In Northern California Less Waste Means More Profit

Every day, hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage travel by truck and rail from America’s cities to the nation’s landfills. New York City, for instance, closed its Fresh Kills, Staten Island, landfill in 2001 and now exports trash to landfills in rural Pennsylvania and Virginia. Dozens of other cities are reaching similar limits, and looking for places to export their waste.

This urban-rural journey pleases nobody. Waste exportation is expensive for cities. Environmentalists warn that landfills often leak toxins, becoming Superfund sites that require costly cleanups. And the patience of waste-importing rural areas is wearing thin. Rural legislators have limited landfill growth in their states. Garbage exportation has even sparked international tensions, as in the case of trainloads of waste from Toronto that travel daily to Michigan landfills.

But one major city has blazed an ambitious path out of this mess: San Francisco. And Bay City leaders believe that other municipalities would do well to heed their example.

An End To Waste

The San Francisco plan aims to ensure that sixteen years from now not a single truck or train bearing residents’ garbage will arrive at a landfill. Everything that the city discards will be recycled, composted, or otherwise diverted for reuse. Spurred by a 1989 California law that requires municipalities to make a “good faith effort” to divert 50 percent of their waste before it reaches landfills, or else face a $10,000 daily fine, San Francisco went even further. Thanks to an innovative combination of financial incentives, technology, and diversion-friendly state and municipal legislation San Francisco’s diversion rate has already met the 1989 requirements and stands at over 50 percent. In 2002, the city vowed to divert 75 percent of the city’s waste by 2010, and 100 percent by 2020. San Francisco is not the first city to aspire to a goal of “zero waste,” and some individual businesses have successfully adopted similar practices. But San Francisco is the first municipality to set measurable citywide objectives for the near future.

With the Bay Area’s left-leaning citizenry, and California’s vanguard role in environmental legislation, San Francisco might seem the likely test case for a goal as bold as zero waste. But Gloria Chan of the San Francisco Environment Department points out that the city’s structure makes waste reduction a challenge. “San Francisco is a very densely populated city–we don’t have backyards,’’ Chan said. “So it’s pretty phenomenal that we’ve been able to do this here. If we can do it, other cities can too. We’d love to be a role model.”

The city has tackled a broad range of waste sources. The backbone of the program is a residential system called Fantastic Three. For a flat, monthly fee of $15 to $25, each household receives three 32-gallon, color-coded carts for weekly pickup. The black cart is for trash, the blue cart is for recyclables, and the green cart is for food waste, yard trimmings, and soiled paper for composting. Residents can put out more recyclables or compostable material, without penalty, than their allotted carts allow, but they face a surcharge for additional waste disposal. Businesses, which produce about a third of San Francisco’s garbage, are charged by overall volume of waste.

While recycling bins are familiar sights in most American cities, Fantastic Three is the first curbside composting program in a large American city. The items collected from the green carts are composted using “ag bags,” a traditional, low-tech method of blowing air through composting materials. A soil company, ReadyGro, markets the resulting compost–in bags for retail and in bulk for landscaping.

Incentives Must Change

The key to selling zero waste to cash-strapped city governments across the United States–and the political spectrum–is to show how waste reduction can work through financial incentives, according to waste management consultant Gary Liss, who helped develop San Francisco’s plan. “Too many people aren’t thinking about the economics of the system,” Liss said.

Most cities pay their haulers by the volume of waste transported, he said, giving the companies a strong financial incentive to oppose waste reduction. But San Francisco has restructured the contract with its waste hauler, Norcal. San Francisco pays the company through a bonus-based system that rewards waste diversion. Conservation is now in Norcal’s best interest. California’s third-largest city, San Jose, has also taken a lead in financial incentives for waste reduction, achieving 64 percent waste diversion in 2000. San Jose charges landfills a $13 disposal facility tax for each ton of waste received–an incentive for the landfills to divert as much waste as possible.

An often-overlooked source of waste is construction and demolition debris, which both San Francisco and San Jose have made particular efforts to reduce. Under San Jose’s Construction & Demolition Deposit for Diversion program, the city collects a deposit when it grants a new construction permit. In order to reclaim the deposit, a contractor must show that a recycling facility has accepted all construction and demolition waste.

“Our key accomplishment is that the recycling of C and D has become standard practice,” said Stephen Bantillo, of the San Jose Environmental Services Department. Bantillo added that San Jose has been working on a C & D model for other cities–a challenging prospect considering that one plan rarely fits all municipalities.

Northern California’s programs also employ high-tech strategies. For many years, households in San Jose sorted their recyclables into four separate bins. But recent advances in sorting technology at the city’s recycling facility mean that San Jose residents can now toss all of their recyclables–including Styrofoam and textiles–into the same bin. Likewise, San Francisco’s Fantastic Three bins allow residents to commingle their recyclable waste. Sorting recyclables at the facility “takes the burden off the resident,” said Jennifer Garnett, of San Jose’s Environmental Services Department. The city hopes that this added convenience will encourage residents to recycle more, she said.

Pay As You Throw

By making recycling easier for residents and targeting non-residential waste, San Francisco and San Jose have gone a step beyond many American municipal systems that only focus on encouraging more residential recycling through economic incentives. The most widely used incentive nationwide is “Pay-As-You-Throw,” an umbrella term for pricing systems that treat waste collection like other utilities. These plans charge residences and businesses a variable rate according to the volume of waste produced.

PAYT programs come in many forms, with varying prices. San Jose, for example, gives its 190,000 single-family households the option of four different-sized carts at different prices. Residents can choose to pay $15.80 per month for a 20-gallon cart, $16.80 for a 32-gallon cart, $33.60 for a 64-gallon cart, or $50.40 for a 96-gallon cart. The 20-gallon cart is a recent introduction, and the city recommends it only for “super recyclers.” More than 80 percent of households opt for the 32-gallon cart. Residents who want to set out additional garbage bags beyond the capacity of their carts must buy a $3.50 tag for each bag. Unlimited curbside recycling, meanwhile, is free.

San Jose implemented PAYT in 1993 and saw recycling volumes “almost triple, literally overnight,” according to San Jose Environmental Services Program Manager Lindsey Wolf.

PAYT spread across the country in the 1990s, and is now used by over 6,000 municipalities. The program’s logic of waste diversion through individual consumer choice has broad appeal across political lines. PAYT is an Environmental Protection Agency darling, promoted heavily on the agency’s website and solid waste publications.

A Waste Program That Works

Urging New York City to adopt PAYT, Benjamin Miller of the Earth Institute at Columbia University wrote in a July 2003 New York Times editorial, “Such measures encourage people to make small changes in their daily habits: asking for fewer shopping bags at the supermarket, removing their names from junk mailing lists, and recycling and composting more of the waste they do produce.” Indeed, studies have shown that PAYT programs cause an average eight to eleven percent increase in diversion of residential waste. But eight to eleven percent is a far cry from zero waste.

“Yes, PAYT has been proven to work,” Liss said, “but PAYT alone is not enough. It should be one among a range of tools that a city uses.” Too many cities, he warns, adopt only one or two strategies for waste reduction, and then think the job is done.

The idea that wasting less saves money makes a great deal of intuitive sense. But somewhere along the way, many city governments have become convinced that they must choose between cutting waste and cutting expenses. The lesson to be learned from San Francisco and San Jose, it seems, is that cities already have at their disposal scores of economically sound ways to reduce their waste by much more than eight to eleven percent. The key to zero waste–or at least 64 percent diversion–is not radical austerity or lavish spending, but providing enough different incentives in combination.

“Few communities are doing everything,” Liss said. “We’d have some awesome diversion if only every city used more of these tools.”