SAN FRANCISCO— San Francisco’s no-waste policy is likely to save residents money and generate new jobs, according to members of San Francisco Environment, a city agency promoting sustainability.

Currently, the city recycles or composts 70 percent of its waste material and aims to reach a goal of 75 percent by 2010 and 100 percent by 2020.

San Francisco collects 3,600 tons of general garbage from homes and businesses each day, enough to fill a football field three feet deep. General garbage includes everything but items like office and construction materials.

The zero waste plan includes several recent measures including a ban on plastic water bottles in restaurants, the elimination of plastic bags at select grocery stores, expansion of recycling to include “firm” plastics like Nalgene water bottles, and the use of recyclable to-go containers by city restaurants.

 In addition, NorCal Waste Systems, Inc., the city’s waste management contractor, launched a composting program in 1996 to distribute food scraps from households and businesses.
San Francisco residents can get up to 10 gallons of composted material a year for free through an annual compost giveaway. NorCal also provides over 60, 000 cubic yards of free compost to Northern California winemakers for fertilizer each year.

The city may extend these efforts under a proposed recycling law now under review by the Board of Supervisors. If passed landlords would be required to provide recycling options for tenants, businesses would accept small amounts of trash from the public, event organizers would provide recycling bins, waste management could refuse to collect improperly sorted trash and recyclable materials would be banned from landfills. The proposal could go into effect as soon as January 2009.

All that might sound like it would cost the city a lot but Deanna Simon, Outreach Specialist for San Francisco Environment said costs won’t rise substantially.

“Landfilling and recycling cost about the same so it doesn’t matter if you put 100 percent of stuff into recycling or 100 percent of stuff into the landfill, it doesn’t change the equation,” Simon said. Both composting and recycling cost about $300 million per ton of material, she added. The additional cost of recycling is offset by the money generated by the sale of new materials.

What’s more, NorCal picks up much of the cost.

Currently NorCal provides black and blue bins (for trash and recyclables) to every residence, including single-family households and apartments.  Green bins, for composting, are not yet available but will be if the new mandatory recycling ordinance is approved.

Many San Francisco Environment recycling programs are paid for by NorCal’s recycling revenue. A 1988 agreement gave NorCal the right to collect residential garbage in the city for 65 years or until the Altamont landfill receives 15million tons of garbage.

Simon also said that restaurants ultimately wouldn’t pay more for recyclable to-go containers. New green products, at first, are expensive, but as more and more people adopt them and you get economies of scale, “the price comes down and then becomes very competitive” Simon said.

Non-compliance fines for household recycling would be minimal and Mayor Newsom in an August press release said he’d cap the fines at $100 per violation.

Recycling rates also won’t change since they are set every five years in a fee structure designed to keep prices down. The last rate structure was approved by the Board of Supervisors in 2006 and mandates that residents pay $24.76 for basic garbage service. Basic service includes the collection of any material in the 32-gallon black, blue or green carts.

Residents may also collect more money from recycling rebates. Assembly Bill 3056, known as the Hancock Program, upped consumer refund values from 4 cents to 5 cents and to 10 cents on containers larger than 23 ounces.

The processing of more recyclable material also “has the potential to create hundreds of new jobs, “Simon said. “It takes more people to recycle items and find places to resell them than it does to just put them into the landfill.”