san francisco recreation and parks department for hosting us here today. i am the president and ceo of recology. we're here to celebrate another environmental success for the city of san francisco. in 1996, we began taking food waste and trying to figure out what to do with it and realized we could composted. we begin a collection program on a pilot basis in 1997, but by about 2006 or so that program was then offered to every resident, every business in the city. we are now taking about 600 tons a day of organic matter and turning it into compost. it is a program that everyone in the city has participated in. if you have never put anything in a green bin. every restaurant, business, resident, and school all have participated.

we met at their restaurant at fisherman's wharf last november to acknowledge that we had collected 1 million tons of organic matter that could be composted, and now today we have returned the product of that 1 million tons here to how many farms that can be used to provide nutrients to the soil here, to russia -- to promote organic farming, promote sustainable agriculture, and to teach people in this community how we can produce high-quality foods from material that we all throw away. we are proud to have that success today. we're going to have a thank you event for the citizens of san francisco on saturday at this and three other locations. it is a bring your own bucket event. everybody who comes with their own bucket is going to be a big of, for free, 5 gallons of compost that has come from

material that we generate, organic material we generate here in san francisco. we're looking forward to that event. i do want to acknowledge some of our supporters and partners on this program better here today. the director of public works. a member from supervisor campo'' office. the executive chef and purchaser for the restaurant. scott with a good laugh groceries. -- good life groceries. one of our customers for this compost from a vineyard. the zero waste manager for the state of san francisco. and jason," manager here of the farm. last but most of parliament, -- most important, mayor lee, mayor of the greenest city. cuyahoga [applause]

>> thank you. i cannot imagine a better way to celebrate the 1 million ton of compost in the city that has been collected by our official waste management company recology and celebrate that with a giveaway of this very rich soil that can be used and some many community gardens, people's private patches, farms like this that jason has been stored in with us -- this is a beautiful farm, by the way. congratulations. mohamed and i have been out here for years when running public works. you know, sometimes we referred to it is in the less than a real farme. for some years that had been neglected, kind of a dumping area. weeds were growing up. thanks to jason and so many volunteers and to the collaboration he has had with residents of our public housing just next door, they have really gotten a great culture going.

certainly with the collaboration with our recreation at the park department which actually owns the land here. they have been a great supporter of this revitalization of a very precious farm in this area of the city. i know supervisor campos and sheila are very appreciative of this because it has not only been taken care of well, it has been used appropriately to educate people and to give them a vision of what a beautiful gardens are, but growing fresh crops and vegetables could be like, and how that can be replicated with the hundreds of community gardens we have in this city. this keeps piling up with rec and a park, the department of environment, of people that want to continue this great effort of the city to build more parks, more planting areas, more urban farms. as we have encouraged -- i know supervisor david chiu and eric

mar join me last year in the urban agriculture ordinance to allow less bureaucracy in the creation of community gardens and farms throughout the whole city and utilizing empty space that would go with it and then at neutralizing, offering them a very rich soil to really create good farmland. and then dpw came and started their collaboration with the department of environment, really allowing private property owners who had orchards in their backyards, fruit trees, vegetable gardens to actually, if they were not using and, to be able to donate it to food shelters and other areas where people could have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. we're doing all the right things. and there is a reason why we have someone named robert haley as the zero based manager.

we made a commitment a while back, one i personally embraced, and that is why i want to keep robert close to me all the time. we're 78% there, but that is not good enough. right? not good enough for the department of environment, not good enough for recology, not good enough for jason and his crew, not good enough for the supervisors, and not good enough for the mayor. we want a city that all the diversity in the country, if not the world, to go to 100% recycled, 100% no waste. and we're not going to waste time in getting to that goal. because it is a goal that i think generations, my kids, generations after us will always ask me -- when you were mayor, what did you really do to help our environment? how did you reduce those emissions? when we know that we're taking compost and we're taking it out of the landfill, significantly reducing the is very harmful emissions that end up being

called nothing, that is your harmful to our at missile. when we can reduce that from our landfills, when we can really recycle as much as we can, going to 100%. reducing even further our use for landfills at all in this city, we will have done generations for our kids to come a great, great service, a great vision of what san francisco will have done while we were at the storage shed here. so i will be dependent upon everybody behind me to work even harder these next few years, to really get those programs out there and collaborate with all of our communities, with public housing residents, with every neighborhood, with our stores, our restaurants, and our local residents here to all join in on this great effort. because the result of it is the greater city and a more caring city, a city that is going to be not just greener, but it will be

