stages and use them regularly.
This is a great initiative.
People will do the right thing if they’re educated and have the inner drive to do so. Mandatory composting is NOT the answer.
I look forward to the garbage man’s face when he has to handle my maggot-filled can that’s had raw meat scraps festering in it for a week.
[...] Anaerobic (without oxygen) digestion works by using bacteria inside the digester to decompose the food. The digester captures the biogas and uses methane, a potent greenhouse gas, to power the treatment plant. What’s left can be used as compost, which is great for San Francisco, which recently signed the first mandatory composting law in the nation. [...]
[...] Prisons and other institutions are rapidly adopting food waste recycling, and the entire city of San Francisco has just committed to a mandatory mega-scale food scrap recycling [...]