As the importance of acknowledging environmental issues rises tantamount with governments’ (federal, state, local) abilities to implement attainable sustainability goals and policies, the more likely it will be for these government entities to follow these policies at least at the minimum level. Going the ‘extra mile’ to ensure the implementation of a policy is successful by increasing its goals is almost unheard of. This unwillingness by these governmental entities to exceed goals may stem from the uncertainty of either reaching the minimum goals or due to unforeseen costs associated with elevating the goals. San Francisco’s Department of the Environment (SFDOE) is one example of a local government not afraid to elevate goals of a policy of the State of California while at the same time creating new ordinances to achieve its goals.
To enhance and further its solid waste management efforts, the state of California enacted the California Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989, requiring local jurisdictions to divert 50% of waste from landfills. Any city or township not meeting the 50% goal could suffer a fine of $10,000 per day. In 1992 San Francisco noted the special importance of wood, metals, and inerts from construction and demolition activities. They believed these materials could be repurposed for other new developments, redevelopments, and for special use.
San Francisco sits on a peninsula surrounded by two important bodies of water- the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. The city is only 46.9 square miles; to lend perspective as to its size, the city of Dallas, Texas, sits on 385 square miles. With a population of 826,000 within city limits, San Francisco is the fourth largest city in California, and the fourteenth largest in the country. However due to its smaller size, it is the second densest city in the country after New York. Although the population projection is only expected to add 158,000 residents and about 73,000 homes by 2030, lack of space, increasing demands in waste management, and the protection of natural bodies of water have caused the city to find it especially imperative to act on the goals of the state policy. In 2000 San Francisco only reached 46% waste diverted from landfills, an upset that embarrassed the progressive city. This failure caused local policymakers to review the policy’s expectations, take a more aggressive approach towards reaching the 50% goal, and set a whole new standard of reaching new goals within a specified timeframe.
It wasn’t until 2006 that the SFDOE’s Board of Supervisors adopted San Francisco Ordinance No. 27-06, otherwise known as the Construction & Debris Recovery Ordinance, which sought to increase the goal of waste diverted to 75% by 2010 and a goal of 100% waste diverted (or rather ‘zero waste’ in landfills) by the year 2020. This ambitious goal and deadline would make San Francisco the first city in the country to achieve such a feat. Ancillary goals that would also be attained by virtue of incrementing these percentages would be a decreased health hazard for human, animal, and plant life, a decrease in traffic by virtue of having less waste management fleet on the streets, and improving overall quality of life. At first glance this new ordinance may seem almost impossible for such a densely populated city to achieve; however, taking a closer look at how the process of waste management in San Francisco has changed over the last ten years shows how the goal may be accomplished.
First of all, any person or business entity conducting full demolition of a structure must submit a waste diversion plan to the Director of the SFDOE, outlining a 65% or more diversion of waste from landfill. The plan must also list the material types to be diverted, volumes by type, rate of recovery by material, and the transporter (or vehicle) to be used. This data is crucial because it quantifies the data needed to verify the waste diverted goals and thus, supports the policy.
Registered transporters take the waste from the demolition or construction site to a registered sorting facility such as Recology, an employee-owned waste management facility with sixteen sorting facilities and three landfills in the bay area. The facility gives the transporter a receipt specifying how much waste was delivered in tons. As part of policy compliance, the director of the SFDOE may at any time request up to three years of receipts from the transporter. The facility submits an annual report to the SFDOE detailing total quantities of materials received, a breakdown of what can be recycled, the end use of these recyclables, the landfill destination for residuals, and recovery ratios. Registrations for both transporters and facilities are valid for two years, ensuring accountability and compliance by both parties. Revenues from registrations and/or citations go toward litter enforcement programs and abatements.
In addition, the ‘Zero Waste’ policy has paved way for other ordinances within the city to reduce
To put it in more quantifiable numbers, in 2000 the city sent over 872,000 tons to the landfill while it only sent 475,800 tons after the 2009 ordinance was implemented. The following year the city reached 80% waste diverted. Today the city diverts about 600 tons of organic material from the landfill daily.So what happens to the compostable material? Recology actually sells compost to farmers, landscapers, garden centers, and the general public for about $10 a cubic yard and sells a custom blend, usually to wineries, for about $30 c/y. Another alternative for compost is being explored by the city as an anaerobic digester; that is, finding ways in which compost can be turned into a source of energy, heat and biogas to help power their recycling and recovery operations as well as the city grid.
