San Francisco’s Safe Medicine Disposal program is starting up.

For years, we’ve had to wonder what to do with expired and unwanted drugs. We know we shouldn’t put these hazardous wastes in the trash to end up in landfill, poisoning the earth for the foreseeable future. You shouldn’t flush them down the toilet, where they will poison the Bay or ocean. And you don’t want to leave them around the house, where they could end up poisoning someone in your household. They have to be disposed of eventually, but is there a safe and easy way to do this? Now there is.

Last year hundreds of Club members and other concerned San Francisco residents wrote letters supporting the safer disposal of left-over pharmaceuticals. This flurry of grassroots activism stopped the big pharmaceutical lobbyists from killing an ordinance that mandates cradle-to-grave responsibility by drug manufacturers.

Nearly a year after its enactment at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the Safe Drug Disposal program will enable residents safely to dispose of old medicines, both prescription and over-the-counter.

This is a pilot program being funded by good-steward pharmaceutical companies. The success of this program will indicate whether companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals will be responsible for managing this type of the program into the future.

So take advantage of it, and show that given the option, residents will make the ecological choice.

For details and drop-off locations of the San Francisco program, go to http://sfenvironment.org/article/toxic-products-recycling/disposal-for-residents-safer-practices/safe-medicine-disposal.

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on a safe-drug-disposal ordinance in June.

For a directory of Bay Area sites for safe medicine disposal, see http://www.savesfbay.org/pharmaceutical-disposal-sites.

For more about the concerns of safe medicine disposal, go to http://sanfranciscobay.sierraclub.org/safe-drug-disposal.htm.

Separating compostables is easy, neat, and effective.

Oakland is designing a new “Zero Waste” collection system to be implemented in 2015. The proposal has many excellent points, but it still needs some improvements.

Under the current proposal, single-family residences would continue to put out separate carts for recyclables, compostables, and garbage. Multifamily buildings, however, would receive pick-ups just for recycling and garbage, with compostables mixed in the garbage. This mixed garbage would be processed at a mixed-materials processing facility, which would try to sort out the compostables from the items going to landfill. Multi-family buildings could get separate pick-ups of compostables for an extra charge–paying a penalty for the opportunity to dispose of their waste responsibly.

This distinction is wrong–both for the environment and for the people. Compost derived from mixed garbage is contaminated and can’t be used for farms and food crops. Further, treating apartment-dwellers as second-class residents, unable to learn to distinguish between compostables and trash, is insulting to them, and leaves them out of the city’s efforts to achieve Zero Waste.

WhatYouCanDo

On Jan. 10 the Oakland City Council’s Public Works Committee will consider this proposal. Contact the committee members at:

Chair: Nancy Nadel
nnadel@oaklandnet.com
(510)238-7003

Rebecca Kaplan
atlarge@oaklandnet.com
(510)238-7008

Council President Larry Reid
lreid@oaklandnet.com
(510)238-7007

Libby Schaaf
lschaaf@oaklandnet.com
(510)238-7004.

Urge them to provide equal garbage-collection services for multifamily-residences, with no composting of mixed garbage.

Recycled Food Container

After a two-year battle, on Oct. 3 San Leandro enacted a ban on distribution of food-packaging containers made of polystyrene foam, joining such Alameda County cities as Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Fremont, Hayward, and Oakland.

Polystyrene foam, better-known by the brand name “Styrofoam”, is not readily recyclable, especially when it has food on it. It ends up as litter or goes in the landfill. In the worst case, particularly in shoreline communities like San Leandro, polystyrene foam ends up polluting San Francisco Bay and then the Pacific Ocean in the form of small particles (leading to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”).

The effort for the San Leandro ban was led by Club-endorsed Councilmember Jim Prola, and supported by the Club’s Northern Alameda County Group. Although the ban won’t take place till Nov. 1, 2012, (a compromise to get the needed votes), Prola suspects that many businesses will switch much sooner when their inventory of polystyrene-foam containers runs out.

The San Leandro City Council will be considering a ban on Polystyrene, better known by the brand name Styrofoam. Polystyrene is bad news. It is not readily recyclable, especially when it has food on it. It just ends up as litter or goes in the landfill. In the worst case, particularly in coastal communities like San Leandro, Styrofoam ends up polluting the San Francisco Bay and eventually the Pacific Ocean. The Sierra Club is supporting this ban. Similar bans have already taken effect in Alameda, Albany, Berkeley, Emeryville, Fremont, and Oakland.

