compost – Enviro Updates

No, compostable bags don’t go in the green bin

January 15, 2026

Amie Windsor, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Rob Carey was surprised after garbage pickup day to see the pink notice affixed to his green bin.

The note left for the Sebastopol resident was a soft reprimand from the city’s curbside hauler, Sonoma County Resource Recovery.

Carey, who regards himself a considerate customer, had been called out for for using green compostable bags to discard his fruit and vegetable scraps.

“They said, ‘We don’t want that,’” he said, confounded. “And here I thought these bags were good.”

Carey considers himself a ‘recycler,’ so he was surprised to learn he’d been going about his green waste disposal in the wrong way.

He is likely not alone.

While single-use bags labeled as compostable are an alternative for plastic bags, they are not be disposed of in the green bins used to collect compostable waste, including food scraps and yard debris.

Sustainable Living'biodegradeable' plastic, compost, plastic pollution, plastic waste

Sonoma County may have a new commercial composting site at the county airport

January 28, 2024

Mary Callahan, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

About 100,000 tons of green waste have been hauled out of county since Sonoma County’s last centralized compost facility closed in 2015.

A yearslong search for a new site to process much of Sonoma County’s yard and food waste may finally be over, potentially ending the need to haul almost 100,000 tons of organic materials to neighboring counties for composting each year.

Officials are now exploring the possibility of using a small piece of county-owned land in Windsor adjacent to the Sonoma County-Charles M. Schulz Airport to collect and compost green bin materials and commercial food waste to produce organic soil amendments in high demand by the local agricultural community.

The roughly 15-acre site at 5200 Slusser Rd. is part of a one-time county landfill decommissioned in 1971 and covered over with 9 feet of compacted soil.

Though its conversion to a commercial composting facility is still years off, an initial feasibility study of the site determined in 2022 there were no disqualifying physical or environmental hurdles.

If successful, selection of the site would put an end to a string of bad luck that has plagued local officials and their partners in providing a destination for organic waste just as an aggressive push is underway to keep as much as possible out of landfills, where they contribute to planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable Livingcompost, composting facilities, food waste, methane, yard waste

California is about to witness its biggest change to trash since the ’80s. Hint: It’s all about composting

January 1, 2022

Chase DeFeliciantonio, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Dawn has just broken over Recology’s vast Blossom Valley Organics composting facility, about 70 miles east of San Francisco in Vernalis (San Joaquin County). The cold fall air hits like a slap to the face as orange light creeps over the horizon.

As the sun rises over the site, one of six the company operates statewide, a fine grit rides on the air, which is thick with the smell of earthy decomposition.

Operations Supervisor Clifford Reposa casts a wary eye on a 25-ton trailer of organic waste as it is hoisted on a hydraulic lift almost vertically against the pale and reddening sky.

“Not good. Lots of plastic bags,” Reposa mutters, his arms crossed as he watches a flood of pumpkins, apple cores, bits of wood and piles of leaves trucked in from San Francisco tumble out, adding to the towering piles of refuse that dwarf huge bulldozers moving it around in a deafening, mechanical dance.

This load of refuse is just a fraction of the roughly 1,500 tons of compostable material the 120-acre facility takes in every day from San Francisco and parts of the East Bay and South Bay. It comes here to be reborn as natural fertilizer used on vineyards and farms, and in varietals that are crafted specifically for different types of soil.

After those plastic bags and nonorganic materials are plucked out by men, women and gargantuan machines with names like The Titan, what remains will be placed into heaping piles that eventually break down into dark compost some farmers call “black gold.” Those heaps that stand higher than a person are spritzed with water and heated and cooled for two months to help trillions of microorganisms turn the solid waste into rich food for hungry crops.

Agriculture/Food System, Climate Change & Energy, Sustainable Livingcompost, compostable waste, composting facilities, food waste, soil carbon, solid waste

Negotiations for new Sonoma County composting site ended over financing issues

June 5, 2021

Mary Callahan, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

A four-year effort to bring green waste recycling back to Sonoma County has collapsed, scuttling hopes of restoring any time soon a high-volume, locally based compost operation to supply farmers, landscapers and backyard gardeners.

The breakdown came late last month after the company chosen to work with the county waste agency withdrew from negotiations after it failed to secure financing.

The company, Renewable Sonoma, and its principal, Will Bakx, terminated negotiations with the county agency and the city of Santa Rosa after 2½ years of trying to shore up plans for a high-tech composting facility that would convert food scraps and yard waste into valuable agricultural products. The project, estimated to cost $52 million, also was to produce biogas to help power treatment equipment on land leased at the city’s Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant on Llano Road.

Bakx, whose proposal ranked first among nine pitches considered by the county in 2018 for siting and construction of a modern compost facility, said he had to pull the plug on negotiations because he couldn’t put together funding after talking with a variety of investors. He said he was not at liberty to disclose details.