According to BioCycle.net, the city and Recology officials are in agreement that when all expenses are accounted for, it costs roughly the same (dollar for dollar) to compost and recycle or to send trash to the landfill. It is at this point one can see the underlying message San Francisco is trying to send out to other cities: expenses involved with recycling and composting are not any higher than they are if a city were to simply keep sending waste to landfills. They aren’t any cheaper either. With expenses relatively the same it makes more common sense for cities to find ways in which materials can be repurposed, and organic materials can be used as compost for the sake of becoming more sustainable. Therein also lies the excuse that other cities could potentially use to NOT follow San Francisco’s example. Officials in other cities may not see the value in switching waste management practices abruptly if the costs are the same. The costs associated with implementing new waste management policies, purchasing new waste management fleet if necessary, providing public disposal bins, etc. would seem like a financial burden for local governments. It would only be through education and social impact that demand for reusing materials would outweigh indifference and inaction.
According to executive director of Save The Bay, David Lewis, approximately 1 million single-use shopping bags end up in the bay annually. To prohibit the use of plastic bags and/or paper bags to carry one’s groceries is a social change that would be hard for many to get used to. The SFDOE however felt it was necessary to begin the change by enacting the Checkout Bag Ordinance in October 2012 for all grocery stores and retailers. Consequently, this would reduce trash on city streets, reduce sewage debris and clogging, and protect marine life. The city began a multi-lingual campaign months before the ordinance was set in place educating citizens how to shop with reusable bags and instructing retailers about the expectations of the ordinance. The city partnered with Citibank to distribute 10,000 free reusable bags in bank branches throughout the city and distributed another 7,000 free bags at events around the city (Reily, 2012). Customers must now either take their own reusable shopping bag or pay a 10¢ fee each time they wish to use a store provided bag. Any fees obtained from purchasing the bag at the store remain at that particular store as profit. The city also requires food service industries to provide compostable take-home trays instead of plastic containers and in October 2013 will require restaurants to also follow the Checkout Bag Ordinance. Although most of San Francisco’s citizens were on board with using a reusable shopping bag or getting charged the 10¢ fee, there were many that felt it was unfair to low-income citizens. In order to balance the fairness of the policy the SFDOE excluded those using WIC and/or food stamps from the being charged the fee at the checkout line. This example shows the city’s policy-making process as an approach to fair and balanced practices.
San Francisco’s policy contains a social component rewarding sustainable practices in the community. Recently the SFDOE approved ‘Zero Waste’ grants for the 2012/2013 fiscal year to local non-profit organizations. To further the goals of the ‘Zero Waste’ program, the department selected six nonprofit organizations to stimulate the recycling effort within communities: Supportive Housing Employment Collaborative (SHEC), San Francisco Clean City Coalition, Garden for the Environment, San Francisco Conservation Corp, Friends of SCRAP, and Twice Loved.
SHEC will focus on allowing previously homeless adults the opportunity to participate in Recycling and Environmental Awareness Internship Programs, which will give them the skills necessary to properly manage waste and composting for their supportive housing sites. The Clean City Coalition will operate a wood-refurbishing program from existing wood, woodchips, and plywood recovered from the facility and will hire ‘hard to employ’ individuals for this purpose. Some of the finished products include handmade furniture which can be sold to local furniture stores.
Garden for the Environment will focus on educating San Francisco citizens on composting techniques for their own backyard, while offering free composting services in many neighborhoods. The idea of citizens helping citizens to compost in their own backyard supports the “nostalgic ideal of a simpler, leaner, more virtuous way of life, lived closer to nature and at geographic scales that promote genuine social bonding and prevailing trust” (Mazmanian & Kraft, 33). This also signifies “a return to humanly scaled communities that can withstand…’future shock’” (Mazmanian & Kraft, 34).
The San Francisco Conservation Corp will use grant funds to provide greening services for events in the Bay City area such as the San Francisco Marathon, while raising awareness about recycling and composting practices amongst attendees and event sponsors. SCRAP (Scroungers for Reusable Art Parts) will use metals, textiles, and wood to promote artistic reuse between the businesses and homes in the city.
