Category: General News

As a waste educator in California, one question we hear frequently, especially from curious students, is deceptively simple: “Why don’t we just burn our trash?” At face value, it’s a simple, solution-based question, but it’s one that deserves a thoughtful answer with historical context in California.

In the waste industry; however, no topic is as contentious and politically charged due to the harm caused by incinerators in the state. As our world adapts to new waste streams, and technology advances, incineration to energy deserves a historic and geographic review as we continue to navigate California’s waste trends, energy and land challenges for the years to come.

A Burning History

California’s relationship with waste incineration has evolved significantly over time. In the early-to-mid 20th century, small-scale incinerators were common in urban areas, seen as simple means of disposal that limited trash heaps from accumulating. However, as we learned that burning waste was contributing to air pollution, California began shifting away from incineration (CalEPA’s History of Environmental Excellence | CalEPA).

The 1970 Clean Air Act marked a turning point, establishing federal standards for air quality. Through the California Air Resources Board (CARB), established in 1967 as the first agency of its kind in the nation, California implemented even stricter regulations. CARB’s pioneering research and standards gradually led to the closure of most waste incinerators across the state. By the 1990s, only a handful of waste-to-energy facilities remained operational in California. By the end of 2024, the last two remaining solid waste incinerators were shut down.

The Environmental Justice Awakening

One of the initial compelling reasons for California’s shift away from incinerating waste comes from the stark disproportionate negative health impact on low-income communities. Studies documented how waste facilities, including incinerators, were disproportionately located in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, namely the United Church of Christ’s study: Racial and Socioeconomic Disparities in the Distribution of  Environmental Hazards, which was one of the first studies to address the prevalence of dioxins in low-income neighborhoods.

In California, this pattern was unmistakable. Research by the Environmental Protection Agency consistently found that incinerator emissions —which include particulate matter, dioxins, furans, and heavy metals like mercury and lead— contributed to higher rates of respiratory diseases, cardiovascular problems, and certain cancers in surrounding communities.

Environmental justice advocates have worked toward shifting policy for equitable waste management approaches, which has sparked community-led movements over the years that successfully shut down California incinerators and helped shift state-wide policy toward more equitable waste management approaches.

Why Landfills?

Looking Abroad: Different Approaches

Many countries who are seen as environmental leaders have taken different approaches when it comes to waste management. Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Japan have invested heavily in modern waste-to-energy facilities with advanced pollution controls (European Environment Agency). These countries lack land space for landfilling, creating a necessity to invent a safe incineration process that would not cause adverse health effects from pollution.

In Sweden, waste-to-energy plants provide heating for about 1.2 million households and electricity for another 800,000. Japanese facilities utilize sophisticated filtering technologies that dramatically reduce emissions compared to older incinerators. These countries have integrated waste-to-energy into comprehensive waste management systems that prioritize recycling and waste reduction first.

These international examples raise an important question: Could California adopt similar particulate filtering technologies while addressing environmental justice concerns? As our state faces growing electricity demands— particularly with the expansion of electric cars, devices, artificial intelligence and data centers that require enormous energy inputs, could waste-to-energy play a role in diversifying energy resources?

California’s Current Focus

California’s current focus is on zero-waste initiatives, enhancing recycling and composting programs, and landfill methane capture. California’s approach prioritizes waste reduction and the protection of vulnerable communities over possible energy recovery from waste.

What’s clear is that there are no simple solutions to our waste challenges. As we work toward a more sustainable future, we must balance social equity, environmental protection, and practical needs.

How To Get Involved

Learn about your local waste agency–RethinkWaste, attend public board meetings and share your thoughts with elected representatives. Look to your community for volunteer opportunities to work within environmental justice, and advocate for a sustainable future, with less waste and more reusing and recycling.

RethinkWaste offers several different in-school education programs for schools in our service area to reduce their landfill waste. Our program provides all necessary infrastructure to implement recycling and composting at schools, as well as, educating students on how to properly sort their waste into the new bin system. In addition, we offer presentations that teach students the connection between waste and climate change and how their sorting choices can impact the environment’s health. We offer school-wide assemblies, lunch bin monitoring, new infrastructure, class presentations, and green team trainings. Let’s dive into the menu of the program we offer to schools and what they entail.

