It’s a sustainability success story: San Francisco food scraps help fertilize Northern California grapes, which are used to make wine of which many Americans partake.
It began in 1996, when San Francisco piloted a composting program by collecting food scraps from some restaurants and bars. Now the city collects from more than 1,800 restaurants and food-related businesses, and from residents, too. In total, the city picks up 300 tons of food waste per day, which is used to make high-quality organic compost. San Francisco then sells the compost to more than 200 Northern California vineyards, including many in Napa, Sonoma, El Dorado and Mendocino counties. City residents can also apparently pick up 5 to 10 gallons of the finished compost each year, for free.
“We provide the largest and most advanced urban compost collection program in the country,” wrote Robert Reed in an e-mail to me. He’s public relations manager for Sunset Scavenger Company, one of San Fran’s recycling firms.
They’ve created an almost perfect sustainable loop: Taking waste that would normally be thrown away, turning it into valuable compost, selling that to grape growers, whose grapes get turned into wine sold in San Francisco restaurants.
Kate Krebs, executive director of the National Recycling Coalition, told me that the compost also gets sold to organic farmers — and they’ve seen their crop yields triple compared to when they used chemical fertilizers.
Reed mentioned that compost returns carbon and nutrients to the soil. Sounds like it helps address climate change, too.
Dozens of cities are replicating this program — Portland and Seattle among them — and many universities are doing it as well. Massachusetts is starting its composting program with grocers, said Krebs, because they generate a lot of food waste. “Food waste is kind of the new frontier, after we address recycling,” she said.
Maybe your state, city or college can move into this new frontier as well.
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San Francisco appears to be on the cutting edge of recycling and sustainability in many ways. The city’s garbage and recycling collection companies now have more recycling trucks than garbage trucks — 174 to 147 — and all the trucks run on alternative fuel instead of diesel. Awesome!
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