This Technicality episode is brought to you by Dashlane.
Hey guys, I’m here, let’s get technical. This green garbage bin is an “Organic Waste”
bin, and it’s for everything from food scraps to yard trimmings. Every resident of the San
Francisco Bay Area is equipped with one of these, but then where does all of that organic
waste go?
*music*
This is South Valley Organics (a compost processing plant in Gilroy, California), and, here, around
40,000 tons of organic waste from people all over the Bay Area gets turned into compost.
South Valley Organics actually used to be a landfill, but around 10 years ago they covered
it up, and, now, it turns organic waste into compost.
And South Valley Organics isn’t the only place that does this. Up north, in Vacaville,
California, Jepson Prairie Organics processes around 100,000 tons of organic material from
Bay Area residents, making it one of the largest composting operations in the United States.
These two composting facilities work together to power San Francisco’s compost program,
which is quite possibly one of the best city-wide compost programs in the US.
In the modern age, we’re incredibly disconnected from our trash. Every night after dinner,
I throw my food waste away in the garbage and don’t even think twice about it, and, if
I were of legal age to be a betting man, I’d bet you’d do something similar too.
Today, let’s change that disconnectedness by taking a deep dive into the fascinating
world of urban composting. To do this, I wanna answer three questions:
One. Why do we need city-wide compost programs? Two. How do city-wide compost programs work?
Three. What makes San Francisco’s compost program so great?
Part the first: why do we need city-wide compost programs?
The United States has a massive food waste problem. About 40% of food in the US — or
around 1,500 calories per person per day — goes uneaten. That’s over 870 million Big Macs
worth of food calories, which is over two times as much as most other industrialized
nations, and enough calories to feed the entirety of Germany, Canada, and Australia combined.
Breaking food loss down into more specific categories: we waste around half of all fruits,
vegetables, and seafood, 1/3 of all grains, and 1/5 of all meat and dairy. Moreover, the
amount of food we’ve been wasting has been increasing; food waste today is 50% more than
what it was in the 1970s.
Ah but Alex, you might say, I read that study once that said just 100 companies are responsible
for over 70% of global CO2 emissions, so while it is helpful that I take the train instead
of drive and use my HydroFlask (registered trademark) instead of plastic bottle, if we
really want to curb climate change, we need to have top-down action. And wouldn’t it
be the same for food? I mean yeah, I don’t finish my kale sometimes but (1) can you blame
me and (2) that can’t be the real cause of the problem; big food is up to their old,
not-green habits.
*laughs* Um, ok yeah, 61% of food waste occurs in the home, so, if we, as consumers, worked
to eliminate food waste, we’d make some very considerable progress in solving this
problem.
And solving food waste would be a pretty impactful thing to solve. 30% of our fertilizer,
31% of our cropland, 25% of our freshwater, and 2% of our total energy goes into producing the
food that we don’t even eat. That’s inconceivable. Yeah, Princess Bride nice. Oh my god the graphics
have a mind of their own.
That’s food that ends up in landfills; a matter of fact, there’s more food in landfills
than any other thing we throw away, and, there, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas that’s
28 to 36 times more potent than CO2.
Some modern landfills have methods of capturing methane and either destroying it or turning
it into fuel, but that’s certainly not the majority because landfills still account for
over 14% of methane emissions in America in 2017, making them the third-largest source
of man-made methane emissions in the US.
All in all, the amount of global food loss in 2009 alone was the cause behind 3,300–5,600
million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, and even if you didn’t care about environmental
impacts, food waste is bad for your wallet. The average family of four in the US spends
around $1,600 a year on food that goes in the trash. Hmm. Ok so how can we solve this
problem? Well, there’s two strategies we can use.
Firstly, you can mitigate your personal food waste. I’m sure at one point your parents
told you to “take only what you can eat,” so follow that and tell others to as well.
Secondly, you can try to mitigate the effect of the (hopefully minimal) food waste you
do have through composting. What is compost? Quite simply, it’s decomposed organic matter
which can be used as a fertilizer.