WhatYouCanDo

Come show the San Leandro City Council your support for the ban! Speak up!

September 19th at 7pm.
San Leandro Civic Center, 835 East 14th Street, San Leandro, CA (map)

If you cannot make it please email the City Clerk at mhanda@sanleandro.org and ask her to submit your public comment in support of the ban to the City Council.

Photo by Maeve Murphy, Green Sangha.

StopWaste.Org (the Alameda County Waste Management Authority and Recycling Board operating as one public agency) is preparing an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) that will consider two specific initiatives for Alameda County: mandatory recycling and a single-use bag ban. The initiatives aim to decrease disposal of resources in landfills, decrease the amount of valuable resources used to produce single-use bags, and significantly reduce the quantity of plastic bags in the urban environment and local waterways.

Mandatory recycling

StopWaste.Org adopted a 10-year strategic work plan in July 2010 that includes a new discard objective that not more than 10% of all readily recoverable materials be deposited in landfills. To help achieve this goal, the agency is proposing that an ordinance be adopted to make recycling (including food scraps and other organics) mandatory in Alameda County.

Businesses and residents would be required to separate readily recyclable and compostable materials from other discards before placing them out for collection. Waste collectors would be required to deliver the separately collected recyclable and compostable materials to processing facilities that would prepare them to be made into new products by recyclers. Landfills in the county may be prohibited or restricted from receiving loads for disposal that contain significant amounts of designated recyclables and compostables.

Single-use-bag reduction

StopWaste.Org is also proposing an ordinance that would prohibit the distribution of single-use carryout paper and plastic bags at the point of sale (i.e. check-out) for all commercial retail businesses in Alameda County. An exception would be made for “green” paper bags containing a specified minimum percentage of recycled content, which can only be provided to customers for a nominal fee to cover the cost to the business of providing the bags.

The ordinance would not apply to plastic or paper bags that are used by customers or the store to protect or contain meat, fresh produce, food prepared at the establishment, or other goods that must be protected from moisture, damage, or contamination, and that are typically placed inside a carryout bag at the point of sale. Restaurants, take-out food establishments, or any other businesses that receive 90% or more of their revenue from the sale of food cooked or otherwise prepared at the establishment would be exempt from the ordinance, as would non-profit re-use vendors.

Addressing probable environmental effects

The EIR is expected to address environmental effects from the ordinances on land use, transportation, noise, air quality, public services, hazards and hazardous materials, biological resources, utilities and services, energy, and greenhouse gases.

For more information visit: www.StopWaste.Org or contact project manager Debra Kaufman at (510)891-6500.

StopWaste.Org

San Francisco could become the first city in the nation to prohibit the mass over-distribution of unwanted yellow-pages phone books. Board President David Chiu has authored legislation that would stop unwanted yellow-pages phone books from being left on neighborhood sidewalks. The law is not a ban—it simply requires that companies get some form of consent before leaving yellow-pages phone books unattended.

San Francisco receives an astonishing 1.6 million yellow-pages phone books every year, piled in doorways and left unwanted on sidewalks, representing seven million pounds of paper waste each year. Each phone book weighs 4 – 5 pounds. This is roughly two yellow pages for every man, woman, and child in the city—every year!

Why so many phone books? When a potential advertiser asks for an ad in the yellow pages, the price of the ads is justified by the inflated circulation numbers.

The industry would have us believe that yellow-pages phone books fill an insatiable free-speech appetite. In fact, every year separate competing distributors give us multiple copies of virtually the same phone book.

I received my third yellow pages of the year recently—on garbage night. Knowing that my neighbors had also received them, I took the opportunity to look inside their garbage and recycling bins that evening. Out of 15 bins I found and recovered nine untouched, unopened, newly delivered 2011 yellow-pages phone books.

San Francisco’s apartment buildings receive dozens upon dozens of unwanted yellow pages. The managers find them dumped in their lobbies and doorways two times a year. At a hearing on the issue at City Hall, San Francisco apartment-building managers testified that most of their residents don’t take the books, and the managers have to throw them away.

The legislation and pilot program being proposed by Board President David Chiu is aimed at stopping this waste and getting these phone books into the hands of real users, not imaginary ones.

