RANCHO CORDOVA, CA (MPG) - If you have garbage cans, you should have recently received a green and white bucket due to the new program mandated by SB1383, a California-wide mandate signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in 2016. Rancho Cordova Public Works manager of operations and maintenance Steve Harriman spoke about the effects of this law at the Rancho Cordova July luncheon.

Harriman listed the life cycle of this program in six steps. (1) You have your pail in the house, you scrape your plate, and the contents of your pail goes into the organics container outside. (2) The container is collected. (3) The material from your organics container is transported. (4) The material is sent to a composting facility, ground up, cleaned of contaminants, and generates compost. (5) The compost is used in agricultural operations and grows food. (6) We consume the food, resulting in food scraps and start the cycle over.

“(The bucket) is a visual representation of the huge changes coming,” said Annah Rulon, municipal sales manager for Republic Services. “At the very least, if someone hasn’t heard of the program at all, they’re going to say, ‘What the heck is this?’ And they’re going to start asking questions.”

The program does cost money. “We have, in Rancho Cordova,” Harriman said, “two additional collection drivers, two additional vehicles, a route auditor who is going to be flipping lids in the neighborhoods, customer service and outreach, a kitchen pail which is delivered to each customer, and additional costs for the mixed materials.” Because of the increased costs, Republic Services rates have increased, depending on the size of the container. For the smallest container, 32 gallons, the increase is $4.95 a month, the medium sized, $5.90 a month, and for the large, $7.95 a month.

The bill, introduced in 2016 by Ricardo Lara (D) District 33, now California Insurance Commissioner, requires that California reduce landfill disposal of organic waste by 75% by 2025. “Which basically means,” Harriman said, “that greater than 20 million tons of organic waste has to go somewhere other than the landfill by 2025. These are extremely aggressive goals.”  The bill is a response to the “greenhouse gas” effect noted when organic material goes into a landfill, gets buried and is subject to anaerobic decomposition which releases methane.   

The program is not only about unusable organic waste material. “Quite startling to me, is that we throw away almost 6 million tons a year of edible food in California,” Harriman said. “This is at a time when many Californians, adults and children, are food insecure. A lot of wonderful, edible food ends up getting thrown away.”  Establishing an edible food recovery program is required as well. Carrie Johnson, director of the Cordova Food Locker, will be working with the City on that.”

There have been assorted reactions to the program, but Peter Lane, mixed media teacher at Mitchell Middle School and resident of Rancho Cordova, has started on the program and loves it. “I love the idea behind it,” Lane said. “I’m curious to see how it’s being implemented on a global scale, and how that will roll over to, let’s say, a school, and . . . how we’re going to separate our food that way.”

Here are a few questions by those attending the luncheon, with answers by Harriman that may be abbreviated because of space considerations.

Question:  What are some of the biggest hurdles you might encounter with this program? Answer: The hurdles are many. On the one hand we have the legislature saying, ‘You must divert this material from the landfill and process it,’ and then we have a regulatory and environmental review framework in California that makes it incredibly difficult to site and permit and operate these facilities. Education is a major hurdle, helping people to understand. Question:  What happens to people who are not compliant?  Answer: 30 days. (laughter) It does require some sort of enforcement mechanism . . . I think it’s going to be a while before we get to the point where we’re actually using our code enforcement. Our first step is really to educate and help people out. Question:  I can see many benefits in the overall program here, but what is the actual end game here?  Is this all about climate change?  Answer:  For the legislature, yes.

Harrison emphasized education and outreach to the community and praised public information officers Maria Kniestedt and Danielle Hale for their work together with himself and Republic Services.

“Trash has become really complicated,” said Harriman, “and if people don’t understand it, it’s just not going to work.” For questions, please contact Steve Harriman, 916-851-8716, [email protected].