Restaurants Find Fertile Ground For Trash
In the kitchen of one of San Francisco's better known restaurants, the Slanted Door, they are almost as careful about what goes into the trash as what goes onto the plates.
Any food not used or uneaten must go into the green can, CBS News correspondent John Blackstone reports. Executive Chef Charles Phan insists on it.
"It's not hard," Phan says. "You just gotta get on people's cases for not doing the right thing."
Some two-thousand San Francisco restaurants are now putting food scraps into their own green bins, leaving trash collectors about 300 tons a day. It's a mixture of leftovers that looks bad and smells worse, but it's the raw material for something better: compost.
Treated just right for 90 days the waste becomes an earthy mixture that's delivered to farms and vineyards.
Farm manager Bob Cannard spreads it on his vegetable gardens. Compost helps everything thrive on his organic farm -- even the weeds that make his heads of cabbage hard to spot.
The weeds and flowering cover crops are actually carefully planted to help transfer nutrients from the compost deep into the soil.
The result, Cannard says, is a crop of organic vegetables with real taste.
"Nice, full and juicy, just what you want," he says, biting into a stalk.
He supplies the same restaurants that collect their table scraps for composting.
Cannard says, "there's no such thing as waste." But Americans generate plenty of it: more than 169 million tons are dumped in landfills each year. More than 30 million tons of that is food, according to this Environmental Protection Agency report.
But in San Francisco, at least 100,000 tons of food scraps will be kept out of landfills this year and turned into compost.
Farmers pay about $400 a truckload for the stuff -- and can't get enough of it.
According to Mike Sangiacomo, President and CEO Norcal Waste Systems, "Every time we've been able to increase our supply, we've found increased demand, and this year again we sold out."
So in the springtime in California's wine country, when weeds and wild flowers appear in profusion turning whole fields to yellow … some people think of garbage.
It's an ugly problem, turned into a beautiful solution.
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