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By Robert Reed and Paul Giusti

An apartment tenant living on the third floor is about to take out the garbage. Does she take six steps to the garbage chute and toss in a bag containing all her household garbage? Or has she taken the time to separate her junk mail, newspapers and bottles and cans to take down the three floors to put into the blue cart?

Recycling cart or garbage can? It may seem like a small decision, but it’s more important than it seems.

Most Americans know that garbage in a landfill can be a threat to underlying groundwater, but most don’t know the methane gas generated by garbage decomposing in a landfill and then escaping into the atmosphere is an even greater environmental risk.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. In fact, landfill gas emissions can have up to 20 times more impact than other sources of greenhouse gases, such as auto emissions. Carbon dioxide doesn’t stay in the atmosphere forever. It is absorbed in the oceans, and the PH of the oceans is becoming more acidic. Coral reefs are in decline, as are large fish and mammals in the oceans.

So the simple decision of where an apartment tenant tosses bottles, cans, and paper is important and does make a difference. The success or failure of any recycling program, including San Francisco’s, depends on tens of thousands of individual actions each day.

With that knowledge, take a look at what percentage of your building’s garbage is going to the landfill rather than the recycling or composting facility. You may ask, how can I do more?

San Francisco residents and businesses are increasingly recycling items in the blue and green carts and throwing less in the black garbage cart. At the inception of the city’s “Fantastic Three” program, single-family residents were issued three 32-gallon carts: a black, blue and green one.

The program has been such a success that today, when a residential customer starts garbage and recycling services, the resident receives a 64-gallon blue cart, twice as big as the recycling cart issued at the start of the program.

That’s a meaningful change toward creating a better environment.

Blue Cart Now Accepts More Plastics
Here is more good news. The blue-cart recycling program expanded on Earth Day (April 22, 2008) to include rigid plastics such as plastic cups, clamshell containers (clean, without food) and stiff plastic packaging. Even plastic toys without metal, batteries, wiring or circuitry are now accepted in the blue cart. Styrofoam and plastic film, such as plastic bags and shrink-wrap, are not accepted.

For years, San Francisco residents and businesses have been encouraged to place all bottles, cans and paper in the blue cart. The addition of rigid plastics represents a significant expansion of the program. Other rigid plastics include plastic buckets, yogurt cups, even Tupperware. Is your Mr. Potato Head broken? Is it time to toss that old Frisbee out? Put them in the blue recycling cart.

Materials that Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling collect from blue carts go to Recycle Central, a 200,000-square-foot recycling facility on Pier 96. Inside, bottles, cans, paper and now rigid plastics are separated by a combination of modern automated equipment as well as hand sorting by recycling workers. Recent upgrades to the facility include additional metal chutes added next to conveyor belts allowing sorters to drop rigid plastics into specially designated bunkers. The sorted plastics are fed into high-density balers, the same machines used for paper and cans. The bales are then loaded into large shipping containers for transport to domestic and foreign mills and manufacturing facilities.

Recycling like this helps protect the environment in several ways. Recycled materials are made into new products and lessen the need for harvesting or mining virgin materials. Since plastics are made with oil, recycling them helps reduce our dependence on increasingly expensive foreign oil. Overall, recycling our garbage where possible uses less energy and creates less pollution than consuming raw materials. For example, recycling one ton of paper saves 17 trees and about 7,000 gallons of water.

Sunset and Golden Gate have posted outreach and education materials that anyone can download on the companies’ combined website, SFRecycling.com. These reference materials include colorful flyers, like the one on the previous page, that feature pictures of which materials should go in the (blue) recycling and (green) compost carts. We encourage you to download these flyers and not only distribute them to tenants but post them next to garbage chutes and recycling bins. Consider adding language that encourages tenants to recycle in your communications to them, as well as in lease agreements.

Food and Yard Waste Recycling
Almost every single-family and multifamily building in San Francisco has blue cart recycling service. Every day, more buildings take the next step and start to participate in the food scrap compost collection program. When an apartment owner or manager takes the first step to contact us and order a green cart to start the composting program, we don’t just deliver a green cart and then leave. We also provide kitchen pails and educational materials to each unit in the building. We can set up a table in the lobby and talk to residents about the program as they come home from work.

