When Mayor Gavin Newsom, (from San Francisco), discovered a few weeks ago that 7,800 tons of waste a day is sorted at the San Francisco Recycling Center and 70 percent of its disposable waste is kept out of local landfills, he embraced the statistic and is now shooting to increase that percentage to at least 75 percent!

Mr. Newsom will soon be sending the city’s Board of Supervisors a proposal that would make the recycling of cans, bottles, paper and yard waste mandatory instead of voluntary, “Without that, we don’t think we can get to 75 percent,” the mayor said of the proposal.

The garbage from San Francisco’s 750,000 residents is picked up on the pay-as-you-throw concept, the more garbage bins you need, the higher your monthly fee. The recycling rate for this curbside collection from homes, hotels and the city’s 5,000 restaurants is considerably lower than the overall rate, especially because the rates on other waste like construction debris, (much of the concrete from demolished buildings is recycled into new sidewalks), batteries and compact fluorescent bulb is much higher. In total, the city has 12 recycling programs devoted to different materials.

For example, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, people in San Fran line up to bring their old paint cans to a recycling facility. The paint is separated into flat and latex, then blended and put in 55-gallon drums. The resulting colors are packed in five-gallon tins and sent to local nonprofit organizations, schools and charitable institutions in Mexico.

San Francisco’s recycling system is now being noticed overseas as more and more people and companies are realizing that you can recycle just about anything!