Leading the way in reducing waste

Why? Because when we bury the food scraps and yard clippings generated in our homes and businesses under mountains of trash, they produce large quantities of methane gas as they decompose. This gas is 80 times more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide, and it’s widely understood to be a significant cause of climate change. With organic waste making up nearly half of what Californians send to the landfill, reducing it might be the easiest and most meaningful thing each person can do to pump the brakes on global warming over the next 20 years.

RethinkWaste, a regional public agency consisting of 11 jurisdictions in San Mateo County, has helped lead the Bay Area in this effort by making it easier for 430,000 residents and 11,000 businesses in our service area to recycle unused and unwanted food and green waste into compost, which we then gladly provide for free to residents, schools and community groups.

Turning kitchen scraps into compost greatly benefits the Earth in a number of ways. First, diverting the organic waste from landfills reduces the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and extends the precious lifecycle capacity of  our landfills. Second, using the compost has powerful benefits of its own, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers, helping with erosion control, aiding reforestation, and improving water quality by absorbing contaminants and capturing sediment. In short, this nutrient-rich, versatile material enhances our soils as mother nature intended while dramatically reducing the toxic effects of greenhouse gases in our communities. Seriously, what’s not to love about this effort?

While most of our community began separating their kitchen scraps long before this requirement was signed into law and became effective last year, some homes and business still lacked access to the infrastructure they needed to participate. That includes residents of apartment and condominium complexes as well as restaurants, supermarkets and others who sell food but often have items that either go bad or go unsold even as they remain edible.

That’s why RethinkWaste has proudly partnered with Recology San Mateo County — that collects our garbage, compost and recyclables — to offer tips, techniques and trainings that are making organic waste recycling available to every single resident, multifamily resident and local business. We also have a robust public outreach and environmental education program that engages the community and schools so the public and students can learn how to recycle food waste, and what becomes of these recovered resources when they do.

Our program converts organic waste into compost by using controlled biological decomposition. Food scraps and clippings are sorted, ground, aerated and cured. Material is screened to specified sizes and then allowed to mature. In 12 weeks, the process converts organic materials that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill to a wonderfully nutrient-rich and highly valuable earthy soil amendment.

To ensure that this compost material will be usable and desirable on our local farms and open space, RethinkWaste provided $40,000 in grant funds to launch an innovative compost field trial along with the San Mateo Resource Conservation District and San Mateo County’s Office of Sustainability. This trial compares compost commonly used by agricultural producers with compost produced by the industrial compost facilities we use in our program.

California still has a ways to go to meet the ambitious goals set by this new organic waste recycling law But the people who live and work in RethinkWaste’s 100-square-mile service area, along with our program partners at Recology, can be extremely proud that, together, we’re setting a stellar standard for the rest of the state to follow.

Joe La Mariana is the executive director of RethinkWaste, a public agency representing 11 jurisdictions from Burlingame to East Palo Alto in San Mateo County.