The only way to move from landfills to recycling is to curb human freedom and go in the red

Yesterday, I covered the monthly meeting of the board of our county's solid waste management district for the local media company I freelance report for. One item of business concerned the sole bid that the board received for the upcoming three-year contract to operate the district's two landfills and its recycling activities. The board's attorney pointed out that the bottom-line figure that the bidder quoted would exceed the district's budget, but that if one takes out recycling, it leaves a nice cushion. In other words, the landfill makes money for the district, but recycling eats that money up.

This comes up at most of the meetings. Some board members even floated the purely theoretical possibility of doing away with recycling, but then quickly said that it was not a possibility; the public would find it too politically incorrect.

So when I came across this Politico piece about San Francisco's "quest to make landfills obsolete," it grabbed my attention.

The first paragraph has to do with the impressive technology that city has employed in the task of sorting refuse, but it doesn't take long after that for the article to acknowledge that "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." Still, San Fran presses on!

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.”

As it turns out, this "willingness to do things other cities haven't tried" entails a fair degree of tyranny - excuse me, bans and regulation:

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. 

Residents and business owners have no choice but to take time out of their lives to fool with sorting refuse into an array of bins, and you can be sure that the nanny state is auditing your degree of compliance:

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.’”

"Not in a mean, police-state way, mind you." At least not yet. Oh, and under a new law, it's up to you to pay for a sorter if you fail your audit.

B.F. Skinner would dig some of the measures the city is employing:

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. 

Only in the fourth and third to last paragraphs does the article glancingly deal with that pesky little matter of what all this costs:

 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.

So how to close the financial gap? More tyranny!

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.

 And if all this regulation, behavior modification, taxation and auditing doesn't do the trick, maybe the icy gaze of Saint Greta will get you to obey: