The garbage police

Add comment June 11th, 2009

Or Big Brother.

Those are words I found when I searched for the story on San Francisco passing a tough new recycling and composting law.

It means people get three color-coded containers: one for trash, one for recycling and one for compost. So throwing banana peels in the trash is a no-no. And you can compost that pizza box, too.

Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

(Mayor Gavin) Newsom floated the mandatory recycling idea in April 2008 as he faced the city’s self-imposed goals of having a 75 percent recycling rate in 2010, with zero waste by 2020.

The rationale behind the move is clear. Material like food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills take up costly space and decompose to form methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

A June 2008 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group focused on environmentally sound community development, said a zero waste approach is one of the fastest, cheapest and most effective ways to protect the climate. Cutting waste sent to landfills and incinerators would be like closing 21 percent of U.S. coal-fired power plants, the report said.

About 36 percent of what San Francisco sends to landfill is compostable, and an additional 31 percent is recyclable, a comprehensive study found.