San Diegans throw enough trash into green bins meant for organic waste that the city paid to have teams of workers pick it out by hand.
The city hasn’t quantified how bad the trash contamination is yet. But it was bad enough to launch a two-week experiment where groups of formerly homeless men armed with pickers separated trash from truckloads of city organic waste at the Miramar Landfill’s Greenery.
The goal is to see whether human trash sorting could be a cost-effective way to achieve cleaner compost, said Kelly Terry, spokeswoman for the city’s Environmental Services Department. Right now people are throwing car parts, gas tanks, hoses and whiskey bottles into their green bin — which can break landfill sorting equipment and bring the entire composting process to a standstill.
(Left to right) A collection of items that were removed from compost on display at Miramar Greenery on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. A pizza box in a pile of compost. / Zoë Meyers for Voice of San Diego
City staff chalk up the contamination they’re seeing to the learning curve of San Diegans still dealing with a new-ish requirement to separate food waste in a green bin. The city rolled out green bins to 200,000 San Diegans in 2023. A year later, Voice of San Diego reported that the city chose not to crack down on people who put garbage in those bins.
The city still doesn’t enforce bad green bin behavior. Terry confirmed the city is developing plans to do so, but didn’t give any details. For now, the city is scrambling to deal with contamination on its own.
On Tuesday morning, the scene at the Miramar Greenery was unexpected.
The trash-picking team of men worked unpaid, seven-hour shifts as part of a collaboration with the East County Transitional Living Center, an organization that helps unhoused people reenter the workforce. That’s how their program functions, explained Julie Hayden, the center’s chief executive officer.
These men spend a year in the center’s program rotating into work programs to gain job skills. By the end of that year, Hayden said most gain permanent housing and employment.
The city couldn’t tell me as of Tuesday afternoon how much the East County Transitional Living Center got paid for the two-week pilot. Hayden also declined to say but said the money goes toward the men’s program and is likely cheaper than the city hiring actual staff.
Earl Davis, one of the pickers, said he found a toilet seat buried in the green bin waste. Another said he found a live turtle.
“It looks like people are just using their green bin like a trash can,” Davis said.
City waste collection trucks began rolling into the landfill’s Greenery around 10 a.m., dumping their loads in front of Davis and his coworkers. They removed bottles, green compostable produce bags, pizza boxes and other stuff that isn’t organic before a bulldozer scraped the remains into large rows.
I walked past the rows that had been cleaned by human hands toward ones that hadn’t. The difference was notable.
Full plastic garbage bags, large pieces of Styrofoam, shoes, clothing and wine bottles mixed with palm fronds, tree clippings and fruit peels. Together, they formed towering walls of ungroomed waste. All of this awaited the next step in the city’s composting process: the grinder.
But the grinder – huge, mechanized metal rollers meant to break down green waste so it can be composted – busted earlier that morning. Somebody had thrown a huge piece of metal into their green bin which went through the grinder undetected and snapped part of its metal undercarriage.
The grinder’s only salvation is a small excavator tasked with pulling some of the obvious larger trash items out of the green waste piles. But it can’t catch everything.
Lalo Hernandez, a city equipment technician, said he’s pulled car parts and motors from green waste going through the grinder.
“When this machine is going it sounds like you’re standing next to a train. So for that ‘clunk’ (of the trashed metal) to outdo the sound of this machine, that’s pretty bad,” Hernandez said.
Once the green waste, and any trash inside, is ground down, larger excavators push it into even larger rows. I felt like an ant overlooking a giant, unplanted garden.
Microorganisms begin to eat up and break down the compost, which generates heat inside the green waste rows. Internal temperatures can reach around160 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s enough to kill harmful pests or diseases. Bugs, fungi and bacteria do the rest of the dirty work to clean the compost.
The compost then goes through another sifting and grinding process where all the good organic muck flies out into a pristine pile as rich, black dirt. That’s sold by the city or given away for free to city residents. There’s also a mid-level quality compost that’s still riddled with plastic bottle caps, strips of plastic bags and the like that can be used for erosion control. The rest is landfilled.
“Most people are actually doing a great job,” said Jen Winfrey, assistant director of the city’s Environmental Services Department. “The city had a pretty mature green collection program. People who had those bins are very used to it and keep it pretty clean. It’s just this massive rollout and it takes time.”
The Miramar Greenery, which opened in 1986, always accepted yard waste like lawn and landscape clippings from businesses or food waste from restaurants.
“We had a lot of control over the food waste that came from restaurants then because we didn’t allow them to bring their waste in until our team went out and trained them and their kitchens on how to do it,” said Julie Sands, Environmental Services Department’s recycling program manager.
But California lawmakers passed a law requiring cities to eliminate food from the waste stream. By 2022, the city rolled out brand new green bins to thousands of apartments and homes in order to comply.
“We aren’t surprised that contamination went up. That was to be expected,” Sands said. “It’s harder just because we don’t have control over every house,” Sands said.
Clarification: Microbial activity is what generates massive amounts of heat in compost rows, not solar radiation.
The city specifically allows greasy pizza boxes as shown in the second photo. The article misleads readers to think that food contaminated cardboard is not compostable. Food contaminated cardboard and paper are allowed so long as they don’t have plastic coatings or metal.
