Thursday, June 11, 2009

The Garbage Police

From: S.F. Gate

Throwing orange peels, coffee grounds and grease-stained pizza boxes in the trash will be against the law in San Francisco, and could even lead to a fine.

The Board of Supervisors voted 9-2 Tuesday to approve Mayor Gavin Newsom's proposal for the most comprehensive mandatory composting and recycling law in the country. It's an aggressive push to cut greenhouse gas emissions and have the city sending nothing to landfills or incinerators by 2020.

The ordinance calls for garbage collectors to leave tags on containers when they spot incorrectly sorted material, but those collectors are only going to view what's on top of the container and have no intention of going through them, said Robert Reed, a spokesman for San Francisco collectors Sunset Scavenger Co. and Golden Gate Disposal & Recycling Co., subsidiaries of Recology, formerly Norcal Waste Systems.

"Our role is to pick up the garbage and to make recycling as easy and convenient as possible for our customers," Reed said. "Our collection drivers will not become enforcers."

The rationale behind the move is clear. Material like food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills take up costly space and decompose to form methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

Let me get this right. Garbage collectors will tag containers with incorrectly sorted material but will not be enforcers. Right!

Food scraps and plant clippings that go into landfills decompose to form methane but composting them in compost bins don't. Right!

2 comments:

Robin said...

the scene: State penitentiary
as we ease drop on a couple of the inmates comparing the charges that they were incarcerated for...

Inmate #1 what are you in for?

Inmate #2 rape, murder, overdue parking tickets.
What you in for?

Inmate #1 I threw orange peels in the garbage can.

inmate #2 gasp!

MAX Redline said...

Reminds me of the time I got busted for hitch-hiking and was transported to the facilities in Sterling, Colorado.