But, Alex, you might be thinking, if I create a compost pile, it’s not gonna help anything.
Like, I know the EPA says composting leads to higher crop yields, but it’s not like
I’m going around, yielding crops all the time, in need of compost to better the process.
There’s nothing I can do with a ton of compost.
Well, you’re right. Not everyone’s a farmer, and not everyone needs compost. So for us
to really harness the benefits of compost, we’d need to implement city-wide programs
to collect organic waste and turn it into compost for farmers. But, is that even possible?
Part the second: how do city-wide compost programs work?
There are two essential components to a successful city-wide compost program: collection and
processing.
Collection actually begins far before any garbage truck is deployed, because the biggest
hurdle to jump is simply peopling not knowing what can and can’t be composted. People
are pretty terrible at this. Compost facilities have found basically anything you can think
mixed in with organic waste, from pencils to computers. Indeed, the day I visited South
Valley Organics, they just got in a new shipment of organic waste, and in it was a plastic
helmet and this brick. Listen, I’ve been working on this video for months now and I
have no idea who’d think it would be a good idea to compost a brick.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, food waste that comes from schools tends to be especially filled
with non-food-waste trash. If you yourself are curious as to what can and cannot be composted,
feel free to pause the video right now and take a look at this chart.
Processing is the next stage of the operation. After all of the organic waste is collected, processing starts when composting plants take out
all that stuff that can’t be composted. Then, the
waste is grinded up using this industrial-sized grinder, making it the ideal size for microorganisms
to do their job and start decomposing. The resulting product is placed into these massive,
long piles called windrows.
One thing that really surprised me is how hot the compost gets; a matter of fact, you
could even sometimes see steam coming from the windrows, and that’s because their ideal
operating temperature can get between 140 and 149°F or 60 and 65°C. Why is that?
Well, 80% to 90% of all microorganisms found in those compost piles are bacteria, and those
bacteria can be divided into two groups: aerobic and anaerobic.
Anaerobic bacteria — or bacteria which do not require oxygen — are lowkey kinda useless
and give compost any of the bad smells you might usually associate with it, but aerobic
bacteria, or bacteria which require oxygen levels of at least five percent, are the highest
iq because they can consume basically anything but love turning nitrogen into protein and
carbon into energy. This process generates a lot of heat.
However, if the temperature gets hotter than 160ºF, it can hurt the aerobic bacteria,
and, thus, the productivity of the decomposition, so compost piles must be turned and exposed
to air in order to cool ‘em down. Bonus points: doing that exposes the pile to oxygen,
which, as we all know aerobic bacteria needs to operate.
And temperature isn’t the only condition that needs to be ideal; we also gotta make
sure the pile has enough water so that it’s MOIST but not sopping wet and the ratio of
carbon to nitrogen in the pile is somewhere between 25:1 and 30:1.
Woah; in learning about why compost gets so hot, we also learned about how compost works.
Huh; it’s almost like I planned that. Wow. Cool. Sweet. Radical. Amazing. Awe--
After between a couple weeks and a couple months, the compost is done and ready to sell
back to farmers in the area. *big exhale* Wooah. Okay. So those are some pretty thicc
logistics, but do they actually work everywhere? Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh?
New York City rolled out it’s composting program in 2017. It’s currently voluntary,
and the advertising around the program is minimal, so they don’t have anywhere close
to 100% participation. There’s certainly the potential for that program to be profitable,
but it made only $58,000 in 2017, compared to the well over $15 million cost of the program
itself. There are currently no plans to expand the program. Huh. But, wait, check out this
article: San Francisco sends less trash to the landfill than any other major U.S. city.
And it’s, in part, because the compost program in San Francisco is thriving. So, we know
it can be done, but how? Part the third: What makes San Francisco’s compost program so
great?
This 27-page document is the San Francisco Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance.
