One of the dirtiest jobs in San Francisco is Dealing with Food Waste

More than a dozen truck unload food waste here everyday, 80 miles east of San Francisco.
The City was the first in the US to require everyone to separate their compostable trash.
Fruits, vegetables, tree branches, and cardboard decompose here until they’re ready to be
spread across surrounding farmland. Now, the city composts and recycles more trash than it
sends to the landfill. That means San Francisco is saving water, space, and chemical
fertilizers, and reducing destructive greenhouse gases.
So, how does composting work when it’s servicing a whole city? And why aren’t more places
doing it?
We went straight to San Francisco’s compost pile to find out if this model can actually
reduce world wide waste.

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 a beautiful, nutrient-rich compost. The whole process takes 60 days
and it does require machinery like Lubo screens. The separator weeds out most of the plastic
that people accidentally put in the compost bin. That goes to the recycler or the landfill. An
8-foot wide trommel spins everything to sort it according to size, this time into smaller
pieces. The larger things pass by over the top on a conveyor belt. Some workers pick out
chunks of woods, metals, or anything that is too large to break down in the compost
process.
It is a dirty job. Someone has to do it. The next step falls to the site’s tiniest workers,
microorganisms that chow down on the organic material. That is why airflow is so important.
Because it allows the micro organisms to breathe. The microbes also need just the right
temperature. These microorganisms are real finicky. If you have too hot of a system, they’ll
die off. If its too cold, they won’t grow.
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. The biofilter will last about 3 years before it loses
its composition and we have to replace it. They spray water onto the compost rows to keep
the material moist throughout the entire process.
Two months after the trash land here, this machine screens the compost one last time to
remove any left over pieces of plastic.
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 into waste, we
must put it to good use.
This 18-foot-deep garbage pit used to get filled to the brim every day. San Francisco keeps
most of what it throws away out of landfills. That’s a big change from 25 years ago, when
California was running out of space to bury trash. 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 helps store CO2 in the soil.
So when you compost your food scraps in San Francisco, you’re actually helping turn a
vineyard into a carbon sink. Compost is a natural sponge that attracts and retains water.
California growers are willing to try anything to save water after more than 20 years of
extreme droughts. So, if composting reduces food waste and helps farmers, why aren’t more
places 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.
About a third of food produced globally still gets thrown out.
That means building many more of these facilities across the state. If 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. It’s just important. It’s the right thing to
do.