Two years after California began efforts to keep organic waste out of landfills, the state has lagged far behind in getting its food recycling program up and running, and its widely accepted ambitions for next year global waste reduction targets will not be achieved.
Over time, organic materials such as food scraps and yard waste emit methane, a gas that is more powerful and more harmful in the short term than carbon emissions from fossil fuels. California’s goal is to prevent waste from piling up in landfills and instead turn it into compost and biogas.
Everything from banana peels and used coffee grounds to garden waste and dirty paper products like pizza boxes counts as organic waste. Households and businesses are now expected to separate the material into separate containers.
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However, it is difficult to change people’s behavior in such a short period of time, and cities have been delayed in signing contracts to transport organic waste due to the pandemic. In Southern California, the nation’s largest facility that converts food waste into biogas has filed for bankruptcy, saying it doesn’t have enough organic material.
“We are way behind in implementation,” said Coby Skye, recently retired Los Angeles County Public Works deputy director of environmental services. “In America, for better or worse, we want convenience, and it’s very difficult to spend a lot of time and effort educating people about segregation.”
Meanwhile, some communities that have stepped up collections now have more compost than they know what to do with, indicating further challenges yet to come as the nation’s most populous state moves forward with its recycling plan. There is.
Trash is unloaded at the Otay Landfill in Chula Vista, California, on January 26, 2024. The landfill processes 200 tons of organic waste every day and hopes to double that amount as more cities step up collection. (AP Photo/Damien Dovarganes)
Only a handful of states have mandated organic recycling, with programs as large as California, which aims to reduce the amount of organic waste sent to landfills by 75% from 2014 levels by 2025. No state does.
Experts say it is unlikely to reach that goal within a year.
Roughly three-quarters of communities currently collect organic waste from households, said Rachel Machi Wagoner, director of CalRecycle. She added that while some regions are behind the curve, her goal is not to punish them, but to help them get started, and every point will help the state move toward its goal of reducing emissions. .
“My goal is to figure out where the challenges are and get them to success as quickly as possible,” she said.
“We don’t know when we will reach the 75% goal, but we will get there,” she added.
CalRecycle has not yet compiled data on the amount of organic waste diverted from landfills in 2023. Competent authorities reported that 11.2 million tons of organic waste had been diverted at the end of 2022, up from 9.9 million tons a year earlier, Wagoner said.
Challenges include getting residents involved in sorting trash into a third bin and knowing what goes where. After collecting grass clippings, tree branches, food scraps, and other materials to create nutrient-rich compost, there are concerns about what to do with the compost.
At the Otay Landfill near the Mexican border, workers sift through piles of branches and leaves to remove plastic debris before placing the material under plastic bags. Gabe Gonzalez, the landfill’s operations manager, said the facility processes 200 tons of organic waste each day and hopes to double that amount as more cities step up collections. That’s what it means.
Once compost is created, California law requires cities to use most of it. However, many people may not have enough space for everything.
Chula Vista, a city in San Diego County with a population of 275,000, is supposed to use 14,000 tons of compost a year, but only uses a few thousand tons at most, said Manuel Medrano, the city’s environmental services manager. he said. Some will be distributed as free compost gifts to residents, while piles of material will be stored in a fenced area at a local park.
“It’s really expensive to transport it and to spread it around,” Medrano said. “We are far from meeting that requirement.”
Communities with more open spaces may do better. Cody Cain, director of marketing and sales for compost maker Agromin, says his company plans to connect cities that are struggling to meet these requirements with farmers who need materials for their soil. He stated that he had formulated the following.
“We’re basically matchmakers. Call us the ‘tinderbox’ of compost. We connect farmers and cities,” Kane said.
Food waste can also be converted into biogas to fuel vehicles and industrial activities. But the massive facility, built three years ago in the Southern California city of Rialto, is now on the brink of bankruptcy after the city of Los Angeles was slow to ramp up collections, leaving the plant with insufficient waste. said Yaniv Scherson, Anagia’s chief operating officer.
“The market is struggling because cities didn’t crack down on it in time,” he said. “If we don’t get raw materials this year, we could be shut down completely.”
The Los Angeles Department of Sanitation and Environment, which handles trash and recycling for the city of about 4 million people, had no immediate comment.
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Heidi Sanborn, founding director of the Environmental State Stewardship Action Council, said she supports the state law but wants more efforts to eliminate plastics from compost and develop alternative energy solutions. . Part of California’s challenges stem from the fact that the state is building a system on a scale never seen before, she said.
“We’re trying to solve an incredibly difficult problem, and we’re not going to find a perfect solution right away,” she said.
But, Sanborn added, “We’re on our way.”