Full In-Schools Program

RethinkWaste’s full school program includes a site visit, new infrastructure, school-wide assemblies, and lunch bin monitoring. These parts take over the course of one school week with a site visit performed beforehand. The first step of the in-schools program is the site visit. A member of our Environmental Education team will go out to the school to assess what bins (compost and recycling or both!) and other waste-related infrastructure that are needed, and then will deliver the necessary infrastructure to the school. After the site visit, the education of proper sorting will begin when all the new bins are placed next to the existing landfill bins.

Our team then presents several school-wide assemblies for different grade levels to teach the students how to properly sort their lunch waste into the three bins (compost, recycling, and landfill). Assemblies include showing proper sorting using example items, explaining the connection between waste and climate change, and showing more steps students can take to improve the planet’s health. After the assemblies, students will usually have their lunch and get a chance to put into action what they just learned about sorting!

Typically, most of the waste created by students at school is created during lunchtime. Since most of the time students go from throwing all their waste into one landfill bin to now sorting it into three bins, RethinkWaste’s Environmental Education team members are present at the bin stations around the cafeteria to help students sort their waste properly as well as answer any of their questions about sorting. RethinkWaste team members typically lunch bin monitor every day at lunch during the week the new bins are introduced.

RethinkWaste is committed to helping school communities understand their agency in reducing waste and how small sorting actions can spur big environmental change. We believe schools play an integral part to reduce the waste in our service area and want to empower them to do that in any way we can!

California has paved the way in the modern world through its cutting-edge technology and rich cultural diversity. However, throughout its history, it has faced its fair share of waste management difficulties. The interesting journey of California’s waste story tells the state’s growth, struggles, and ultimate commitment to overall sustainability. How did California get to the green state that it is today?

During the Gold Rush, miners would often leave a trail of broken mining equipment and dangerous chemicals as they worked to extract gold from rivers and streams using simple tools and pans. While the Gold Rush increased California’s popularity and wealth, it also brought up the state’s first waste management issues.

Waste management became a growing problem as California’s cities grew during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As landfills grew and waste disposal practices became increasingly inconsistent and unsuccessful, environmental issues and public health risks appeared. Because early waste collection systems relied on horses and wagons, they contributed to pollution and unsanitary conditions.

Like the rest of the country, California started to create more organized waste management systems in the middle of the 20th century. The increasing use of automobiles led to advancements in garbage collection efficiency and the spread of the recycling movement. To lessen their negative effects on the environment, landfills and incinerator plants were given more regulations.

Recology Inc., previously known as Sunset Scavenger Company, utilized the iconic horse and wagon collection technique throughout the early 1920’s throughout California’s San Francisco neighborhoods. In later years, they utilized “open trucks.” Open trucks worked by collection workers picking up tiny garbage cans using a hook that hung off the shoulder, filled a larger aluminum 75-gallon container, and carried the full load to the garbage truck. The bags were then dumped and items like cardboard, bottles, rags, and newspapers were recovered for recycling. The garbage was then compacted in the vehicle by the workers jumping on it.

Images Courtesy of Leonard Stefanelli: Everything You Wanted to Know About “Garbage” but Were Afraid to Ask From The Argonaut – San Francisco Historical Society

A major turning point in California’s garbage history occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in 1970 because of the environmental movement. These changes led to an increased concern for environmental protection and an impact on California’s waste management rules.

Did you know that the plastic material that make up car tires and plastic cutting boards wears off? These tiny plastic particles, or microplastics, shed and enter the environment. For example, from your tire, rainwater washes tire microparticles from the street, into the storm drains, and out to the ocean. Those microplastics then end up in the seafood we consume. You may also ingest the cutting board microplastics with the food you cut up, or you may wash them down the drain and they’ll eventually enter the sewer system. After treatment, microparticle-rich sewage sludge is applied as fertilizer to agricultural land, where it comes into contact with crops and disrupts terrestrial eco-systems maintaining the fertility of the soil.

Studies of the effects of microplastics on living organisms, including humans, have emerged in recent years, but the growth of this knowledge is in its infancy. More data is needed to define the full scope of the problem and guide the development of protective measures. Unlike other waste, plastic will never fully degrade. It will only break down into smaller and smaller particles that will continue to permeate our environment indefinitely. The more plastic we use in our everyday lives, the more we add to the pollution, change our landscape, and affect the life existing within it.

