Touring San Francisco's Waste Facilities

10 Jan, 2025

Yesterday I visited Recology’s trash and recycling facilities in San Francisco, as part of their monthly tour open to the public.

The tour started with a short presentation before we walked to the transfer facility. The transfer facility is the first stop for all trash, recycling, and compost. The highlight was the football-field sized pit which is filled with trash each day, before being emptied and transported to a landfill outside the city. The pit was nearly full the morning I visited, although I was told it was unusually high due to increased holiday trash.

Next we visited Recycle Central at Pier 96. This was the most interesting part of the tour, since it’s where all recycling gets sorted and bundled into large blocks that are sold to manufacturers. The recycling weaved through the facility along large conveyor belts, passing a series of sorting mechanisms that included humans, magnets, compressed air, optical scanners, and AI robots. The robotic arms that sorted items one-by-one were particularly impressive – our guide told us they use a giant database of consumer products to determine what belongs where.

SF's Recycling Central facility, with bales of sorted recycling on the right

My biggest takeaway from the tour: people are bad at recycling and composting. ~50% of landfill-bound trash in San Francisco could have been recycled or composted. It’s common to see soft plastics (e.g. plastic bags) and mixed materials (e.g. toothpaste tubes) in recycling bins even though they aren’t accepted curbside. I can guarantee you’ll find plastic takeout containers, cutlery and bags in any public compost bin. At best, this reduces the effectiveness of the program, and at worst it’s introducing contaminants into our soil, and by extension, food supply. (I didn’t visit Recology’s composting facilities, so I can’t comment on how robust their contamination filtering process is).

I don’t think S.F. residents deserve the blame for this. My husband recently bought toothpaste that has “Recycle Ready” printed prominently on the tube¹ even though toothpaste tubes aren’t accepted curbside. The identification labels on plastic bags look suspiciously like the recycling symbol. Combine that with differing recycling standards across municipalities, and it’s no wonder that people don’t know what goes where.

Piles of unsorted recycling

One-off virtue signaling (e.g. plastic straw bans) isn’t going to make much of a difference. The only solution is much stricter regulation, ideally at the federal or international level:

1. Consumer items should feature standardized, regulated labels that indicate if a product is either recyclable or compostable
2. Recycling standards must be uniform across the country
3. All single-use products, with limited exceptions, should qualify for curbside recycling or composting

We need to make it ridiculously simple to know what goes where.

In the meantime, I would encourage everyone to visit their local waste facilities if they can. Not only is it fascinating to see the industrial machinery², but I think most would find the experience to be illuminating and educational.