It was passed back in 2009, and it requires all San Franciscans to sort their garbage
into recyclables, organic waste, and classic trash. This was completely unprecedented at
the time because it was America’s first mandatory composting law. Is this what makes
San Francisco’s program so great? Yes and no. Yes, because this is incredibly important,
but no, because saying this ordinance alone is responsible for SF’s composting success
doesn’t take into account the nuance of trash collection in the city. There are two
reasons SF’s compost program is so great.
This is the first is their exclusive partnership with the waste management company Recology.
While cities like New York have hundreds of companies competing to collect waste from
residents and businesses, San Francisco only works with Recology, decreasing administrative
friction, which, in turn, means it’s a lot easier to try new things.
Indeed, in the past, San Francisco and Recology have ran many “pilot programs” (which
are small scale tests of larger projects done to see if those projects would be successful).
And many of these pilot program turned out really well. For example, in 1996, the curbside
collection of food scraps was pilot tested, and, it went so well that the project was
rolled out to the whole city in 2001.
Additionally, the genius of San Francisco’s whole waste management system is that it’s
structured so that Recology has strong financial incentives to divert waste from landfills.
Recology has a lot of stake in various recycling and composting facilities around the Bay Area,
but they don’t have stake in landfills, so it’s to their benefit to move as much
waste as possible to recycling and composting plants.
Ok, so what’s the second reason San Francisco’s compost program is so great? Well, quite simply,
the government wants it. Composting has the full support of the San Francisco government.
It all started in 1989, with, actually, the state government. The California Assembly
passed the Integrated Waste Management Act, which set the goal of a diversion rate of
25% by 1995 and 50% by 2000. A diversion rate is the measure of how much trash you’re
diverting from landfills by recycling or composting that trash. At the time, San Francisco’s
diversion rate was 10%, which means it was sending 90% of its trash to landfills.
Over the next decade, San Francisco invested cash money into making their waste management
system as environmentally friendly as possible, and, by 2000, they hit their goal of 50%.
But San Francisco said “we can do even better,” and, in 2002, SF’s Board of Supervisors
passed the Zero Waste Goal, requiring San Francisco to have a diversion rate of 75%
by 2010 and 100% by 2020. That’s right: San Francisco wants to send no trash to landfills.
And they’re like kinda doing it.
Thanks to all of these legislations, in 2007, the city reached a diversion rate of 72%,
while California, like the state as a whole, was hovering at 52%. But San Francisco realized
that, without people sorting recyclables, compost, and trash in their homes, they wouldn’t
be able to stay on target and reach their goal of zero waste. And that’s where this
comes in: the 2009 Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance. We’ve come full circle.
Thanks to this thing, in 2018, the city hit a diversion rate of 80%. That means over 1.5
million tons of garbage are diverted from landfills every year. That’s insane.
So, no, San Francisco doesn’t send no waste to landfills, but they’ve gotten pretty
darn close, at least, closer than any other major US city, and that means they’re doing
something right.
What’s the future for compost in San Francisco? Well, if everyone were to fully abide by this
law and separate their trash, SF would be able to achieve a diversion rate of 90%, so
the city is continuing to work towards that and find ways to get that last 10%. Luckily,
the future looks bright because the residents are on their side. Before this law was enacted,
the city surveyed a bunch of apartment owners and found that 85% of ‘em really liked the
program, and, like, when was the last time that many people agreed on anything political.
Obviously, there is a lot we need to do to fight climate change, and even that’s an
understatement. But one factor we need to look at is what we do with our food and what
we do with our waste. And compost is the brilliant solution to both of those things.
HECC, the fact that you’ve made it this far in a video about composting shows that
you care about this and it’s a solution worth fighting for. So,
now that you know why we need city-wide compost programs, how they work, and why San Francisco’s
is so great, you can advocate for them where you live and in the conversations you have.
And, in doing so, we’ll make the world just a little bit greener.
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Wooo, this video is finally done!
I’ve never spent this much time on a video. I didn’t time track it or anything, but
I’m guessing I spent between 60-70 hours on this. I’m incredibly happy with how it
turned out, and I hope you are too. Uh and if you are, it’s super helpful if you share
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