San Francisco’s Quest to Make Landfills Obsolete (2024)

Mark Peterson/Redux Pictures for Politico Magazine

Erick Trickey is a writer in Boston.

SAN FRANCISCO—In a giant building south of downtown, a river of paper, cans, cardboard, and plastic rushes along 150 yards of conveyor belts. It flows past human sorters who snatch unsuitable items from the stream, zips past air jets that blow sheets of cardboard onto a separate track, and crosses over shaking grates that sift out paper and more cardboard. Bottles, clamshell containers and more pass under a robotic arm that jabs tirelessly at the blur of plastic like a mechanical heron stabbing at minnows. The robot’s camera connects to an artificial-intelligence system that’s learning to identify shapes and pluck them out at a speed no human can match. The belt, now carrying a pure stream of plastic bottles, moves on.

This is the front line of San Francisco’s ongoing battle to reduce to zero the amount of waste it sends to landfills. Even as other cities over the past several years have scaled back or even abandoned their recycling programs because they couldn’t find a market for the materials, San Francisco’s commitment to recycling has not wavered. Out of the city’s annual 900,000 tons of discarded material, it diverts more for reuse than it sends to landfills—a success that only a few peer cities, such as Seattle, have achieved.

But San Francisco is still far from achieving the goal it set 16 years ago when it pledged it would achieve “zero waste”—and no longer need landfills—by 2020. Today, it’s nowhere close to that goal. No city is. Though it is a leader in the U.S. at recycling and composting, San Francisco is in a predicament common among American cities, whose residents are growing increasingly vexed by their role in creating vast amounts of garbage and their struggle to control where it’s ending up.

The U.S. produces more than 250 million tons of waste per year—30 percent of the world’s waste, though it makes up only 4 percent of the Earth’s population. Sixty-five percent of that waste ends up in landfills or incinerators. Appalled by floating trash zones like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch off California, the public says it wants to stop plastics from polluting the oceans. People say they don’t want to burn garbage if it creates toxic air pollutants, and they don’t want any more landfill mountains. But if you’re a city official, crafting a waste-disposal system that is financially and environmentally sustainable is a monumental challenge. What’s different about San Francisco is that it is continuing to push the boundary of what’s possible—leaning on a combination of high tech, behavior modification and sheer political will.

For decades, recycling and composting programs have enjoyed broad political support from San Francisco mayors, legislators and voters. “They’ve always been willing to do things other cities haven’t tried yet,” says Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “They’ve pioneered a lot of programs that either are commonplace everywhere or are going to be soon.”

Curbside composting bins joined recycling bins in 2001, and composting and recycling became mandatory in 2009. Now, city residents and business actually compost more material than they recycle. The city has also regulated construction and demolition debris, diverting much of it from landfills through recycling and reuse. Wood goes to steam-driven power plants in North Carolina to be burned as fuel; metal goes to scrap yards, then to foundries; sheetrock is composted; crushed concrete and asphalt go into new roads and pathways.

The city has also banned single-use plastic bags and other hard-to-recycle items. It recycles items other cities don’t: film plastic, clamshell food containers, and lower-grade plastics such as yogurt cups. San Francisco found new markets for some items after China shut the door to them last year. Its cutting-edge sorting technology produces cleaner, purer bales of recyclables, which are easier to sell.

Yet despite its green ethos, San Francisco has found reducing waste toward zero harder than expected. The amount of trash it sends to landfills declined by about half from 2000 to 2012, from 729,000 tons a year to 367,000. But then the gains stopped, and the amount of trash sent to landfills has crept up since, to 427,000 tons last year. The reasons include San Francisco’s spiking population, its residents’ increasing wealth and consumption, and the hyper-convenient plastics and other packaging that are more common in American life than they were a decade ago.

So last year, the city’s new mayor, London Breed, reset the city’s ambitions. Instead of zero waste by 2020, she said the city will, by 2030, cut all waste it produces by 15 percent and reduce the waste it sends to landfills by 50 percent.

