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The Watershed Project

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Zeroing in On Zero Waste | Our Waste Matters Program is Following in the Footsteps of San Francisco

By Julia Aaronson

juliazeroI have done some pretty gross things in the name of Zero Waste; I have climbed through dumpsters, plunged my hands into week-old leftovers, and sorted waste from dormitories of UC Davis all as an effort to improve my university’s waste management. Over time, I found myself talking about trash with an ease that soon disturbed my friends and family. However, it is this fanaticism about waste that has thrust San Francisco into the limelight as the greenest city in North America.

The mayor of San Francisco recently announced that the city has achieved an 80% diversion rate, sending 440,000 tons of waste to the landfill in 2012, a number less than half the amount sent to the landfills only 12 years earlier. San Francisco has led the country with legislation including laws requiring compostable or recyclable food service ware, a ban on plastic bags, and the most recent, Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance requiring all people in San Francisco to separate their recyclables and compostables from their landfill waste stream. This ordinance is the first of its kind in the United States.

Many cities are following in San Francisco’s wake, implementing their own recycling programs and even attempting to introduce composting to their citizens. Vancouver, New York, Seattle, and Denver follow closely behind San Francisco as North America’s greenest cities according to Siemen’s Green City Index, a study comparing 27 major metropolitan areas in North America and ranking them based on nine categories.

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While recycling is a major component leading to San Francisco’s success as the greenest city in North America, composting is the key component that has taken diversion from 50% to the impressive 80% that San Francisco has recently achieved. In addition to introducing wide-scale composting, San Francisco has implemented an intensive, multi-lingual education campaign to spread the word about composting and recycling. Additionally, San Francisco has made recycling of unusual items, such as couches, and large electronics, extremely easy through websites that inform citizens the closest locations to recycle their items.

While recycling was becoming more common-place when I was growing up and I remember learning about it in school, composting was never part of our curriculum, and even now many cities and municipalities are a long way from implementing wide-scale composting. However, The Watershed Project wants to be play a part in continuing this effort, and we have recently received an environmental justice grant from the EPA. The EPA grants supports our new Waste Matters program that we will be piloting at Fairmont Elementary in El Cerrito.

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Waste Matters seeks to transform Fairmont Elementary into a zero-waste school by training students in the 4Rs and engaging them in their daily practice. The project features training in source reduction, trash separation, recycling, composting, and implementation of an ongoing, sustainable program of these practices. As part of the program, students will take these practices home to their families and initiate zero-waste there.

Several years ago the idea of a waste-free city was laughable; however, with San Francisco narrowing the gap with 80% diversion, and if our Waste Matters program can be replicated in other schools around the Bay, we will continue to move closer toward a waste-free life.

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The Demise of the Plastic Bag | The Plastic Bag Lobbyists Won This Round, But We’re Not Giving Up!

By Linda Hunter

Californians seemed on the verge of joining a growing league of cities and countries around the world that have banned plastic bags. But the American Chemistry Council spent millions on a deceptive campaign to defeat AB 1998, The Plastic Bag Ban Bill, claiming that it would cost California jobs and that we should instead focus on recycling plastic bags.

In truth, plastic bag recycling is simply not happening. Fewer than 2% of plastic bags are actually recycled because it’s not a viable business option. The recycling argument appears to be just another of the many greenwashing claims put forth by industry lobbyists.

In order to be recycled, plastic bags first need to be sorted, cleaned, and the contaminants from inks must be addressed. On top of that, the low quality of the plastic used in single-use bags make them completely undesirable to recyclers who would rather focus the vast quantities of easily recyclable materials such aluminum and glass.

According to Jared Blumenfeld, former director of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment and now the Region 9 Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, it costs $4,000 to process and recycle one ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for a measly $32.

What really happens to the bags that the American Chemistry Council says can be recycled? Many are shipped to countries like India and China where they are incinerated under more lax environmental laws. Ironically, China and some cities and states in India have banned plastic bags because of their ability to cause floods by clogging storm drains.

Let’s face it–plastic bags are terrible for the environment and completely unnecessary. The latest efforts by the plastic bag industry to hide this truth have fired up cities and counties all over California to institute their own plastic bag bans. San Francisco enacted the nation’s first ban on plastic bags at grocery and drug stores in 2007. Other bag-banning California cities include Palo Alto, Fairfax, and Los Angeles. In fact, the growing trend for outright bans is happening all over the world.

In 1989, Italy took a look around its beaches and saw plastic bags cluttering the scenery and choking dolphins. To help clear up the mess, the Italian government began taxing plastic bags, and next year it will institute an all-out ban on them. After bag-clogged drains led to prolonged flooding in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1988 and 1998, the government banished disposable plastic bags from the city in 2002. Ireland became the first European nation to tackle the plastic-bag problem. It imposed a 15-cent PlasTax, revolutionizing the Irish shopping scene with reusable sacks and reducing the use of flimsy plastic ones by 90 percent within weeks.

In South Africa, plastic bags were such a ubiquitous scourge that they became known as the “national flower” until the nation banned them in 2003. Eritrea, Rwanda, and Somalia followed suit in 2005, and Tanzania in 2006.

In Kenya, Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Mathaai blamed plastic bags for helping to spread malaria because discarded bags can fill with rainwater and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Her country banned thin plastic bags in 2007 and imposed fines on thicker ones. Uganda followed Kenya’s lead.

South Australia hopped on the “ban” wagon this year, threatening fines of up to $5,000 for stores that don’t comply. American Samoa banned plastic bags on the same day that California policy makers caved in to industry lobbyists.

So, it’s evident that the plastic bag ban movement is moving full speed ahead. In the meantime, the plastic bag industry is concealing the true effects of plastic bags on the environment, while encouraging people to participate in coastal cleanups through their deceptively eco-friendly websites like Marine Debris Solutions. If plastic bag lobbyists really wanted to stop harming the environment and killing marine life, they would change with the times rather than invite us to clean up their mess.

Photo credits: iStockphoto, Daily Mail, New York Times.

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