“Don’t Mess With Texas,” perhaps the most famous state slogan in history, began as an anti-littering campaign. Having grown up in the Lone Star State, I remember a TV ad showing two fighter jets swooping over a highway, presumably about to strafe some guy who tossed a can out of his pickup. Well, turns out San Francisco is about to do Texas one better. Today, the city’s Board of Supervisors made it illegal not only to throw that can out the window, but also in the trash; a new law will require you to recycle it. I can’t wait for the bus ads featuring a gun-packing hippie: Don’t mess with San Francisco.
Of course, San Francisco’s strong recycling norms aren’t unique along the Left Coast, which, as we noted in our recent Waste Issue, takes those curvy green arrows much more seriously than folks in New York. Recycling is already mandatory in San Diego and Seattle, where trash collectors shame offending homeowners by posting notes on their trash bins and leaving them unemptied on the curb. Still, San Francisco might up the ante. SF Weekly notes that its proposed fines for not recycling–$100 to $500–are ten times higher than Seattle’s.
San Francisco is already the least trashy city in America. In May, it announced that it recycles 72 percent of its waste. And most homeowners and more than a fifth of apartment dwellers compost (under the new law, everyone will). Fascinated by how the city where I live achieves such high numbers, I recently began following my garbage. I’ve tracked it from the can at my apartment building to its eventual reincarnation, learning a lot along the way about the obstacles to going “zero waste,” as the city hopes to by 2020. Check back tomorrow for the first installment of this colorful–and stinky–trash saga, which will appear on this site throughout the week.