I see a chunk of 4×4 lumber in the other photo but the city allows non-hazardous wood, which untreated redwood or pine are. I am confused on this point. IS non-hazardous wood allowed? Or not? How does the city actually define non-hazardous wood??
Thanks for the interesting and relevant article VOSD!
I think that 4×4 is pressure treated, so hazardous. I’m also curious about the pizza box as I also thought that would be organic waste!
Same here re pizza boxes and wood. Our north county vendor, EDCO, allows both in the greens bins.
If you think people are cheating the system and putting non-compostable trash into the green bins now, just wait until the new for-pay trash system rolls out and people are limited to one 95-gallon trash container, with a second bin costing an extra $18/month.
So I just throw away less stuff. Compost ( and/or use a worm bin), buy stuff that only comes in compostable forms ( recycling is not happening more than 90% of recyclable plastics is thrown in landfill because there’s no market for it), freecycle and stop buying stupid cheap clothes and junk. We are killing our planet and with it- and ourselves. We are the problem- and the solution. It’s a decision every time you buy something on what respect you have for yourself and our shared San Diego community.
You’re not only right on this point, but it’s incompetent to produce and distribute smaller trash bins for a discount. A smaller trash bin means that a home will put it out to the curb more often. That will cause the collection trucks to stop more and waste fuel. People with the smaller trash bins will cost the City MORE for fuel. The City ought to charge more or less based on the number of people living in the units. More people equals more waste. And the City should promote only setting out a container if it is heavy or full.
Yes, plenty of people are already planning an “anything goes anywhere” strategy. They are going to put trash, recyclables, food and greenery in any bin that is convenient to use every week. If they generate more trash one week then the blue and the green bins will also be used for trash, including car parts, tires, rocks, dirt and furniture. I am all for it. If the City is going to charge for trash pickup, then let them sort it all out and to hell with their stupid “machines”.
car parts, gas tanks, hoses and whiskey bottles, yes I often confuse these items from my food waste. Maybe a UPS style sorting system?
“The trash-picking team of men worked unpaid, seven-hour shifts…..”. Yes, once you become unhoused you must move to the workhouse and labor in the sun. Just like in the good old days.Their minders get paid, but nobody wants to disclose the amount. Such is life on the East County Transitional Living plantation.
Yes, and if any of those bums refuse to work or refuse to get clean then they should be thrown into the compost grinder. No one will miss them….
“Cheaper than hiring City Workers” – “worked 7 hours in the baking sun, sorting trash by hand, couldn’t afford to buy a bottle of water and hand sanitizer afterward, because minimum wage is not required when laboring in the city compost pile” – i can’t even wrap my mind around this. It’s still not registering that no one else has any concern about this. Who cares about the pizza box. Is this real?
The reference to pizza boxes is confusing – the city website says food-soiled cardboard is OK as long as any plastic tape or labels are removed (and even has a picture of a pizza box as a YES item).
We sort our trash. Then it gets resorted about a half dozen times by our good neighbors every trash day, before pick up. Don’t blame homeowners, blame the idiot politicians that have allowed our streets to be vagrant filled.
I can’t believe Joan is the only one who saw what I saw. This sounds like a Cotton Field in South Carolina, back in the day, but way worse. Clarification is needed most on the 7 hour shifts, in the sun, by people who need any form of payment, desperately enough to sort trash by hand. Even if they are volunteering, someone should be volunteering to pay them. Doesn’t our DA enforce worker’s comp? But no need for payment for the unhoused willing to work 7 hours a day in the sun? “Cheaper than hiring city workers”????
It isn’t surprising a Democrat-inspired program requires the equivalent of slave labor to make it sustainable. Don’t like it? Vote differently!
And expose the ever living …. Out of the RICO Enterprise that’s operating within the County, demand transparency, recall, repeat, until Election Day…
Try educating people before rolling out a program. They did very little marketing or education.
If you are worried about the cost of trash, consider making an investment into Ridwell instead of more trash can capacity. Our household of 3 adults, a cat and a dog, are producing less than a half-gallon milk carton of trash, on average per week, plus a shopping bag size of pet waste per week. I am not trying that hard or doing weird things, but I do clean food-contaminated plastics accepted by Ridwell, who accepts a wide range of household wastes: multi-layered plastics, thin-film, clamshells, styrofoam, plastic caps, batteries, lightbulbs and much more. Disclaimer: you might not have Ridwell operating in your community and I understand many will not be atttacted to the time and money it takes to recycle these items. But to me it’s empowering to see only a milk carton of waste per week heading to the landfill.
Well you got to love that! They finally got their free homeless slave labor. People need to wake up. Yes that’s real job training sorting through trash! Tell me how much effort was put into their training. So they can go out into the highly competitive career of trash sorting! Its in high demand because they don’t pay you to do it!. I think these people did not need training sorting threw trash. They been sorting through society’s trash for years! Boy we finally feel better about ourselves. Making people who have nothing work for free! Who said slavery is no alive and well. 100 years down the road their descendants are going to demand reparations and I hope they get it! Why don’t you start giving out fines to the people causing this issue! Instead of punishing those who have already been trapped on by society!
One of the problems is that grocery stores all started using “compostable “ produce bags, which cannot go in the green bin according to the city’s website. Why isn’t the city requiring stores to put up a sign saying the bags are NOT compostable in San Diego ? Or better yet, make them take the “compostable “ wording off the produce bags?