San Diego, Your Food Doesn’t Belong in the Trash

What We Learned This Year is a reporting series about some of the biggest stories of 2023. Read more here.

This year, many California cities began the monumental task of rolling green plastic bins to every door within their boundaries. Except, they started too late.  

The state now requires that the amount of organic food waste being thrown into landfills drop by half come 2020. Most California cities would get there by convincing residents to separate and dispose banana peels, meat bones and coffee grinds into food waste recycling bins.  

Rotting organics trapped in landfills is a top source of methane gas in California and usually accounts for over half of total landfill waste. Methane has potent planet-warming power once it accumulates in the atmosphere, even more — in the short term — than carbon dioxide from tailpipes, public enemy number one in the climate change. But San Diego’s landfills leak methane on the regular. It’s not an easy gas to catch.  

California already blew past its 2020 target date without reaching that goal. In fact, the amount of organics going into landfills by 2020 was increasing, a state oversight commission found. The state’s poised to blow past its next target in 2025, when 75 percent of organics must diverted from landfills.  

Part of the reason is that the state didn’t start cracking down on cities until 2022. And by that time, over 100 cities still asked the state for an extension to get their food waste recycling program started.  

The city of San Diego didn’t begin rolling out green bins until January of this year. The Environmental Services Department blamed some of that on difficulties securing new garbage trucks, plastic pails and receptacles due to lagging supply chains, a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic.  

But the department also needed to hire 100 more people for the department, including 40 sanitation workers, and take out debt to cover over $100 million in costs that come with the unfunded mandate by the state. Plus, the city is planning to build a food waste recycling facility at the Miramar Landfill to handle all the new material.  

Then there’s the task of teaching residents to rethink how they generate waste. It was clear to me, after following the first green bin distribution truck through the Grant Hill neighborhood in January, that many residents had little clue how to fill a green bin. No one seemed upset to receive one, however. Many neighbors thought the city was doling out new trash cans – they were half right. I found myself educating the people I interviewed about how they should separate and store food waste in their kitchens.  

Then the cost of composting really began to crystallize. 

By February, the city raised “tipping” fees at the Miramar landfill to help cover the costs of the program. Dozens of private trash haulers across San Diego, like Republic Services or EDCO, which serve most of the apartment complexes and businesses in town must comply with this law too. If you’re a renter, the landlord probably raised your trash bill to cover the cost of the new green bin collection service. (If you wonder how that’s possible, read my story on ratio utility billing and junk fees at rental properties.)  

San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria set even loftier waste goals than the state, but he gave the city a bit more time to reach them. By 2035, the city should be diverting 90 percent of waste at the landfill – that’s trash, organics, couches, mattresses, Amazon packaging. All that.  

The city reported it diverted 71 percent of its waste from landfills in 2022. But it was supposed to have already been diverting 75 percent by 2020, under so-called zero waste goals set in 2015. Gloria’s updated Climate Action Plan says the city should be diverting 90 percent by 2035. So, we’ll see how that goes.  

Then, there’s the enforcement piece of all this. The state is reluctant to fine cities that aren’t complying with the food waste recycling law. And the city of San Diego hasn’t been cracking down on people who fill their green bins with trash.  

I tried to get an end-of-the year update on the green bin program from the Environmental Services Department, but the department declined my request for an interview with its leader, Renee Robertson.  

So all we know is what the city released in October: that San Diego collected 71,318 tons of organic and yard waste since January. I have no datapoint to compare that against. But from the monthly tonnage breakdown on a city factsheet, it looks like organics collection ebbs and flows month-to-month with August being its highest collection month at almost 9,000 tons. That may be due to the summer months producing more yard waste than winter months when collection tonnage dropped to 6,843 tons in November.   

Data from the inaugural year of the green bin roll out will be complete come 2024. I’m looking forward to seeing the data.  

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that organics waste accounts for half of total landfill waste. And that the city of San Diego’s organics recycling program falls under the Environmental Services Department.