More than 2,000 restaurants in San Francisco participate in the green cart compost program. So do about 50,000 city homes. Many apartment building tenants would like to see green cart service added to buildings where they reside.

People sometimes fear collecting the food waste in their units. They think the waste and the green carts themselves will smell. That’s just not true. Treat the food waste bins just as you would the garbage by emptying it regularly and rinsing out the bins. It’s still the same garbage we’ve made all our lives. Instead of putting all or most of it in a garbage can, we now use different colored carts: blue for bottles, cans and paper; green for food scraps and yard trimmings; and black for nonrecyclable trash.

Food scraps include kitchen trimmings from the preparation of meals and plate scrapings from unfinished meals. The key to avoiding odor is to take the bins out every two or three days, before they start to smell. Simple ways to handle food scraps in the kitchen include tossing them in a paper bag lined with a little newsprint (to absorb moisture) or using a kitchen pail we can provide and a biodegradable liner bag. Biodegradable bags made of cornstarch can be ordered online or purchased at local grocery and hardware stores.

Food scraps placed in the green cart go to a modern compost facility outside Vacaville where they are made into nutrient-rich compost. The finished compost is a soil amendment—food for the soil. More than 200 vineyards and farms have used the compost made from food scraps collected in San Francisco.

The amendment gives local farmers a viable alternative to using chemical fertilizers. Every time a crop is harvested it takes nutrients from the soil. Applying compost returns those same nutrients to the soil. By participating in the food scrap compost program, people in the city are returning nutrients to farms just as farms provide food to city dwellers.

“Junk” Collection Program
Your apartment building and each apartment unit is qualified to participate in the bulky item collection and recycling program. The BIC service, at no additional cost, provides pick up for large items such as washing machines and dryers, mattresses, broken furniture and expired electronics. Bulky item collection is funded through regular garbage rates. For program details, you or your tenants can go to SFRecycling.com and click on “junk hauling” or call Sunset at 415-330-1300 or Golden Gate 415-626-4000.

Most of the material collected through this program gets recycled. The program does include limitations on how many items can be set out. Customers with additional items or who would like collectors to come into a property and carry out items can order extra service through RecycleMyJunk.com, a higher level of service also provided by Sunset Scavenger.

Do the Right Thing
Colorful advertisements on trucks, city buses, and bus shelters encouraging residents and businesses to recycle and compost are popping up all over San Francisco. Because children instinctively understand the importance of recycling, the ads were designed to appeal to all ages.

One ad features large glass bottles and reads “Recycle: Be a glass act!” Another shows large red raspberries above the words “Composting: A berry good idea!” A sign reminding people that even large appliances and office equipment can be recycled shows an old console TV and reads, “The Smithsonian already has one.”

Fun, colorful ads are another way we are working to boost recycling and send less waste to landfills. Other communications aimed at inspiring people to recycle more of their trash include community presentations, tours of the San Francisco transfer station (fondly known as “the dump”), improved websites, and working with community-based organizations such as the San Francisco Conservation Corps to attach recycling information to the handles of recycling and garbage carts.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors has set a goal of diverting 75% of waste away from landfills and into reuse and recycling programs by 2010. Achieving that goal will require everyone in San Francisco to pitch together and help.

To that end, Mayor Gavin Newsom wants recycling and composting to be mandatory. His staff is currently drafting an ordinance that would require all residents, business owners, and apartment owners to use the blue cart for all recyclable materials and the green cart for food scraps and yard waste. Other California cities, such as Fresno and San Diego, already have this type of ordinance in place.

Remember, it is just as easy to toss things that can be recycled or composted in the appropriate blue or green cart as it is to throw them away. So, please do the right thing: recycle.

If you need assistance in adjusting your collection service to further participate in the recycling or compost collection programs, go to SFRecycling.com or contact Sunset or Golden Gate. We must work together if we are to be successful in achieving San Francisco’s recycling goals.

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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or SF Apartment Magazine. Robert Reed is the public relations manger for Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Company. He has lived in San Francisco for 15 years and actively recycles and composts. He can be reached at RReed@SFRecycling.com. Paul Giusti is the business manager for Sunset Scavenger Company and a native San Franciscan that still lives, works and recycles in the city. He can be reached at
PGiusti@SunsetScavenger.com. Copyright © 2008 by SF Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.