A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More (not NYC)
recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste and
food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary, on
the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.
See Brooklyn Greens' Jym Dyer's comments at the end.
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NYT: A City Committed to Recycling Is Ready for More
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: May 7, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO Mayor Gavin Newsom is competitive
about many things, garbage included. When the
city found out a few weeks ago that it was
keeping 70 percent of its disposable waste out of
local landfills, he embraced the statistic the
way other mayors embrace winning sports teams,
improved test scores or declining crime rates.
The San Francisco Recycling Center processes
about 750 tons of recyclables a day, and Mayor
Gavin Newsom wants to add to that total.
New Life for Garbage
Workers sort plastics at the San Francisco
Recycling Center. The city, with 7,800 tons of
waste a day, keeps 70 percent of it out of
landfills. Mayor Gavin Newsom is shooting for 75 percent.
But the city wants more.
So Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city's
Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make
the recycling of cans, bottles, paper, yard waste
and food scraps mandatory instead of voluntary,
on the pain of having garbage pickups suspended.
"Without that, we don't think we can get to 75
percent," the mayor said of the proposal. His
aides said it stood a good chance of passing.
How does he describe his fixation with recycling
dominance? "It's purposefulness that could
otherwise be construed as ego," Mr. Newsom said.
"You want to be the greatest city. You want to be
the leading city. You want to be on the cutting
edge. I'm very intense about it."
In a more businesslike tone, Jared Blumenfeld,
the director of the city's environmental
programs, addressed one of the main reasons the
city keeps up the pressure to recycle. "The No. 1
export for the West Coast of the United States is
scrap paper," Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining
that the paper is sent to China and returns as
packaging that holds the sneakers, electronics and toys sold in big-box
stores.
Not that Mr. Blumenfeld does not have a
competitive streak of his own. San Francisco can
charge more for its scrap paper, he said, because
of its low levels of glass contamination. That is
because about 15 percent of the city's 1,200
garbage trucks have two compartments, one for
recyclables. That side has a compactor that can
compress mixed loads of paper, cans and bottles
without breaking the bottles. (These specially
designed trucks, which run on biodiesel, cost
about $300,000 apiece, at least $25,000 more than
a standard truck, said Benny Anselmo, who manages the fleet for Norcal.)
Another major innovation in the past decade was
the development of infrastructure for turning
food wastes a major part of the waste stream in
a city with thousands of restaurants into
baggable compost that is used in California's
vineyards and the vast farms of the Central Valley.
The garbage from San Francisco's 750,000
residents is picked up on the pay-as-you-throw
principle the more garbage bins you need, the
higher your monthly fee. (The average customer
pays $23.58 a month.) Also, in the past couple of
years, it has banned plastic grocery bags and
permitted the recycling of hard plastic toys.
The city has 12 recycling streams, or programs,
devoted to different materials, including regular
garbage, construction debris, furniture and paint.
"When we look at garbage, we don't see garbage,
O.K.?" said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal
Waste Systems, the parent company of Sunset
Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling
Company, the main garbage collectors in the city.
"We see food, we see paper, we see metal, we see glass."
The recycling rate for this curbside collection
from homes, hotels and the city's 5,000
restaurants is considerably lower than the
overall rate, Mr. Reed said, in part because the
rates on other waste streams construction
debris or material, like batteries and compact
fluorescent bulbs, that the public brings in to
special centers is much higher.
Much of the concrete from demolished buildings,
for instance, is recycled in new sidewalks.
Another recycling stream is born of the
community's design sensitivities. "People are
doing very well here," Mr. Reed said. "They
remodel, and they paint. On Thursdays, Fridays
and Saturdays, people line up to bring us paint"
at a facility built for the purpose.
"We separate it into flat and latex, screen it to
take out the chunks, and blend it in 55-gallon drums," he said.
The three resulting colors off-white, beige and
green are packed in five-gallon tins and sent
to local nonprofit organizations, schools or charitable institutions in
Mexico.
Norcal's subsidiaries handle 3,545 tons of waste
a day in San Francisco, out of about 7,800
generated citywide, Mr. Reed said. About 55
percent of Norcal's total goes to the landfill;
the rest is recycled. These figures become part
of the calculation of the city's overall
diversion rate of 70 percent, which is the figure it just reported for
2006.
As John Sitts, of the state's integrated waste
management board, said, "the diversion rate
includes recycling, composting and source
reduction" the last term representing
"everything businesses and residents do to reuse
things rather than throwing them out."
The Los Angeles region most recently reported a
59 percent diversion rate, a number still being
audited by state regulators. San Jose, at 62
percent, claims the best-in-class crown for
cities of 900,000 or more. Statewide, the figure for 2006 was 54
percent.
With the exception of Chicago, which boasted a 55
percent rate in 2006 the most recent year for
which national comparisons are available
Eastern and Midwestern cities lagged well behind
their California counterparts. According to the
most recent annual survey of the trade magazine
Waste News, in 2006 New York City was at 30.6
percent, Milwaukee at 24 percent, Boston at 16
percent and Houston at 2.5 percent.
San Francisco's system is being noticed overseas.
Mr. Blumenfeld's calendar is full of meetings
with officials from Germany and China, most of
whom visit Norcal's facilities, including the food-waste composting
centers.
His visitors are learning, Mr. Blumenfeld said,
that "you can recycle almost anything."
*************************************
COMMENTS
From: Jym Dyer
re:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/us/07garbage.html
This is all interesting stuff, though credit where credit
is due: the innovations came more from the ground up, rather
than the top down. I wouldn't credit San Francisco mayor Gavin
Newsom for trends that started elsewhere in the region (usually
in Berkeley). Maybe he should get some credit for having the
sense to keep buying trucks that don't ruin commingled material
quite as badly as other trucks do.
| "It's purposefulness that could otherwise be construed as
| ego," Mr. Newsom said. "You want to be the greatest city.
| You want to be the leading city. You want to be on the
| cutting edge. I'm very intense about it."
Newsom just loves to capitalize on a green image, but he
falls short on the big-ticket items:
- Totally in bed with PG&E, which blocks community-based
efforts to get solar and other renewable power going.
- Totally in bed with Chevron, and bleeding the city's
transit system dry.
- Green building development goes on in *spite* of city
policies, and willing to trumpet projects conforming to
minimal industry-promulgated "green" standards (we've
taken to calling it "LEED Lead Certification").
- Environmental justice horrors in communities of color.
As with Mayor Bloomberg, he associates himself with planting
trees, though the Department of Public Works -- which he's
theoretically in charge of -- says it can't take care of the
trees, so a bunch of them will just die after the photo-ops.
see http://www.washingtonsquarepark.wordpress.com
(BTW, Newsom is coming to New York in about a week to go to
the New Yorker Conference to enthuse about how green he is.)
| In a more businesslike tone, Jared Blumenfeld, the director
| of the city's environmental programs, addressed one of the
| main reasons the city keeps up the pressure to recycle. "The
| No. 1 export for the West Coast of the United States is scrap
| paper," Mr. Blumenfeld said, explaining that the paper is sent
| to China and returns as packaging that holds the sneakers,
| electronics and toys sold in big-box stores.
Blumenfeld actually *is* the greener guy, and it's odd to
see him juxtaposed against Newsom as the "businesslike" voice.
I take the above as important, though not entirely positive,
information.
<_Jym_>
------ End of Forwarded Message
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This entry was posted
on Wednesday, May 07, 2008 at 21:52.
