From yesterday's Seattle Times:
City to require table-scrap recycling at homes in 2009
All single-family homes in Seattle must sign up for table-scrap recycling in 2009, the City Council decided Monday.
While residents will have to pay for the service, the city will not check whether they are actually dumping food in the new separate bin.
Reducing food trash was a piece of a larger plan the council unanimously approved Monday to reduce the amount of garbage sent to the landfill.
"We can reduce the waste stream," said Councilmember Richard Conlin, chair of the utilities committee. "We can treat waste as a resource and continue to recirculate it as we reclaim, recycle it or turn it into compost."
Starting in April 2009, all single-family homes will be required to subscribe to food-waste recycling, a program that is now optional through the yard-waste collection program. A variety of containers will be available for different rates. Prices have not been set.
Recycling food waste will be voluntary for apartments, as well as for businesses, which produce twice as much food waste as residents.
Conlin said he hopes garbage-collection rates can be adjusted to absorb some of the additional cost homeowners will have to pay for food recycling.
Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) will study a ban on putting food waste in the garbage can � and enforcing the ban as it does with aluminum, paper and glass. If businesses, apartments and houses place recyclable material in their trash, violators are fined or their garbage doesn't get picked up.
By 2025, the council hopes, the city will divert 72 percent of its garbage from the landfill.
Seattle recycles 44 percent of its trash now. In 2003, Mayor Greg Nickels hoped to reach 60 percent by 2010, but that goal has been pushed back to 2012.
Talk about rampant nany-statism... Two interesting things about recycling. The first is Penn and Teller's excellent dissection of the Landfill Crisis: Part One, Part Two and Part Three The second is an excellent use made of a landfill in Ohio. Here is my post from March of this year: The Ohio Valley Creative Energy Project The home page for this wonderful project is here: OVCE As for the food recycling, there are a lot of things that do not compost well -- are they going to hire people to sort through food waste or will they just quietly landfill a bunch of it the same as current recycled items are disposed of. Aluminum is about the only good thing to recycle. Paper is good but the supply far outstrips the demand and glass is a joke with about 5% of recycled glass actually finding a use...
