Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash (20 page)

With the advent of the injunction and the food-waste recycling, San Francisco claimed in 2010 to divert a nation-leading 77 percent of trash away from landfills through Recology’s recycling and composting operations.

Still, the city fills up The Pit with 1,500 tons of trash every day from residential “black bins”—the stuff that’s not recycled. Periodic trash audits show that two-thirds of the material in The Pit is a mix of plastics and food waste, which means it could theoretically (though not economically) be recycled, too. Instead, it gets hauled by sixty huge diesel eighteen-wheelers a day to a Waste Management, Inc., landfill in Altamont, fifty-eight miles away. The impact of these waste shipments cancels out many of the environmental gains of San Francisco’s efforts to lower the city’s trash footprint.

In 2015, the city plans to shift gears and haul that waste to a Recology landfill near Sacramento by rail, lowering transportation-related emissions considerably. By 2020, the city’s master trash plan calls for zero waste to landfills, though it’s not entirely clear yet exactly what that will look like, or whether it’s possible to achieve.

And despite these impressive efforts, an underlying reality is that keeping trash out of landfills is not the same as making less trash in the first place. Indeed, San Francisco residents tend to make slightly more waste per person than the national average. So if anything, the knowledge that most trash is being recycled or composted may be giving San Franciscans license to be more wasteful rather than less.

“In any case,” says Munk, “there’s still plenty of room to improve.”

From the application for trash artist-in-residence, Recology, San Francisco:

Program Goals

  To encourage the reuse of materials

  To support Bay Area artists by providing access to the wealth of materials available at the public dump

  To prompt children and adults to think about their own consumption practices

  To teach the public how to recycle and compost in San Francisco through classroom lessons that explain the city’s three-bin (recycling, composting, garbage) system

Recology Provides

  Twenty-four-hour access to the facility

  A large, well-equipped art studio

  An exhibition and reception at the end of the residency (including printed invitations, refreshments, installation assistance, etc.)

  Miscellaneous supplies and equipment

  A monthly stipend

  The presentation of artists’ work in off-site exhibitions

Expectations of the Artist

  Work in the studio either forty hours per week for a full-time residency or twenty hours per week for a half-time residency