Agriculture/Food System, Climate Change & Energy, Land Use, Sustainable Livinganaerobic digesters, biogas, compost, composting facilities, methane, recycling, solid waste

$50 million Santa Rosa compost facility inches ahead as opposition from neighbors grows

September 10, 2019

Tyler Silvy, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

When Greg Eicher and his wife, Gulten Eicher, moved to a quiet stretch of Walker Avenue five years ago, they were ready to embrace a more rural lifestyle there in southwestern Santa Rosa.

They’ve got a heap of homegrown fruits and veggies on offer, raise chickens for fresh eggs and even recently began beekeeping. There’s also a farm cat — Tekir, which is Turkish for striped or tabby cat.

Greg Eicher said they knew they were moving in a few blocks from Santa Rosa’s Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant, which handles wastewater for 230,000 residents from Santa Rosa, Rohnert Park, Cotati, Sebastopol and portions of unincorporated Sonoma County.

The Eichers occasionally get whiffs of what is treated at the plant. But Eicher said one waste-related facility is enough, and neighbors can’t abide a push by local governments to relocate a commercial-grade composting facility across the street from the Laguna site.

“This neighborhood has been putting up with the noise and the smell and the traffic — to the benefit of the entire city of Santa Rosa — for years,” Eicher said. “You’re doubling down on me.”

There’s no organized opposition yet, but thanks to leadership changes and the fits and starts of governmental negotiations for green-bin waste, neighbors have months, if not years, to coalesce and build their campaign against the proposal.

Until then, and perhaps for many more years, the future of green waste handling in Sonoma County will remain in limbo — with both tons of material and millions of ratepayer dollars continuing to go out of the county.

It’s been more than a year since the board of Zero Waste Sonoma — the renamed Sonoma County Waste Management Agency — voted to begin negotiations with Renewable Sonoma, a private company, to handle commercial-grade composting operations, a service not offered in Sonoma County since that company’s previous site was shut down four years ago in the wake of wastewater violations.

Agriculture/Food System, Land Use, Sustainable Livingcompost, composting facilities, floodplain, Laguna de Santa Rosa, solid waste

Green-waste options mulled for Santa Rosa apartment dwellers

September 1, 2018

Kevin McCallum, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Most [apartments], perhaps 90 percent, do not yet have a food waste option, Migliore said. But a number of complexes have begun testing organic waste programs, including the Coddingtown Mall Apartments. Some residents had installed their own small compost tumblers on their porches, so there was clearly an interest in providing the service, said Harry Brown, one of the property managers.

When Carlos Calzontzi lived in Chico, he and his wife had a little house with a garden and a compost pile where he would throw most of his kitchen scraps.

It felt good to return those nutrients back to the Earth and fertilize the soil to help grow vegetables for his family.

But when the retired city maintenance worker relocated last year to Santa Rosa to be closer his kids and grandkids, he moved into an apartment complex that at the time had no green-waste disposal option. The Coddingtown Mall Apartments, like most apartment complexes in the county, provided its 230 units with garbage and recycling service, but no bins for organic waste.

So he threw his leftover avocado pits, unused vegetable chunks and bread scraps into the garbage, where they went to the landfill.

“We felt bad because we knew all of that could be used in the garden,” Calzontzi said. “We care about the Earth.”

Organic material makes up about 34 percent of the material that Californians throw into landfills every year, according to a 2014 study by CalRecycle, the state waste management agency.

Gov. Jerry Brown signed a 2014 law meant to improve organic recycling efforts, in part by requiring businesses like restaurants and food processors to have an organic waste program. But multi-family apartment complexes were exempted from the law.

Sustainable Livingapartment complexes, compost, food waste, landfill, recycling

‘Complicated choice’ looms in Sonoma County over next compost operator

August 12, 2018

Kevin McCallum, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Every week, hundreds of thousands of Sonoma County residents dutifully gather grass clippings from their yards and food scraps from their kitchens, toss them into green bins and then cart them to the curb alongside their garbage and recycling.

Tons of this so-called “green waste” is then hauled, at a cost of $5 million per year, to other counties, where it is chopped up, often mixed with chicken guts, encouraged to rapidly decompose, and then sold as compost.

The process takes place entirely outside Sonoma County — mostly in Mendocino, Napa and Marin counties — ever since Sonoma Compost, the county’s longtime compost operation atop the Central Landfill, was shut down nearly three years ago for wastewater violations.

Now local officials face a complex but crucial decision about the future of composting in Sonoma County, one that will have major implications for the life of the county landfill, the rate of emission of greenhouse gases and the size of people’s garbage bills.

That decision is whether to encourage the construction of a new, modern composting facility here, with costs of $50 million or more, or whether to continue hauling the material to existing facilities elsewhere indefinitely.

Agriculture/Food System, Sustainable Living, Transportationanaerobic digesters, compost, composting facilities, food waste, yard waste