Exciting News! In September, Los Angeles will begin a trial run of household food scrap collection.
The city will give 2-gallon kitchen pails to residents in three areas of the city. It will encourage folks in about 5,000 households to dump their kitchen food scraps into 
these pails and, ultimately, their yard waste bin that’s already being collected at curbside.
Mixing food scraps with yard waste is a relatively low cost way to grow food waste recycling–there are no added trucks or routes. The pilot program will cost $140,000 and expanding it to the entire city would require $13 million.
I’ll admit: I’m skeptical that L.A. residents will take to composting with the same vigor as Bay Area residents. Take that as a challenge, Angelinos!
As we read in the L.A. Times article, a 2002 survey found that food scraps were a whopping 27 percent of trash from L.A.’s single family homes. That’s more than double the national average of 12 percent! Los Angeles, here’s your chance.
6 Comments
I have noticed that since I began putting food scraps in a composting bin (which has a tight fitting lid), there is much less smell coming from the trash can in the kitchen. The trash can now only contains plastic wrappers and some paper, like colered junk mail, that cannot be composted. The trash does get taken out regularly but it only takes a few hours to create smells from the decomposing fruit rinds, rotten vegetables from the refrigerator etc.. This seems to have been eliminated now though. With all of the Glade air freshener ads and other ads selling odor “killing” products maybe this would also be an angle to sell people on the idea of sorting compostable materials.
Robert,
That’s a great angle to convince people that composting is worthwhile. ‘Compost your food and avoid the stinky kitchen trash.’
Of course, the skeptical part of my brain thinks the majority of people will choose to buy their solutions rather than change their habits. But I do see that improving slowly.
Also, I’d recommend not closing the lid on your compost bin and taking it outside more frequently. That increased air flow will keep it from going anaerobic and getting stinky.
$6.5 million for 5000 2 Gallon buckets.
That’s $1300 per bucket. What the heck. A 5 gallon bucket at Home Depot is like $5.
And governments wonder why they have no money.
Ken, I screwed up the numbers. That $13 million price tag would be for servicing the entire city, not just the 5,000 pilot program homes. I knew that sounded a bit too expensive!
I’ve changed the post to reflect that. Apologies.
I prefer to feed my scraps to the composter or my worm bin.
Hmm, now if they could get people to start worm bins, that would be cool….
That’s cool. Sure, it’d be great if people composted, but this is a much easier to way to get them to stop throwing food into the garbage.