All Manhattan Beach residents and businesses may be able to recycle food waste as soon as July.
Some 777 residents and 25 businesses have already been doing so under a pilot program administered by the city and Waste Management since 2012, diverting an average of over 37 tons of food waste per month.
After receiving positive feedback from participants, the city is looking to expand the program.
“Some residents [not enrolled in the program] have been buying bags and sneaking their waste into their neighbors’ bins because they want to participate,” said Anna Luke-Jones, a senior analyst with the city’s public works department.
The city council directed staff to finalize the deal with Waste Management and bring it back for approval in the next couple of months.
The program would make Manhattan Beach “an environmental leader in Los Angeles County and one of the first municipalities with a local, permanent commercial organics recycling solution,” according to a report from Waste Management.
It would also prepare the city for a statewide law passed last year that requires all California cities to offer plant and food waste recycling to businesses by Jan. 1, 2016.
Under the deal negotiated with the company, residents would pay 50 cents a month and get a two-gallon pail to keep in their kitchen. They would then empty the pail into their green yard waste carts every week for pickup.
Businesses would pay $8 a month. Those with more space would get a cart or two-yard bin, and those with less would get bags that they could then put in other businesses’ containers.
Participants could recycle materials such as produce, meat, oils and dairy and use any kind of liner bag. Waste Management would pick up the waste and take it to a plant in the city of Orange that would transform the material into a slurry. The slurry would then be taken to a waste water treatment plant in Carson that would convert it to energy for the plant. The reduction of greenhouse gases from each ton of food waste recycled would equal the removal of 30 cars from the road or the planting 3,800 trees, according to Waste Management. ER
