San Francisco - Toughest Recycling Law in U.S.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted this week to impose the nation's most comprehensive composting and recycling law on city residents, effective this fall. Failure to comply will result in $100 fines but officials say they won't start fining people for a while.

The legislation calls for every residence and business in the city to have three separate color-coded bins for waste: blue for recycling, green for compost and black for trash.

Currently, the law merely defines required behavior for trash disposers and penalties for violations. Not addressed is enforcement.

According to Robert Reed, a spokesman for San Francisco's garbage collectors,

"Our role is to pick up the garbage and to make recycling as easy and convenient as possible for our customers," Reed said.

"Our collection drivers will not become enforcers."

Logically, though, some group will ultimately be designated as the trash police force or a new law enforcement group will be created, responsible for checking the cans to make sure all garbage is properly sorted. My money is on a soon-to-be-created trash police force, the SFTP.

Interestingly, the fact that homeless people scavenge through garbage cans at night is a problem that wasn't considered while crafting the law. Who pays the fine when a vagrant violates the garbage law hasn't been decided.

Companion post at The Jawa Report.