What You Need to Know About California’s New Composting Law — A Game Changer for Food Waste
27th December 2021
Californians will ring in the new year with the unfurling of a groundbreaking law that will change how they dispose of their organic waste, particularly leftover food and kitchen scraps.
Senate Bill 1383 requires all residents and businesses to separate such “green” waste from other trash, but the program will be rolled out gradually for homes and businesses in the coming months, with the actual startup date varying, depending on the location of your home or business.
Fines can be levied for failing to separate organic refuse from other trash. But those charges aren’t scheduled to begin until 2024. CalRecycle, the state agency overseeing the change, has lots of information about the new requirements on its website.
Time to leave.
December 28th, 2021 at 13:58
I worked on a project that was proposed for Pittsburgh back in the early ’90’s. There’s a Swedish technology for separating solids on a vibrating table. Picture it with holes in it. Light (flammable) stuff floats to one side, heavy (metals, glass, etc.) to the other side, and fine materials like food waste and sawdust falls through. In that project, garbage trucks would come to the site and dump their loads. The material would be chopped up and separated. Stuff that would burn would be sent to a boiler to produce steam and thus produce electricity to sell. The organic stuff would be used for compost. The remaining stuff – about 10% of the original – would go to landfill. The company setting up the operation would make most of their money on the tipping fees. Once all the kinks were worked out, the waste company would buy them out. The location was a heavily contaminated former steel mill, effectively making it a brownfield site.
Why wasn’t it built? The state regulators were afraid to issue permits as an independent power producer, instead opting for the much more restrictive incinerator rules. Months of permit work would turn into perhaps decades of work.