Cutting trash in half again will be harder than the first time, a decade ago. “When you’re as far down the path as we are, it gets harder and harder to figure out how to get a good bump,” says Robert Haley, the zero-waste manager for the San Francisco Department of the Environment. “We have to change the way some products are made, and we’ve got to get people not consuming so much. And those are big challenges.”

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Looking back, San Francisco’s ambitious goal might have been too ambitious.

A California law, passed in 1989 to deal with a growing stream of waste and shrinking landfill capacity, was pressing cities to achieve a 50 percent waste diversion rate. In 2002, the city’s Board of Supervisors, urged on by an environmental commission, decided it could do better: 100 percent diversion, or zero waste, by 2020.

It was “a little forward-thinking and a little bit of hubris,” says Tom Ammiano, then president of the board, who’s now retired. “We wanted to take the lead.”

Today, Recology’s transfer station on the city’s southeast edge shows how far San Francisco falls short of that zero-waste dream—as well as how it’s made progress other U.S. cities might envy.

Inside a huge building, garbage trucks disgorge white and black trash bags into a giant pit, as they have since 1970. The pit is about 200 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 16 feet deep—big enough to hold three to four days’ worth of the city’s garbage. A pungent, rotting odor rises from it. But the pit is only about 4 feet deep in trash and that’s normal. Twenty years ago, the city sent 100 trucks of trash every weekday to a landfill; now, it sends half as many: 50.

One reason the pit is less full is visible in the next room: a composting annex built last year for $19 million. About 29 percent of the waste stream is made up of organic material. That’s what produces the compost pile which is about 12 feet high and probably 30 feet wide. Made up of about half leaves and sticks and half food scraps, it gives off very little odor, thanks to good sorting, the Bay Area’s mild temperatures, and the new facility’s odor-neutralizing system. The food decomposes over 60 days and then it’s sold to California farms and vineyards. “Composting is a very good climate action strategy,” Haley says. “You can sequester carbon back into the soil.”

The other part of the reason the garbage pit is so low is the city’s state-of-the-art recycling facility 3 miles north, at Recology’s recycling plant at Pier 96. Bales of separated paper and cardboard are bound for mills in the U.S., Canada, and Pacific Rim countries. The glass bottles and jars ship to a Bay Area glass plant and metal to an American foundry. Huge bundles of flattened milk jugs and orange laundry-soap bottles go to domestic recycling plants. Lower-grade plastics, harder to recycle and sell, go in shipping containers to the port of Oakland. There, they’ll be shipped to recycling plants in Southeast Asia.

The success of the end product begins at the curb.

This is what San Francisco does as well as any big city in the U.S., and better than most. All around the city, residents and businesses don’t have just two waste bins, they have three: black for trash, blue for recycling and green for compost. From curbs outside San Francisco’s famed Victorian houses and on sidewalks outside Chinatown restaurants, Recology picks up food scraps from green compost bins the same day it picks up recycling and trash.

Sanitation workers don’t just fling stuff into the back of their trucks. They’re auditing customers’ trash. If they see too much waste in someone’s black bin that ought to have gone into the green or blue bins, they’ll leave notes reminding the person what to recycle and compost. The notes include pictures of common items for the workers to circle — a universal means of communication in the multilingual city. It’s “very targeted communication,” Haley says, “not in a mean, police-state way, but to [say], ‘Help us clean up the recycling. Help us clean up the composting.’”

The city has also used behavior-modification strategies to get people to throw away less trash. It recently shrank the capacity of the black bins by half, to 16 gallons, but the monthly charge of $6.97 for each black bin is the same as for a 32-gallon recycling or composting bin. “If your recycling or your composting are so contaminated that they are trash, we can double your charge on those temporarily,” Haley says. About 500 large customers have received contamination charges, and about 100 have lost discounts for recycling and composting, he says.

Efforts like these cut San Francisco’s trash volumes in half. In 2012, the city’s refuse rate reports show, the city diverted 60 percent of its refuse from landfills. (At the time, then-mayor Edward Lee claimed a diversion rate of 80 percent, a subsequently debunked stat still echoing across the internet and cited by envious politicians in Washington, D.C. and other cities. San Francisco, unlike most cities, included reuse of sewage sludge and construction debris in its diversion rate.)

