Of course, the city isn’t satisfied with a landfill diversion rate of 80 percent: Its goal is zero waste—that means absolutely nothing going to the dump or the incinerator—by 2020. To close the garbage gap, City Hall is busy experimenting: It has deployed a pair of outreach workers to go door-to-door educating residents on blue and green bin sorting; it recently installed water bottle–refilling stations along the Embarcadero; and it’s piloting a pharmaceutical take-back program at pharmacies and police stations. “If everyone simply used our current programs correctly, we could be diverting about 90 percent of our landfill waste,” says Robert Haley, the city’s Zero Waste manager.
But officials stress that the city can only do so much to accomplish its waste goals: The real heavy lifting will have to come from average residents (like the very un-average Barneby family, whose story of waste-free living you can find below). Haley believes that it’s not just about keeping waste from the landfill, but also about keeping waste from becoming waste in the first place. “What we see at the consumer level is just the tip of the wasteberg,” he says (and yes—he really did use the term “wasteberg”). “What people buy really matters. It’s about the highest and best use of materials, and reducing and reusing what we have. It’s about individual responsibility.”
Read More:
The Family That Wastes Not
A Year of Living Trashlessly
Follow That Compost!
Zero Waste All-Stars
How To Zero-Waste Your Own Life
Originally published in the April 2013 issue of San Francisco.
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