Sacramento officials will be snooping through your garbage cans. It could cost you | Opinion
Sometime next year, in the wee hours of the morning, representatives from the city of Sacramento may start peeking into your garbage cans at the curb.
If they find scraps of food or greasy pizza boxes in the waste, you can expect a friendly tag notifying you of a no-no.
The methane emissions at California’s landfills, fueled by the decomposition of organic waste, are a considerable source of greenhouse gas production that is contributing to climate change. That’s why the city is prepared to snoop through your trash.
The California Legislature in 2016 passed Senate Bill 1383, directing local waste haulers to start developing pickup programs that separate food and other green waste into their own bins. That first phase has by and large occurred.
Now comes the next phase: Over the next two years, Sacramento will monitor, educate and remind the public when food ends up in the wrong bin.
Then comes enforcement — which is no joke. Sacramento’s city code allows for a fine up to $5,000, says Waste Compliance Manager Erin Treadwell,
“That will probably never happen,” she said. That such a hefty fine is allowed in the code, however, speaks to the seriousness of this matter.
Consider this the next — and, perhaps, the toughest — phase in readjusting the behavior of Californians when it comes to how we discard our waste. From decades of throwing everything in one can, we then began segregating newspapers and cans and bottles into separate bins. Then we got accustomed to throwing all recyclables into its own giant can, usually blue.
But our food products, from banana peels to soiled napkins to chicken bones, are recyclable as well. In Sacramento, they go into a garden-ready compost. Most of us, however, aren’t accustomed to treating these items as such.
In my kitchen — and in the kitchens of other early adopters — there is typically a modest-sized plastic bin somewhere on the counter. It is lined with a compostable bag. Cucumber skins, carrot tops, skins of chicken thighs and every last scrap of kitchen food waste goes into the bag in the bin.
Leaving a full bag in the green waste can down in the garage, however, particularly in the hot summer months, can create an aroma reminiscent of a rendering plant. My only summer solution is to literally chill my organic garbage in the refrigerator until the night before garbage day. The city even suggests I freeze my food garbage as well.
This is some serious behavior change. And coaxing this kind of change out of millions of Californians is simply not in the core skill set of government.
Yet legislators (and then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who signed the bill at the time) have declared that we change our discarding patterns for the good of the planet. They are right.
This is one of the everyday changes Californians can make to lower greenhouse emissions, without ever leaving the home. And time is of the essence: In California, greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 went up rather than down. That we treat food scraps as garbage for the dump is among the reasons. Californians discard an estimated 6 million tons of food that ends up in landfills.
The implementation strategy varies with each waste hauler. In the case of Sacramento, the city began collecting food waste separately in mid-2022. For some residents, the waste goes in the same large green can for leaves and yard organics. Those who don’t need the yard can get smaller green cans solely for the food’s organic products.
Garbage bills went up as well to fund the service — $11.88 more a month at first, heading up to $19.18 a month when the program is fully phased in with the monitors.
Sacramento currently has no information on what percentage of residents are separating the food from the waste. In my 120-unit downtown housing complex on a recent pickup morning, 79 driveways had no food organic cans outside and 31 did.
The neighborhood experience reflects a statewide trend of poor compliance at the present time. When SB 1383 was passed, its goal was to reduce the tonnage of food waste ending up in landfills by 50% by 2020. Instead, the volume of food waste increased by a ton.
The launch of California’s food recycling initiative has gone so badly that an independent watchdog, the Little Hoover Commission earlier this year recommended a “temporary pause” in the process to emphasize more public education for now.
Treadwell of Sacramento, however, says there is no turning back.
“The train has left the station,” she said. “You can’t turn off a program like this.”
By the time the city starts to monitor compliance next year, many Sacramentans may finally realize they are supposed to recycle food waste — a full eight years after SB 1383 was passed.
Treadwell said staffing and strategy are not fully in place, but the basic idea is to look into a sampling of residential garbage cans going forward to inspect the contents.
“Something along the lines of going and probably selecting a street or two” per morning, she said. Homes that are not placing an organic can street-side will be suspects of interest. So will homes that have leaves, but no food, in the organic waste cans.
“We want to make sure if we’re turning organics into compost, we’re getting the purest material we can,” she said. “The intent of that material is to be used in gardens and to the public.”
What happens to repeat offenders who change their garbage habits?
“It would probably start at a $250 fine, but that ... would be a couple of years (of trying first),” she said.
This would be a whole lot easier if Californians didn’t need all this coaxing to treat all forms of food waste as recyclables. But we do.
We can no longer afford our landfills to be these giant organic stews of our food discards. The planet is warm enough as it is. If we collectively cannot figure out a way to recycle the remnants of a meal just like we recycle an aluminum can, we’re in deep trouble.
This story was originally published November 7, 2023 at 5:00 AM.