As a city committed to being a national role model of zero waste and climate change, we have to cut our waste—and ask responsible businesses to do the same. Per capita, Americans produce more CO2 emissions than any other people on earth. According to the city, this legislation would be San Francisco’s biggest contribution to reducing our climate footprint in the last several years.

Stanford climate change expert Dr. Michael Wara, who examined both the legal and climate-change aspects of this legislation in light of the need to reduce our carbon footprint, writes, “We can afford to leave no stone unturned in this effort. . . . The Yellow Pages Distribution Pilot Program represents exactly the kind of careful, detailed policymaking that is necessary in every sector of our economy to address the enormous challenge of global climate change.”

WhatYouCanDo

Help the Bay Area lead the nation in environmental policy. To win we need you to urge key yes votes from:

Supervisor David Campos
David.Campos@sfgov.org
(415)554-5144

Supervisor John Avalos
John.avalos@sfgov.org
(415)554 -6976

Supervisor Sean Elsbernd
Sean.Elsbernd@sfgov.org
(415)554-6516

Urge them to support legislation to rein in the yellow-pages industry.

Dave Grenell

Dave Grenell is a former aide to Matt Gonzalez and Mayor Jerry Brown. He has worked on environmental policy in San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond.

Five million tons of garbage can make a big environmental difference, and that’s why the Sierra Club has asked the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to reconsider its next garbage-hauling contract. (This is not the pick-up of garbage by compactor trucks all over the city, but the hauling of garbage from the city transfer station to its final landfill.)

In 1948 San Francisco began sending its garbage to Sunnyvale, leaving the piles that now underlie the Shoreline Amphitheatre. In 1978 it contracted with the old Oakland Scavenger (now Waste Management of Alameda County) to take 15 million tons of garbage (that’s the equivalent of 6,000 miles of sea containers laid-end-to end) to the Altamont Landfill in eastern Alameda County. In 2006, with that deal running down (now projected to be completed in 2015), the city re-advertised its need, but this time, counting on reaching zero waste by 2020, for only five million tons, and got two proposals: one from Recology, the same company that does the city’s local garbage pick-up, to haul the garbage by rail to a landfill in Yuba County, and another from Waste Management, America’s largest waste company and current owner of the Altamont Landfill. The Waste Management bid was considerably higher, and the technical review committee recommended going with Recology. Questions have been raised, however, about the fairness of the bidding process and the thoroughness of the evaluation.

On Feb. 8 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee listened to 3-1/2 hours of testimony and postponed its decision until mid-April. The Sierra Club Bay Chapter has asked the Board to redo its bidding process on the contract because too many important questions have not been answered.

• Is it true that the emissions of the 150-mile roundtrip by rail to Yuba would be significantly less than those for the 90-mile roundtrip to Altamont? (Recology obtained a report from a consulting firm saying that rail-haul was a little better for the environment than trucking, but the experts have never been examined in an adversarial proceeding.)
• How would the local impacts compare at the two dump sites? Residents in both areas worry about air pollution. The Livermore Valley, through which all Altamont-bound trash trucks drive, has the worst air in the nine-county Bay Area, with consequent high asthma rates. Yuba has relatively clean rural air. Yuba residents are also concerned about contamination of groundwater.
• What do the apparent cost differences really mean? One major difference is that the Altamont charges include about $22 per ton in local public fees that pay for environmental mitigations; Yuba’s fee is much lower ($4 per ton). Thus the Recology bid was low because it did not include environmental mitigation fees. If Yuba thinks its landfill is “too cheap”, it could at any time impose additional mitigation fees (which the city would have to pay on top of the costs of the Recology contract) whereas Alameda County officials are promising “no new fees” and even some waiving of current fees.
• Will Yuba County even accept San Francisco’s wastes? To date the Board of Supervisors in Yuba has not agreed to do so and numerous local activists there are pushing officials in Yuba to reject San Francisco garbage, no matter what the fees may be.

Shortly before press time the director of San Francisco Environment (the city’s environmental agency) released a letter to the Board of Supervisors contradicting many of the above claims (which the Club had made in a letter to the Board). The Club is still evaluating these counter-claims, but on initial reading they appear to provide no new information and do not resolve the Club’s issues.

Further details on this matter are available from David Haskell, chair of the Chapter’s Zero Waste Committee, at (415)485-0542 or: davidhaskell89@yahoo.com

The San Francisco Group is leading the Club’s opposition to the deal as presented.