Adam Minter, Columnist

San Francisco's Recycling Claims Are Garbage

A recent lawsuit exposes some funny calculations behind San Francisco's claim to divert 80 percent of its waste from landfills to recycling.

July 13, 2014 at 1:55 AM UTC

By Adam Minter

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

San Francisco's real recycling rate is likely impressive, just not world-beating.

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If you toss an apple core into a composting box and it ends up in a landfill, has it been recycled? In most places, the answer would be a simple "no."

Not in San Francisco. There, thanks to creative and perfectly legal waste accounting, that apple core can end up in a landfill and still be officially considered recycled. One might think of it as "Schrodinger's trash" (being both landfill and compost at the same time), and its environmental benefits are worthy of debate. What's not debatable, however, is that without this magical transformation, San Francisco's gaudy 80 percent diversion rate (the amount of waste the city diverts from landfills into recycling) would be significantly lower, calling into question the title of "greenest city in the United States and Canada."