My Letter in the SF Bay Guadian, today....re: The Reform Initiative.

Things change, over 80 years, but not with regard to how the City of San Francisco regulates "solid waste management".

I got involved in "community recycling" in 1972, helping REA, Richmond Environment Actiion, on the campus of USF. It had started, there, in 1970 running "once a month recycling", performed by an all-volunteer cast. At that time the City had left ALL recycling activity to the "scavenger companies", then called Sunset Scavenger and GoldenGate Disposal. They had switched to "packer trucks" 20 years earlier, and saw no reason to try to "sort it all out". ...Our City's trash was being landfilled in Mt.View, where now the Shoreline Amphitheatre is--- home of the "flaming gopher holes"....

REA was easily able to promote citywide recycling, by causing to open a network of 12 Recycle Centers. Our own at USF grew to be open "7 Days a Week". The trash companies, at the same time, were pushing for the voters to approve a scheme that woulde have committed all the City's waste stream to them, for 100 years, so that they could finance their proposed alternative to Mt.View landfilling:
A mammoth Garbage Incinerator, opposite to Candlestiick Park, which would have been renamed "Candle Stink Park---.

Now the trash companies have a new name, but the same old game: control the "waste stream" however you can. "Recology", the new name, wants SF to let them not only operate the collection systems, BUT ALSO the landfill, in a new Yuba County site...

Imagine if you took your pet to "Joe, The Veterinarian," and next door was a shop with this sign on its door: " Joe the Taxidermist". And spread out, across the two adjoining shops, was a banner that said: "Come to "Joe's"...Either way, you get your pet back".

If that encouraged you to bring "sick Fido or Fluffy" in for treatment....we would be
surprised.... Yet SF is on the verge of doing that to you and your wastes....

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Maximizing recycling, re-using, and conservation are in grave jeopardy. Equally, the wallets of the garbage rate payers are at jeopardy. The City Budget Analyst deserves highest commendations, for having the courage to call it as he sees it.

Support the call for Garbage Reform in SF.. Eighty years is way too long to wait for reform.

jack barry in the Sunset

• reply

Posted by Garbage Reform Needed, Now. on Jun. 15, 2011 @ 8:34 am

Taxi TownSF: Proposal On Taxi Service Improvements - Open Taxi Access (OTA). By John Han.

Taxi TownSF: Proposal On Taxi Service Improvements - Open Taxi Access (OTA). By John Han.

The TIME IS NOW....to change the way customers connect to Available Cabs, and get that cab at their

side within 10 minutes...

Send me an email if you would like to help accomplish this.