The City of Santa Barbara, CA has a strategic plan to increase the diversion of waste from the landfill. This composting program includes a new rate structure that reduces trash pick ups, saves schools and businesses thousands of dollars annually, and maintains the franchised hauler salary rates. This is a win-win program that is economically and environmentally sound.

Video Transcript

We've got a really comprehensive recycling plan that's being implemented in Santa Barbara.  

The city council approved a strategic plan several years ago that said environmental services needs to go out and really work aggressively with the business community and the schools to increase diversion, diversions recycling.  

And when we took a look at what was going on we realized that great opportunities with the new food scraps program that's taking all the leftovers, that's taking the bones, taking the cheese, a lot of things that people have traditionally considered compostable and putting those into a new container, a yellow container.  

And then we take those food scraps up to Santa Maria and we turn them into healthy compost that then gets turned right back into our fields, and then that gets put back right out on our farms and parks right here in Santa Barbara.

So it's really full circle and it's doing it right inside of the county and that's something we're rolling out across the business sector.

We've got 56 businesses doing it now.  We've probably got about 350 left.  We've got four schools, all elementary schools, and we're going after the next 23 in the next year or two.

One of the things that people love about our program is, if you are going to recycle and you're going to compost, people say I'm interested but things are tight right now, times are tight.

One of those things that we spent so much time building was what we call a new raid structure, and what that effectively means is if you want to do the right thing, you're going to pay a lot less.

So businesses in Santa Barbara, if they get to 50% recycling, 50% diversion, their bill is going to go down.  And one of the things we've offered now is this food scraps program.

Food scraps recycling costs 85% less than trash.  Most businesses in the problem are going to save a thousand to three thousand dollars a year if they really go whole hog with the new composting program.  It's incredible.

We have businesses right now, they're at ninety percent recycling.   It's incredible.  And that's not just one business.  We probably have a dozen plus restaurants right now that are at ninety, ninety five percent recycling.  These businesses are seeing thousands of dollars in savings.

So this is really, just an economic message.  You're going to do the right thing of course, everyone wants to do the right thing.  Everyone wants clean air, healthy water, healthy food.   But really if they can save money, that just makes it a win-win, it's very easy to do.  And at the same time, trash companies in the city of Santa Barbara are what we call franchised haulers.  

Meaning they work on contract with the city.   The city pays them to collect waste over the course of the year.   They don't pay them to collect trash.   And so, one of the things we do is, if they're not collecting trash and they're collecting another material.   We're paying them a commensurate amount for that material so there's no economic loss for them.  

In fact, their revenues are neutral from that standpoint and we make sure every year that they're kept whole.

So that's one of the reasons reasons we've had such strong support from our trash companies is they see it as a win-win because they're still making the revenue that they put on their projections, and at the same time, they're getting to do the right thing, so everyone is really in a good space right now about that.

I think the key for getting people to recycle more is for them to see the benefit to them economically and to see the benefit to our community.

Because really everybody wants Santa Barbara to stay as beautiful as it is, so as we start to make those connections between doing the right thing and saving money and it benefiting our community we'll see more businesses take that leap into high recycling.