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| Good for San Francisco (525942) | |||
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Good for San Francisco |
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Posted by GP38/R42 Chris on Wed Nov 18 20:07:18 2009 I am almost a fanatical recycler, so this is right down my alley. San Francisco wants to have zero waste, by 2020, finding a use for all waste. They stepped up the anti, as they just added a new pail....the compost pail to put stuff like food waste into to send off for compost. San Fran is closer than you think to 100%, as they are already up to 72% of their garbage recycled. Hopefully other cities follow suit. I am pretty happy with NYC already, they are more aggressive with recycling than many other cities, and more aggressive than we have it out here in Suffolk. But I like this new addition to San Fran... http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/11/18/san-franciscos-goal-zero-waste/ San Francisco’s Goal: Zero Waste November 18, 2009 - 12:03 PM | by: Claudia Cowan Environmentally-sensitive San Francisco is taking aim at trash- assembling shiny green bins by the truckload to help residents, landlords and merchants comply with a new mandatory composting law. Alongside blue and black bins for recycling and garbage, curbs are now lined with green bins for food scraps-- and, after an initial grace period, improper sorting could mean a hefty fine. It's part of an aggressive push to cut greenhouse gas emissions and have the city sending "zero waste" to landfills or incinerators by 2020. It sounds like a tall order, but San Francisco is already 72% of the way there-- the highest trash diversion rate of any big U.S. city. Officials say it's a matter of doing something useful with all those mineral-rich leftovers: reducing the amount of garbage generated, and therefore the need to build costly, smelly, new landfills. Equally important, composting helps clean up the air, because at landfills, decomposing food generates methane, a more toxic greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Turning foodscraps and other organic matter into compost helps the earth, too, because it returns minerals and carbons to the soil. And farmers love it, saying San Francisco's "four course" compost is better than "miracle grow" thanks to all the diverse nutrients that went into making it --- especially foodscraps from restaurants: think crab shells from Fisherman's Wharf, pasta from North Beach, shrimp fried rice from Chinatown, etc. The city's trash agency's new name, Recology, and some very cool 3-D graphics showing recyclable trash on the trucks, all aim to get people to look at garbage in a new way-- as a resource that should be valued... not automatically "trashed." And it seems to be working. Recology says composting has grown from 400 to 500 tons a day in the past year, a sign San Franciscans are ready to give a very green light... to "zero waste." -Claudia Cowan |
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