Twice Loved is a non-profit specifically focused on collecting handed-down baby clothing, but will take appropriate textiles from the facilities to fashion ‘new’ baby clothing for donations to needy mothers. This social component at the community level further enhances the policy’s efficacy by virtue of community participation, appreciation, and overall knowledge. Awareness and inclusion between the local government and its citizens makes the policy more acceptable.
San Francisco’s ordinances follow the theory of ‘Metropolitan Governance’, of “communities interacting within a region that achieve and retain improvements in quality of life without diminishing the quality of life enjoyed by other communities” (Mazmanian & Kraft, 48). San Francisco must take into account that a landfill where its waste goes also serves the suburbs, including its sister city Oakland. Citizens must also note that trash or waste spilled into the San Francisco Bay affects the ecology of neighboring cities as well. Of course, it would not suffice if only San Francisco developed and followed an ordinance while other nearby cities did nothing; it is equally imperative for them to follow suit. Interestingly enough, the city of Oakland has also adopted similar sustainable policies such as the ‘Zero Waste’ policy in March 2006 (zero waste by 2020), a month after San Francisco adopted theirs. Since 2000 the city of Oakland has reduced their overall waste diversion by 31%. They have also adopted a ‘Bring Your Own Bag’ campaign to reduce the use of plastic bags and have handed out over 164,500 free reusable bags to help with efforts.
The concept of ‘Zero Waste’ did not begin with San Francisco. In fact, according to the Global Recycling Council, the first city in the world to implement the concept as a policy was Canberra, Australia in 1996. Since then over half of the cities in neighboring New Zealand have adopted the policy. Not very many American cities have adopted this plan quite as efficiently and as ambitiously as San Francisco. Other localities well on their way to achieving ‘Zero Waste’ are Seattle, Washington, San Jose, Sonoma and Santa Clara counties in California, and Boulder and Summitt counties in Colorado. Cities in other states have jumped on the ‘Zero Waste’ bandwagon recently, but have lacked the ambition and action to truly achieve 100% waste diversion. For example Austin and San Antonio, Texas, have both adopted similar policies; however, looking closely at their plans- Austin hopes to achieve 90% waste diverted by 2040 and San Antonio hopes to divert only 60% by 2025 (an amended timeline extension from 2020). Both of these cities have something San Francisco does not have – space. Perhaps having an abundance of land and few natural wonders are the reasons why these two cities have lacked the urgency to be proactive. It is possible that regional location, density, and being surrounded by natural bodies of water have shaped the psychological behavior of the citizens of San Francisco, allowing for a smooth transition towards sustainability.
By executing an ordinance directed at sorting useful materials at a facility and diverting waste from landfills, San Francisco has reduced garbage truck traffic and fire-burning at landfills, thus reducing greenhouse gases and improving air quality. New developments are reusing materials while demolished buildings are perceived as a smorgasbord of useful treasure rather economic waste. Possibly millions of plastic bags are diverted from the San Francisco Bay annually, restoring the natural beauty and safety of marine life. Local organizations are taking the tools they need to promote awareness within their communities while hiring the homeless and ‘hard to employ’. Time will tell if the ‘Zero Waste’ goal can be reached by 2020, but by increasing the state’s current goal at the local level, San Francisco has become a model for other cities to follow.
Resources
City of San Antonio, Texas. (PDF web address not able to capture)
City of Oakland, California. http://www2.oaklandnet.com/Government/o/PWA/o/FE/s/SO/OurFocusAreas/NaturalResourcesWasteEnvironmentalHealth/index.htm
FOCUS is a development and conservation strategy website for the San Francisco Bay Area http://www.bayareavision.org/bayarea/sf.html
Mazmanian, Daniel A. & Kraft, Michael E. (2009). Toward Sustainable Communities: Transition and Transformations in Environmental Policy (2nd ed). London. MIT Press
Reily, Neal J. (2012, October 1). New ordinance not quite everybody’s bag. The SF Gate. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/New-ordinance-not-quite-everybody-s-bag-3910863.php
San Francisco Department of the Environment. (2006, February 16). Policy for Zero Waste (File No. 051142). San Francisco, CA. Retrieved from http://www.sfenvironment.org/zero-waste/policy
San Francisco Department of the Environment. (2012, September 28). Save Money, Bring Your Own Bag: It’s That Easy. Retrieved from http://www.sfenvironment.org/news/press-release/save-money-bring-your-own-bag-its-that-easy
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