One of the dirtiest job in San Francisco is dealing with Food Waste

Every day, the average American generates 4.4 pounds of rubbish. More than a
dozen trucks unload food waste here every day, 80 miles east of San Francisco. The City was
the first in the US to require everyone to separate their compostable trash. According to the
EPA, about 1.5 pounds of that waste is composted or recycled, indicating the United States
spends only 34% of its waste in landfills. Fruits, vegetables, tree branches, and cardboard
decompose here until they’re ready to be spread across the surrounding farmland.
Ultimately, San Francisco aims to reach zero waste. The city composts and recycles more
trash than it sends to the landfill. That means San Francisco is saving water, space, chemical
fertilizers, and reducing destructive greenhouse gases.

How has San Francisco dealt with Food waste?

San Francisco made recycling and composting mandatory for all businesses and
residents in 2009. While a few progressive communities have followed suit, the most have
not. An employee-owned company called Recology collects all of the trash, recycling, and
compost that San Francisco throws away. Since 2015, every home and business has used a
separate bin for their food and yard waste. It ends up here, at this industrial composting
yard. The process is designed to mimic what happens in nature. They are using banana peels
and coffee grounds to make beautiful, nutrient-rich compost.

The process:

The whole process takes 60 days, and it does require machinery. The separator
weeds out most of the plastic that people accidentally put in the compost bin. The larger
things pass by over the top on a conveyor belt. Some workers pick out chunks of wood,
metals, or anything that is too large to break down in the composting process. The next step
falls to the site’s tiniest workers, microorganisms that chow down on the organic material.
Pipes run underneath the compost rows and draw harmful gases to piles of chopped-up
almond trees called Biofilters. Microbes in the biofilters destroy these gases and prevent
them from releasing into the atmosphere. Every ton of food and yard waste transforms into
a little under half a ton of finished compost. That’s because a lot of the water weight
evaporates in the composting process.

Recology sells it to farms, vineyards, and ranches across the Central Valley and
Northern California and uses the profits to help its operations. Rather than putting it to
waste, we must put it to good use. San Francisco still has work to do. About half a million
tons of material end up in the city’s landfill every year. Since then, San Francisco has
composted 2.5 million tons of garbage. That is enough trash to fill more than 13 Salesforce
Towers, the tallest skyscraper in the sky. Composting doesn’t only save landfill space. It is
also a climate solution. In a landfill, food breaks down in a tightly packed environment
without oxygen. That kind of rotting produces methane, a harmful greenhouse gas 80 times
worse than carbon dioxide. Composting keeps that from happening. And when it’s spread on
farms, composts help store CO2 in the soil. So when you compost your food scraps in San
Francisco, you’re helping turn a vineyard into a carbon sink.

So, if composting helps farms and decreases food waste, why aren't more people doing it?

There are over 700 composting programs across the US. Like San Francisco, the City
of Seattle and the State of Vermont have also mandated composting. And 24 states have
laws in place banning yard waste from landfills. But the practice is optional in most places if
a municipal program exists at all. In the food recovery hierarchy, composting still isn’t the
best solution for solving food waste according to the EPA. It ranks second to the last. That
means building many more of these facilities across the state can help the state meets its
goals. It would save 26 million tons of organic waste from going to landfills and reduce
greenhouse gas emissions by about 1% every year.