In 2022, scientists first confirmed that plastic particles were detectable in the blood of donors from the general public. This means that the microplastics we internalize through ingestion, or otherwise, are not all cleared from the body, but remain in the blood available for uptake by cells and tissues of the organs. According to the same study, one of the more populous particles found floating in the blood samples was styrene. The National Toxicology Program listed styrene as “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen” in its 2011 annual Report on Carcinogens. In 2016, styrene was added to the well-known Prop 65 list of chemicals known to the state to cause cancer.

Microplastics have spread throughout our environment and into our bodies, and we know that they have the potential to cause harm. What we have yet to do is connect all the dots and discover just how deeply the degradation of the 8,300 megatons of plastic produced since WWII will affect us and our planet. The 10% of plastic that is recycled globally will also eventually end up discarded, since plastic cannot be infinitely recycled.

You might be wondering why the recycling rate for plastic is so low. While you may put great effort into collecting all your plastic containers in the blue bin, the reality is that the collection of those items does not guarantee their recycling. Waste management agencies, like RethinkWaste, SORT the items from the bins, but downstream of that there needs to be companies interested in buying the materials for remanufacturing purposes. Depending on the state of the economy, this interest will fluctuate. In the RethinkWaste service area today, plastic #1-7 is collected, but we are only able to sell #1-2 containers. The rest of the plastic materials will go to landfill, until the markets shift.

As individuals, we can do our part to mitigate the current limitations by refusing, reducing, and reusing plastic products as well as supporting legislation that aims to regulate the full plastics lifecycle with its production from fossil fuels, its use by consumers and business, and finally, its disposal. As a consumer, we also have the power of choice:

• Take a train, bus or carpool to minimize tire tread microparticles on the streets;
• Use natural products like wooden cutting boards and cooking spoons to minimize the amount of microparticles washed down the drain;
• Wear clothes made of cotton, wool, or silk, rather than synthetics, like polyester, nylon, and acrylic to further minimize the microparticles entering our water supply;
• Purchase products in glass or metal over plastic containers, since, unlike plastic, glass and metal are infinitely recyclable.

Help stop the spread of microplastics everywhere! Advocate for yourself and your environment by NOT choosing plastic.

The California Resource Recovery Association (CRRA) recognized RethinkWaste’s Environmental Education (EE) Team at its annual conference in Burlingame on August 14, 2023 as the recipient of the 2023 Outstanding School Recycling Program.

This award honors a school or an entity partnered with schools that have excelled in implementing programs and practices that promote waste reduction, reuse, recycling and/or compost at school campuses.

In 2022, RethinkWaste’s EE Team implemented a mixture of both on-site and virtual instruction after developing a variety of new materials for hybrid learning. Staff conducted 99 online and in-person assemblies and presentations, accounting for about 103 hours of instruction. Specifically, the EE Team focused on providing tools for educators, emphasizing refresher waste education and continued environmental education even in the physical absence of RethinkWaste staff. The EE Team also complimented virtual offerings with in-person campus visits and custodial trainings when possible.

The EE Team launched the full RethinkWaste In-Schools Program at new schools and engaged with previously participating schools, reaching a total of 19 campuses in the agency’s service area. Staff also provided adult-focused education to school staff, administrators and parents. In total, the RethinkWaste EE Team connected with approximately 5,680 students spread across eight of its 11 Member Agencies: Burlingame, Belmont, East Palo Alto, Foster City, Menlo Park, Redwood City, San Mateo, and San Carlos.

We extend a warm thank you to CRRA, our community and organizational partners, schools, students, custodians, Green Champions, and our own amazing Environmental Education Team for everyone’s joint efforts to support schools in their waste journeys!

Bioplastics are quite the hot topic these days. From plastic cups with a green stripe around the base to utensils that proclaim they are 100% compostable, is it all too good to be true? The plastics industry is notorious for employing tactics such as misleading labels and mastering the art of greenwashing in order to make their product more appealing to eco-conscious customers. But what are bioplastics exactly and why are they such a source of controversy?  

Bioplastics can serve as a catch-all term for a few different types of materials. Bioplastics are often made at least in part of some form of organic material; however, they only need to be composed of 20% bio-based material to qualify as a bioplastic. Biodegradable plastics are plastics that can be broken down in nature, in water, or by various organisms. Sometimes even petroleum-based plastics can qualify as ‘degradable’ if certain organisms such as bacteria can break them down. Compostable plastics are plastics made of 100% organic material that are, in theory, supposed to break down in an industrial compost facility along with the food scraps and yard trimmings to form finished compost to be used on crops or gardens.  

