Trash Lessons from the Greenest City
S.F provides residents with green bins for food scrapes San Francisco has been called the "greenest city in America" and when it comes to keeping garbage out of landfills, it's a title the city has earned. The city keeps an astonishing 80% of solid waste out of landfills, in part because residents not only use blue bins for their glass, plastic and papers but an additional green bin for all their compostable food waste. The company Recology manages the city's solid waste and notes that its composting program "takes 650 tons per day of organic matter and turns it into compost that goes to farms, orchards, vineyards and landscaping businesses." The city is aiming to be zero waste by 2020. More than 90 other cities have followed San Francisco's lead with curbside composting, including Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; and Seattle. Most recently, city councilors in Boston have been lobbying hard for curbside compost pickup in their city.