As bad as it must have been for Santiesteban during that
November audit of rotting giblets and pie crusts, his San
Franciscan counterpart might have had it worse. Waste
characterizations done there show that as much as 30% of San
Francisco's garbage has been composed of food scraps. The
challenge began 20 years ago, when overflowing landfills led
California to pass the Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989.
This required jurisdictions to divert 25% of their trash to
recycling programs by 1995 and 50% by 2000. If cities failed,
they faced fines of thousands of dollars a day. It soon became
clear that not every city had the same trash profile. While Los
Angeles produced huge amounts of lawn clippings, garbage trucks
in the more urban San Francisco showed a higher proportion of
food scraps. It only made sense for Los Angeles to work early
and hard at getting the lawn clippings out of the black bins.
After trial green bins for lawn clippings were introduced in
1993 in the San Fernando Valley, recycling rates we