The Dry Garden: L.A. trails San Francisco in the quest to divert food scraps from landfills

Jorge Santiesteban estimates that food scraps constitute roughly 15% to 25% of what goes into black garbage bins in Los Angeles. The city's solid resources manager has been struck by the seasonal changes in how much food we throw away since 1997, when, in the week after Thanksgiving, he had a garbage truck empty its contents for him. Santiesteban picked through the trash, putting like objects with like until a clear picture emerged. This is what is known in recycling circles as “waste characterization.”

As bad as it must have been for Santiesteban during that November audit of rotting giblets and pie crusts, his San Francisco counterpart might have had it worse. Waste characterizations done there show that as much as 30% of San Francisco’s garbage has been composed of food scraps.

Now the race is on to see which of the two cities can divert more kitchen waste from garbage trucks to composting programs. With the introduction of mandatory food-scrap recycling in San Francisco on Oct. 21, the Bay Area has taken the lead.

The challenge began 20 years ago, when overflowing landfills led California to pass the Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989. This required jurisdictions to divert 25% of their trash to recycling programs by 1995 and 50% by 2000. If cities failed, they faced fines of thousands of dollars a day.

It soon became clear that not every city had the same trash profile. While Los Angeles produced huge amounts of lawn clippings, garbage trucks in the more urban San Francisco showed a higher proportion of food scraps. 

It only made sense for Los Angeles to work early and hard at getting the lawn clippings out of the black bins. After green bins for lawn clippings were introduced in the San Fernando Valley in 1993, recycling rates went from 7% to 30%. Soon curbside collection of garden trimmings was part of everyday life in Los Angeles.

As the contents of L.A.’s black bins were further characterized, small yellow cartons for household recyclables were replaced by big blue bins in 1998. Limited largely to newspapers and glass bottles early on, the blue bins now take a variety of items. Santiesteban said the guidelines encourage residents to throw in foam cups and plates, plastic bags, coat hangers and more. 

Today, Los Angeles diverts 65% of its trash from landfill, well above the state average of 59% and the highest recycling rate of all the major U.S. cities, Santiesteban said.

This is true provided one doesn’t count San Francisco as a major U.S. city, and L.A. doesn’t. Granted, San Francisco’s population of about 800,000 spread over less than 50 square miles does look puny next to L.A.’s 4 million people over more than 450 square miles. And San Francisco doesn’t take coat hangers or foam cups.

But San Francisco, at 72%, has the highest  diversion rate from landfills in the country. Its avowed goal is 75% by next year and zero waste by 2020.

Why the comeuppance for big, sprawling Los Angeles from nimble little San Francisco?

It dates back to our 1993 early deployment of green bins, that heroic first move that took lawn clippings out of the black bins. It turns out that not all of the contractors who handle the garden waste collected by the city are licensed to compost food scraps.

Meanwhile, as more urban San Francisco wheels out shiny new green bins at a rate of 100 a day, its system can reach not only apartment dwellers who have never mowed a lawn but also homeowners who have yard waste as well as food scraps. The kitchen and garden waste mix is then delivered to an outfit in the Central Valley that can compost grass clippings and chicken bones — together.

Restaurants love it, said the city’s Department of Environment Director Jared Blumenfeld.

“The rodent issue for restaurants has gone down because they’re putting the food into containers that are sealed,” he said.

This has to rub. The Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation has been hosting free kitchen-scrap composting courses and selling discounted home compost bins for years. But these are elective measures, not mandatory. The trucks don’t take bones, meat or dairy. And they will never reach apartment dwellers.

Santiesteban stresses that Los Angeles does have a pilot food waste program that includes 8,700 households and an ongoing trial with 800 restaurants. He sees real prospects, particularly with restaurants.

“We have found that a very large percentage of what they throw away is organics,” he said, “from 70 to 80 percent.”

Pending the outcomes of these trial studies, it could be that Los Angeles will have to take a different path with its food scraps, perhaps including them in plans to burn garbage for fuel and count our trash as a  renewable energy source.

But back in San Francisco, after recent raves in the national press over the rollout of its food scrap program, Blumenfeld can’t resist a friendly dig at L.A. He thinks that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office can achieve his numbers. The key, Blumenfeld said, is to be tough when issuing Requests for Proposals, or RFPs, when hiring companies to do the city’s composting.

“All they need to say is, ‘We want single-stream recycling. We want a food scrap collection program at curbside.’ That’s all it takes,” Blumenfeld said. “That’s the RFP language.”

Villaraigosa’s office said it was not available for comment.

-- Emily Green

Emily Green’s column on low-water gardening and sustainable landscapes appears here weekly. She also blogs on water issues at www.chanceofrain.com.

Photos, from top: Petterik Wiggers / For The Times; Los Angeles Times

Comments

[Rick]

Please note that many smaller apartment buildings in Los Angeles do in fact use city-issued bins and recycle extensively. Our own block is entirely apartments, of which about 80% recycle via Dept. of Sanitation pickup.

Apartments are inherently more space- and energy-efficient than stand-alone houses, and contribute to the density that makes transport, a major greenhouse gas source, far more efficient; with more people on the sidewalks in apartment-heavy neighborhoods you have more social and civic involvement as well. It doesn't make sense to dismiss apartment dwellers as non-recyclers out of hand, especially when it's often not true. Los Angeles does provide recycling service to many apartments--probably almost all apartments smaller than 8 units.

[Big Jim Slade]

So much is missing from this "rant" it's hard to take seriously.

What is the cost/benefit relationship? What are the ecological and financial incentives to do so? Basically, what's the point?

I think many people are frustrated with the logic "someone else is doing it" as the prevailing logic and motivation and then codifying it into law.

There's a reason every manufacturer has hightailed it out of California, we're broke, our education system is a disaster, and the future looks bleak. This sort of nonsense is part of that problem. Foam cups and coat hangers are not the problem. 50% drop out rates are!

Did the author not attend a journalism class?

[Craig Nakano, L.A. at Home editor]

Hi, Rick. Thanks for the comments. Just wanted to reassure you that Emily wasn't writing off apartment dwellers. She was just making a distinction between renters, who are likely to have recyclable food scraps, and homeowners, who are more likely to have food scraps as well as green waste (lawn clippings, tree trimmings and such). Some apartment residents will have garden trimmings too, sure, but most probably will not. The main point was simply to suggest the environmental advantages of having owners and renters alike recycling not only their garden trimmings, but their food scraps as well. Keep the comments coming. Thanks again.

[Broc Coward]

Thank you for the informative article on next generation diversion programs. I appreciate hearing what other cities are doing to reduce their waste footprint. I suspect Los Angeles' reasoning behind discounting San Francisco as a large city has something to do preserving its place atop a list more than anything else. As such, Long Beach (500,000 population) wouldn't be considered to be among the largest cities in the U.S. either. However, most lists do include us in their top 50. The City of Long Beach is among the nation’s leaders in waste diversion due to the thoughtful planning and investment by city leaders and the Southeast Resource Recovery Facility (SERRF), which began commercial operation in 1988. According to City documents, SERRF is a publicly owned solid waste management facility that uses mass burn technology to reduce the volume of solid waste by about 80% while recovering electrical energy. The facility is owned by a separate authority created by a joint powers agreement between the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County and the City of Long Beach, but is operated by a private company under contract. Residential and commercial solid waste from Long Beach and surrounding contracting communities is combusted in high temperature boilers to produce steam, which in turn is used to run a turbine-generator creating 36 megawatts of electricity. The SERRF site generates enough power each year to supply 40,000 residential homes with electricity and has reduced solid waste from entering landfills by over four million cubic yards. In addition, the SERRF site has allowed the City to keep the cost for waste management significantly below average, passing the savings on to our residents in their monthly bills.

Each month, an average 825 tons of metal are recycled rather than sent to a landfill. As a public service and at the request of law enforcement agencies within California, SERRF began destroying narcotics and drug related paraphernalia in 1992. The program has been a tremendous success. SERRF has destroyed an average of 17,000 pounds of narcotics each month. This commitment by the City of Long Beach to assist in the removal of illegal narcotics from our cities' streets has saved law enforcement agencies hundreds of staff hours and thousands of dollars in alternative disposal costs.

The County of Los Angeles has evaluated next generation conversion technologies, which are capable of converting post-recycled residual solid waste into marketable products, green fuels, and clean, renewable energy, and identified a number of viable technologies for Southern California. This next generation thermal conversion technology differs from our current SERRF technology in that it eliminates the residue combustion ash, which is currently treated and sent to an authorized landfill to be used as road base material. This difference is significant, since the only local landfill permitted to receive the ash is Puente Hills and it is scheduled to close in 2013.

Our existing SERRF site provides a valuable service to the residents of our city, pushing our diversion rate over 70% and converting our waste to electricity. However, City Council members such as Suja Lowenthal are hoping to introduce next generation conversion technologies that can further enhance our efforts to become our own “wasteshed” by 2020 as Councilmember Lowenthal says. Conversion technologies may also provide us with the electricity necessary to support increased demand from the ports of LA and Long Beach to reduce pollution through green efforts such as cold-ironing.