MoJo Video: My Trash’s Afterlife

Was I wrong to recycle the junk-mail envelopes with plastic windows? Won’t the "Two Buck Chuck" bottle just shatter? A guided tour of garbage heaven.

by Josh Harkinson and Alexandra Bezdikian | Mother Jones

Step 1: The Big Sort

In the best of ways, San Francisco is king of the trash heap. While the average American annually discards more than 1,100 pounds of garbage, the typical resident of the city by the bay trashes 882 pounds, thanks to a Herculean recycling program that recovers nearly half of everything that gets tossed. No major American city recycles more. I wanted to know why. It certainly wasn't because of me.

To find out whether my city's phenomenal recycling success was actually real, I asked San Francisco's waste contractor, Sunset Scavenger, if I could track one week's worth of my own trash in real time. It agreed, and so began my odyssey into a world of waste.

In addition to curbside pickup, Sunset Scavenger offers 11 other recycling services, everything from free "bulky item" pickup to a 16-year-old construction debris program that accounts for roughly 30 percent of everything the company recycles. These programs are supplemented by other independent recycling services that trade in everything from glass bottles to used asphalt. Factoring them all in, San Francisco calculates that 72 percent of its waste is diverted from the landfill. To reflect this focus on waste diversion, Sunset Scavenger's parent company recently changed its name from Norcal Waste Systems to Recology.



To read the entire Mother Jones article click here.