one that will be healthier for everybody. and that is the attraction of san francisco. people all over the world come to san francisco not only for its innovations but for its reflection of care it has with the environment. that is what distinguishes our city from some many others. so happy to have a lively department of the environment that works with everybody to make sure we are reaching out to all of the different cultures that come here and establish themselves here. there is no cultural barrier when it comes to caring for our environment and caring for the world. we have to have the same language, the same attitude that we care about all of our communities, and we have to get everybody involved. no matter what economic scale their act, no one should be left out of this great goal that we have for the city, to be a city for everybody. and fresh fruits and vegetables are health in terms of our own bodies and our communities and

in terms of the health in this of our city. it needs to be reflected in everything we do. so the greatest restaurants that we have here and the greatest food servers that we have here are going to be a part of this as well, because they know that with the richness of the compost that we have, that they are giving back with their food scraps, that contributes to the richness of the soil. to have more people use that, as they will. as my wife well. she has been asking me, mike -- when are those three days of picking up compost going to happen again? i of the come post by giving it away for free at four locations this saturday, one right here in the heart of here, but we spread it out to the rest of the part of the city, have great locations and we have here i'm sure a document here and a website as to where the other locations are. happy million tons, mike, but

also a great thanks to everybody for doing a wonderful job and working with us, great stewardship here, again jason and congratulations to everybody in joining this collaborative effort, thank you very much. [applause] >> good morning, everybody. my name is sheila chun hagen. i'm here representing supervisor david campos who represents district nine. supervisor campos loves come post. it's great to be here at allegheny farm which is in district nine. it reminds me of a garage sale where you quickly find out that one person's trash is another person's treasure. here we are finding that all of our collective come post here in san francisco becomes a treasure for the entire

community. we can be at a place that grows nutritious food and teaches the importance of growing food, of camposing and being good stewards of the environment. i want to thank all of the san francisco residents for the awareness and willingness to take action to make this change take place here in san francisco and for us to be able to sell britain so much success in the environmental realm. but it's important for us to also remember that we need to continue to do this education and re-education as we have new people coming into san francisco as our residents, as we have friends and neighbors from other cities coming to our dinner tables and trying to figure out where do they put away their food scraps, that we can serve as a model for the rest of the country in setting the standard for being good stewards of the environment. so thank you very much and congratulations to everybody. [applause]

>> good morning. i'm really proud to be here and i think we can all be proud of what san francisco has accomplished with respect to zero waste. 11 tons is really an enormous milestone. it's only because. hard work and support of a lot of people like mayor ed lee over all of the years likes mike and all the employee owners at recology. like the department of environment staff and the like the people behind me and really all of the residents and people who work in san francisco who are recycling and com posting every day, that's how it really happens. i do want to go a little further to say we can do more. san francisco has a goal of zero waste by 2020. we're a good part of the way there. but we're still landfilling over 400,000 tons a year, so a lot of material is still going to the land phil. when you put material in your black trash bin, it goes straight to the land phil. so it's really important to put

all of your recyclables, your paper, bottles, cans, hard places into the blue recycling bins. it's really important to put all of your compostable places, your trimmings, food scraps, and different kinds of paper that is hard to recycle, wet paper, soiled paper, paper that is coated with something, tissue paper, put that in why your green carts. if we do that together, we can comply with the mandatory ordinance and get closer to zero waste in the future. thanks, everybody, we really appreciate all of your efforts. i would like to introduce jason, one of the co-managers of the farm here. [applause] >> howdy, everybody, and welcome, first of all, i'm glad to see a number of familiar faces like mayor lee out here and all of the team from

recology. if you haven't been out here, welcome and we hope you come back soon. when visitors come to the farm, one of the things i tell them, we're not growing plants, we're going soil. that's the number one thing we're doing here, building soil. if we have healthy soil, we'll have healthy plants and then healthy people. it's as simple as that. our main task as an organic garden is to be guarding soil health and to be stewards of this little epidrmis of the earth that sustainsous. we can do this because we take such good care of our soil. we build our own soil onsite from manure we get from a nearby horse stable in daly city and the green waste from the garden. we top it off, icing on the cake with the great stuff we get from recolog which is fantastic and a nice compost that helps you grow a lot of food. it's insane to have a major

city like a chicago or a new york, not to point fingers, every day would have thousands of tons of food that they're just going to toss out and they're going to take something that is a real resource and just treat is like rubbish. it's just going to get lost in the land phil or even worse, it's going to become methane which is a potent greenhouse gas. here in san francisco, we do think smarter. we are taking that and turning it back around. re-colog makes high-grade compost and it's sold to the wineries in california. when i go home at the end of the day and make dinner, mostly from stuff i grew myself, i like to have a glass of wine or two with dinner. i try to make sure that does come from a sustainable organic winery here in northern california because i know that then what we put in the green bins is somehow coming back to my table and that the scraps from our table eventually are getting recycled back and made

into food or at least back into wine. so i'm really excited that the city has reached this goal that we have done. thanks to the work to recolog and department of environment, with that, do you want to look around, mr. mayor? do we have a time for a short tour? all right.