Food-waste recycling or bust
Calif. seeks to slash by 75% the amount of organic waste it sends to landfills by 2025
CHULA VISTA, Calif. — Two years after California launched an effort to keep organic waste out of landfills, the state is so far behind on getting food recycling programs up and running that it’s widely accepted that next year’s ambitious wastereduction targets won’t be met.
Over time, food scraps and other organic materials like yard waste emit methane, a gas more potent and damaging in the shortterm than carbon emissions from fossil fuels. California’s goal is to keep that waste from piling up in landfills, instead turning it into compost or biogas.
Everything from banana peels and used coffee grounds to yard waste and soiled paper products like pizza boxes counts as organic waste. Households and businesses are now supposed to sort that material into a different bin.
But it has been hard to change people’s behavior in such a short time, and cities were delayed setting up contracts to haul organic waste because of the pandemic. In Southern California, the nation’s largest facility to convert food waste into biogas has filed for bankruptcy because it’s not getting enough of the organic material.
Only a handful of states mandate organics recycling, and none are running a program as large as California’s, which seeks to slash by 75% the amount of organic waste it sends to landfills by 2025 from 2014 levels.
Reaching that goal within a year would be a stretch, experts said.
About three-quarters of communities are collecting organic waste from homes, said Rachel Machi Wagoner, CalRecycle’s director. While some places are lagging, her aim is to help them get started, not punish them, adding that every bit helps the state move toward its goal of reducing emissions.
CalRecycle hasn’t tallied data yet on how much organic waste was diverted from landfills in 2023. Jurisdictions reported diverting 11.2 million tons of organics at the end of 2022, up from 9.9 million tons the previous year, Wagoner said.
Some challenges include getting residents on board with sorting their trash into a third bin and knowing what goes where. Others concern what to do with the nutrient-rich compost once it’s been created from collected grass clippings, tree branches and food scraps.
At Otay Landfill near the Mexico border, workers pick through heaps of branches and leaves to pull out plastic bits before the material is placed under tarps. The site processes 200 tons of organic waste daily and hopes to double that amount as more cities ramp up collection, said Gabe Gonzales, the landfill’s operations manager.
Once the compost is made, California’s law requires cities to use much of it. But many say they don’t have enough space to lay it all out.
Chula Vista, a San Diego County city of 275,000, is supposed to use 14,000 tons of compost a year but uses a few thousand at best, said Manuel Medrano, the city’s environmental services manager. Some is doled out in free compost giveaways for residents, while heaps of the material are stored in a fenced area of a local park.
“To transport it is really expensive, to spread it is really expensive,” Medrano said. “We’re nowhere near meeting that requirement.”