It’s easy for politicians to set goals for their cities. It’s far, far harder to achieve them.
Take San Francisco’s much-heralded goal of sending absolutely no garbage to landfills by the year 2020. In a composted nutshell? It’s nowhere near happening.
Back in 2003 when the city’s Commission on the Environment, at the urging of Mayor Willie Brown and the entire Board of Supervisors, set that goal, it was considered achievable.
But 13 years later, and just four years from the goal date, San Francisco continues to throw away huge amounts of garbage. The city’s waste has averaged 1,463 tons every workday over the past year, according to Recology, the city’s trash collector. There’s no penalty for not meeting the target other than, of course, a swelling landfill that’s bad for the environment and a big dent in San Francisco’s reputation as one of the greenest cities in the world.
“We haven’t hit our targets,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, spokesman for the Department of the Environment. He called the zero waste plan a “big, audacious goal” that the city is still trying to meet, but admitted not everybody is doing their part.
“Really, we need our businesses and residents to do a much better job,” he said, pointing out that 50 percent of what San Franciscans put in their black bins could be recycled or composted instead.