Trash the Green Bags, Please
Thank you to all our neighbors who have made a habit of tossing their food and plant scraps into their green bins each week. The city is aiming to get more households on board with this requirement by rolling out a “Stay Scrappy, San Diego” campaign, complete with a mascot seagull sporting muscular human arms (yikes), reminding everyone that food scraps and plant materials from our yards and house plants go in the green bins. What doesn’t go in the green bins, though, are “compostable” green bags.
Those lovely eco-conscious-looking compostable bags you can buy online or find in a few local stores must be thrown in the trash here in San Diego, regardless of anything the manufacturer’s marketing or instructions might say. Folks who live in North County, the Bay Area, and many points in between are allowed to include compostable green bags in their green (organics) bins, but San Diego’s green waste recycling system is not currently set up to handle these bags, so let’s please use them only for trash. We’re allowed to use paper bags for our food waste, as needed. And we can support the environment by bagging our regular trash in those plastic-free green bags. Win-win!
Note that it’s never okay to put ANY plastic bags in the BLUE bin. The plastic film those bags are made of gets caught in the recycling sorting machines and wreaks havoc. And the bags themselves are not recyclable.
Some multi-family apartments and condo buildings in UH have already been charged extra fees by their private haulers for putting green bags into the organics (green) bins and plastic trash bags into the recyclables (blue) bins. It’s unclear when single-family home dwellers will start incurring fines or other punishments, but the fact that we might get away with contaminating the organic waste we send up to Miramar doesn’t make it a good idea. People who use the free compost from the Miramar Greenery on their vegetable gardens would certainly prefer it to be contaminant free, as would the Environmental Services staff who deal with sorting and processing our scraps and recyclables.
So let’s do as the swole-armed seagull commands, and keep our green bins “scrappy” and green-bag free.