Then the progress stopped. San Francisco’s trend lines plateaued and even reversed a bit. By last year, its diversion rate had slipped to 51 percent.

“It’s been challenging because we’ve had such an amazing economic boom in San Francisco,” Haley says. The city’s population grew 10 percent from 2010 to 2018, from 805,000 to 883,000. Construction and demolition have surged, generating heavy debris. Meanwhile, people are discarding fewer newspapers and less glass and more plastics, take-out containers and Amazon shipping envelopes. “Eighty percent of the food in the grocery store is packaged in plastic,” laments Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology. “That was not the case 10 years ago.”

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It used to be easy and cheap to export recyclables.

“We could send recyclables to China for almost nothing, literally a few hundred dollars for a cargo container,” says Paul Giusti, Recology’s community and governmental affairs manager. For years, China took in 45 percent of the world’s waste and was a major market for American recycling. Then, in January 2018, China instituted its National Sword policy, a near-ban on foreign recyclable materials, so it could focus on recycling its own discards.

Many cities stockpiled recycling bales while looking for new buyers. Others cut back on the types of plastic they recycle. Still others started sending certain recyclables to landfills or incinerators. Giusti says San Francisco refused to go that route. Instead, it focused on creating a better product and finding new markets for it.

Recycling is a buyer’s market now. With China out of the picture, recyclers are getting choosier, refusing dirty or poorly sorted bales. The optical sorters and robots at Recycle Central help keep San Francisco competitive. So does the composting program, which helps keep food waste out of recycling bins. “We are consistently able to move San Francisco’s recyclables,” Recology’s Reed says, “because we are producing much higher quality bales of recycled paper and recycled plastics than other cities.” Reed says the city’s paper and plastic bales meet the market’s exacting new standard: less than 1 percent impurities.

Now, Recology exports cardboard and harder-to-recycle plastics to Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. Recology’s commodities marketing manager recently spent three weeks visiting its Southeast Asian customers to confirm that they’re recycling San Francisco’s materials, not burning or sending them to landfills. The plants were “very primitive,” Giusti says— very-low-wage workers sorting material barefoot, instead of in steel-toe boots — “but they were recycling the material.”

Meanwhile, San Francisco is sizing up its new self-imposed challenge: How to cut the waste it sends to landfill in half by 2030?

Homeowners usually recycle and compost effectively, officials say. The weak links are apartment buildings and offices. So the city is cracking down on its largest waste producers: large apartment buildings, office complexes, hospitals, universities, hotels and a few really large restaurants. Under a new law, they’ll have to hire waste sorters if they fail an audit. Trash has to be 75 percent uncontaminated, recycling 90 percent, compost 95 percent.

San Francisco’s 2007 plastic-bag ban and 2012 bag fee were among of the nation’s first. The laws have reduced plastic-bag litter; 60 percent of city shoppers decline a bag. Fewer bags now get entangled in Recycle Central’s sorting machines. This year, the city also banned plastic straws, stirrers and toothpicks, and it banned napkins and single-use utensils from being automatically included in food orders without request.

Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who co-sponsored the waste audit and straw ordinances, says political support for anti-waste laws is high, though businesses will always raise financial concerns.

“That’s one of the biggest challenges we face when we’re talking about these very aspirational and wonderfully environmental policy goals,” Safai acknowledges. “How do you put it into practice without making San Francisco unaffordable for everybody?” So Safai highlights ways the laws save money: fewer supply orders for restaurants, lower garbage rates for businesses that sort.

The next frontier may be producer responsibility laws, already adopted in Europe and parts of Canada. They fund the disposal of certain packaging and printed paper by collecting fees from companies that produce them. This month, Recology CEO Michael Sangiacomo joined with two members of the California Coastal Commission to launch a petition drive for a statewide ballot initiative. Their proposed law would tax plastic manufacturers up to 1 cent per package, ban Styrofoam food containers and require that all packaging be recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2030.