Unfortunately, this does not mean any of these materials will break down in a landfill or in an industrial composting facility. Landfills lack the required exposure to air and sun for organic material to break down. Organic material in the landfill, including bio-based plastics, releases methane – a harmful greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. So-called ‘compostable’ plastics often don’t break down in industrial composting facilities because they either don’t meet the required heat threshold or time period for them to break down into finished compost. Therefore, as a general rule in the RethinkWaste service area, we only accept BPI-certified compostable bags in the green compost bin. Hard compostable plastics need to be landfilled because they don’t break down during the 60-120 day period at the industrial composting facilities we send our material to. Additionally, many countries around the world, particularly developing nations where plastic pollution is an even greater problem, don’t have the infrastructure for industrial composting facilities. This means that compostable plastics are not yet a global solution to the prevalence and pollution of plastic products.  

An additional consideration regarding the production of bioplastics is that the product must come from organic material. The most used bioplastics are polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA) and polylactic acid (PLA). PHA is typically composed of sugars grown from algae or produced by microorganisms. PLA, the cheaper and more prevalent of the two, is composed of sugars from corn and sugarcane. Growing these crops for the purpose of making bioplastics requires more land for agriculture that could otherwise be used to grow food for Earth’s growing population.  

Another important consideration in the bioplastic debate is how to dispose of these single-use products on a large scale. Despite the impressive advancements in technology that allow manufacturers to create products out of organic material, the burden is still on the consumer to figure out how to dispose of the product. Thankfully, the implementation of extended producer responsibility laws for plastics are being put into place in California, which mandates manufacturers to take responsibility for the lifecycle of their products, from design to their end-of-life.

Though there are drawbacks to bioplastics, there are positives as well. First, organic material is renewable as opposed to the oil used to produce traditional plastics. Bioplastics also don’t contain BPA and won’t leach toxic chemicals into food or soil therefore causing disease or harming the environment like traditional plastics. From production to breaking down, bioplastics produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than traditional plastics as well.  

In summary, bioplastics are not a magic solution to the world’s plastic problem. Bioplastic production can use up valuable natural resources that could otherwise be used to grow food, they often don’t break down in industrial composting facilities, and they place a burden on the consumer to determine how to dispose of them properly. While there are promising developments in the field, such as creating bioplastics from wastewater or food scraps, avoiding plastics altogether is the most conducive way to reduce your waste.  

Many cities in San Mateo County have passed a Disposable Food Service Ware Ordinance, which requires a transition to fiber-based foodware products in restaurants; a step in the right direction for ensuring that single-use foodware is actually compostable. Purchasing products wrapped in paper or fiber (which can be composted), using reusables, and refusing plastics whenever possible are the best way to reduce your plastic consumption, at least until bioplastics have fewer negative environmental impacts and can be reliably composted. 

Sources:  

https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/12/13/the-truth-about-bioplastics/

https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-bioplastics-will-not-solve-the-worlds-plastics-problem

https://greenhome.co.za/blog/the-pros-and-cons-of-bioplastics/

Today, Governor Newsom signed a sweeping package of climate measures into law, including all three of RethinkWaste’s co-sponsored bills from the 2021-2022 legislation session. The three bills are:

• AB 1985 by Assemblymember Robert Rivas (D-Salinas) – Organic waste: recovered organic waste product procurement targets.   
• AB 2440 by Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin (D-Thousand Oaks) – Responsible Battery Recycling Act of 2022.          
• SB 1215 by Senator Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) – Electronic Waste Recycling Act of 2003: covered battery-embedded products.            

AB 1985 will create a phase in of two additional years for SB 1383 procurement requirements.  SB 1215 and AB 2440 are two battery bills that will create a more comprehensive strategy to tackle household batteries and battery-embedded products. Specifically, SB 1215 expands the existing Electronic Waste Law to include battery-embedded products, while AB 2440 will create a producer responsibility program for loose batteries where manufacturers will fund and create a takeback program for their products. 

These three bills are major wins for California and we’re really excited about the signing of these three bills, especially the two battery bills – an issue RethinkWaste has been working on for over three years.

Learn more about proper battery disposal in our area by visiting our battery page: RethinkBatteries.org.