SD’s Food Waste Program

Photo by Tom Fisk

Early this year, San Diego missed the state deadline to begin collecting food waste from homes and apartments. This program once made headlines, but now has conspicuously faded into the background of our local news. New progress, however, has brought the plan of action back into the public eye. Below I breakdown the program’s goals, as well as how it plans to achieve them, and when the program is set to begin.

The objective of the program is simple: to reduce food waste in landfills in order to cut down on the harmful greenhouse gases that are subsequently released. San Diego plans to provide residents with organic waste bins and food waste kitchen pails. They also plan to expand weekly yard waste and organics collection services to eligible households.

In order to go through with this plan, and handle all the new waste, the city plans to build a $50 million organics recycling facility at the Miramar landfill, which would add capacity beyond its current (smaller) composting facility. In addition, they have signed a $51 million contract for 43 waste collection trucks (August 2021), and plan on using this same contract to order 55 new trucks, scheduled to arrive mid-winter of this year. The city has also been working on hiring 43 new sanitation workers to drive the trucks and collect the organic waste, all set to be hired and trained before the roll-out of the program. The city has signed a contract for thousands of new green kitchen-pails and more organic waste carts for the curb, which are set to arrive alongside the trucks.

This is all of the information the public has at this time, and city staff has announced that there will be more announcements made in October. Finally, the roll-out deadline has been officially set for January 2023— a great way to start the new year.