West Valley residents can compost with kitchen pails
Santa wasn’t the only one who dropped off gifts this year. West Valley Collections and Recycling (WVCR) is nearly finished distributing kitchen pails to residents to separate their kitchen food scraps from their trash, in line with the new state law aimed at reducing organic waste in landfills.
Egg shells, banana peels and coffee grounds can all be collected in the new kitchen pail and dumped into the yard trimmings cart each week to be composted.
WVCR Outreach Manager Weslie McConkey said the pail is like a recycling bin, meant to help people sort trash as they throw it away.
“The kitchen pail is meant to stay in the kitchen and collect food scraps from the kitchen, and then residents will take that pail to their organics cart and dump it into the cart,” McCronkey added.
This system is different from Sunnyvale’s split garbage can that debuted in 2017, which caused some upset among residents because it limited space in the can for trash.
The new state law aims to reduce methane emissions caused by organic waste from landfills by requiring all cities and counties to create organic waste reduction plans by the start of 2022. WVCR signed a contract with Los Gatos, Campbell, Saratoga and Monte Sereno earlier this year to collect residential compost in the West Valley.
WVCR started delivering the pails to the West Valley in October, and Los Gatos Mayor Rob Rennie said he noticed some residents weren’t sure how to use them.
“I was looking forward to the pail delivery, and we actually just got our pails last week,” Rennie said. “As I’ve walked through the neighborhoods, people have put away their garbage cans, but the pails are still left out in a lot of places. It’s almost like they don’t know what it’s for or don’t want it.”
McCronkey said WVCR included a how-to guide with the pails and a list of acceptable materials, including yard trimmings,
“The kitchen pail is meant to stay in the kitchen and collect food scraps from the kitchen, and then residents will take that pail to their organics cart and dump it into the cart.” — Weslie McConkey, WVCR outreach manager
egg shells and banana peels.
“With the new state law, we want to make it as easy and convenient to participate in the organics program as possible to give them a good start,” McCronkey said. “We know change can take a little bit of effort, so we want to do what we can to make it easier and really encourage people to put their organics into the organics cart.”
The state law sets the goal to reduce organic waste by 75%, which Rachel Wagoner, director of CalRecycle, said would be the equivalent of removing 1.7 million cars from the road.
“It’s actually really important in the fight against global warming,” Rennie said. “It is a good way to help fight greenhouse gasses by keeping these kinds of decompositions out of our landfills.”
Decomposing food scraps sitting in landfills produce methane gas, which is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
Reducing organic waste will have the fastest impact on the climate crisis, according to CalRecycle.
“In compost recycling you turn so that it stays exposed to the air and it decomposes correctly,” Rennie said. “But in a garbage dump, it gets buried, and now it can’t go through a chemical process with oxygen. It goes through one without oxygen and produces methane, which is a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.”
Rennie said the compost program will increase residential WVCR service costs by about $3-$5 per month.
If residents do not want to use the kitchen pail, WVCR encourages them to repurpose the pail for another use. Unwanted pails cannot be returned, McConkey said.
“Some people are using them for crayon buckets,” McCronkey added. “One person donated hers to her church.”