Welcome to Food for the Earth
What's Food for the Earth
San José is the 10th largest city in the US with a population of more than one million people. As the population grows, the amount of garbage going into the landfills in San José also increases. It is estimated that the landfills serving San José will reach its capacity by 2030. The solution is not to expand or open new landfills within the city, but to rethink what we have traditionally regarded as garbage and treating all materials as valued resources instead of items to discard. With this in mind, San José embarked on a campaign to become a world-class sustainable city by adopting the Green Vision in 2007. The Green Vision includes an ambitious goal of becoming a Zero Waste city by 2022.
Achieving “Zero Waste” means that we will divert 100% of our waste from the landfills through reduced consumption, reuse of existing products, and recycling of materials. Eliminating waste is no small feat, but San José residents are on target with the current 62% of garbage diverted from landfills. Part of achieving Zero Waste requires us to explore new opportunities and test strategies that improve the efficiencies of capturing reusable resources. A recent waste study shows that residents have tremendous potential to reduce, reuse and recycle their way to zero waste.
Almost half of the waste going to landfills is organic material. Organic material, such as food scraps, coffee grounds, yard trimmings, dirty paper, napkins and plates, is a valuable resource that can be composted into a rich natural fertilizer for our soil instead of taking up space in our landfills. This rich natural fertilizer is Food for the Earth.
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Why Implement the Food for the Earth Pilot Programs?
The City’s residential recycling program, Recycle Plus, is one of the largest privatized systems in the United States and provides garbage and recycling curbside collection services to approximately 205,000 single-family units citywide.
The City must redesign the Recycle Plus Program to achieve the 2022 goal of Zero Waste under the City’s Green Vision. Since the current Recycle Plus contracts will terminate in July 2013, it is critical that the City begin testing potential new program elements immediately. Lessons learned from these pilots will shape future Recycle Plus programs and services.
The amount of yard trimmings, particularly leaves, fluctuate with the seasons. The fall leaf season increases the amount of yard trimming piles collected. Thus, two years of collecting peak season in a cart is necessary in order to provide time to collect data, evaluate results, and design new programs with information learned from the pilot programs. Specifically, the Food for the Earth pilot programs will test new collection and processing methods for food waste and yard trimmings. Pilots yield important information to improve potential programs and to ensure issues are resolved prior to implementation. It is good practice to conduct pilot programs before implementing any major service change to the broader public.
The Food for the Earth Pilot Program will run in selected neighborhoods from November 2009 through August 2011.
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