things that can be done there and this ordinance addresses larger generators. i want to say that we have a challenge throughout all sectors from your small single-family resident all the way up to the largest generators and we are doing a tremendous amount and have been over the past ten years. we were currently -- over the last year plus, rolling out a new program to single-family residence. you may be aware you have gotten a smaller trash bin and he saw the new materials that we are recycling. there is a part of the efforts we are working with with a lot of the smaller generators. this ordinance is offering a tool that makes sense only for the larger generators. and so when you think about larger generators, we see a need to improve participation across the board. but when a large generator is contaminated in our containers and throwing recyclables and combustibles with the trash, it is a bigger impact because it is

a bigger material. and looking at one of the parts of the definition of large refuse generators as they have a roll off compactor. those things start at 10 cubic yards and because they are compacting they are holding cubic yards material. we're talking about big generators. those generators, we look in recent years, they are a 551 audits that have been done. over three quarters of them in the trash stream have more than half recyclables and combustibles. gives a huge lost opportunity. a need for tremendous improvement and we have been working with a lot of properties for ten years on the mandatory and even before but we still have a need for improvement. and then they have a need to improve recycling and composting but smaller percentages, as you see. currently, we have a system in place through the refuse rates that are set separately through the process going back to a 1932

ordinance that allows recology to provide significant discounts for the amount of recycling and composting that an account has. basically, the volume divided by all three streams gives you a recovery or diversion right and that ends up translating, not 25 % off that, to a discount. it is across all three streams. it is significant. large build properties are saving thousands, if not many thousands through that discount. but if they mess up those streams and contaminate too much , they can lose the discount if they are contaminating the trash too much like you see here , they get extra charges and those can be really significant up to just over a year ago, the maximum of that was 50% and then just over a year ago the rate process allows recology to go to 100% on those. there are significant incentives

in place that has helped driven and industry of what we call a zero waste facilitators. so there is an existing group of companies and entities out there that are doing this kind of work and what are they doing and what is envisioned in this ordinance as they can help a property with better material separation and sorting. through working with the property and looking at what is going into the containers collected by recology, they can see where the contamination is and help provide feedback and education to tenants and overall , the benefit of what they're doing is to help reduce the contamination so property can comply better and that allows property to get off contamination charges or get the discounts back. as i said, there is existing zero facilitators that are out there and we have been able to identify over 80 properties. mostly large office buildings that are currently using the

zero waste facilitators. and why are they doing that? because they can economically incentivize by increasing the discount on the rate his -- other rate. some of these properties take pride in being a cyst ability champions. >> excuse me. before you go to that slide, i wanted you to speak a little bit more in depth about that so the committee members can really drill down on this point. this is an important point. this shows how this is the use of best practices. how these buildings realize savings and how they pay for the facilitators and in most cases, paying for themselves and realizing a significant cost savings. if you could say more about that so -- >> this approach with getting additional professional help to better manage materials has a

long history. we saw it starting with special events. get used to be one of the hardest to deal with and getting high recovery rates. now a lot of events are covering 75 or 89%. that is often because they have professional staff on board to help them provide quality control and to do necessary sorting to get material separated. that has moved into the building property space as well over the last number of years and it is being driven in part by the incentive refuse right structure that we have so properties can maximize. as of a year ago, in july, there was an incentive for properties to get an increased discount all the way up to 100% diversion. the more they recover or divert, the more they put in recycling and composting then they can get a higher discount.

and the charges that can be done through the refuse right process is driving that as well. not everybody is using that could be using and benefiting that has used the zero waste facilitators. so i think -- this is an example of the impact that a zero waste facilitators can have. it is a high-rise apartment building. before you see, they have a lot of trash. and only 64 -- 464 gallons. just to help you visualize what a cubic yard is, you know the toter is that you have residentially? they typically are 32-gallon size and with the new trash ones , they are even smaller. the next biggest size is 64 and the largest is 96 gallons. that is less than half a cubic yard. a cubic yard is 202 gallons. if a property has 30 cubic yards

, they would have to have over 60 of those collected every week. you basically have a lot of trash but after a zero waste facilitator, reduce the trash by two thirds and they reduce the recycling by two and a half times and they increase composting by three times and after paying for the zero waste facilitator, and this was i think, a couple people working there, they saw a net savings of $28,000 a year. the savings will vary a lot based on a given particular situation. and with a zero waste facilitator, we see a range of effectiveness. some seem to be effective and there have been cases where they may not be doing as good a job as they could add a property can still not be in compliance. i just want to clarify who actually is covered by this ordinance. as the supervisor just mentioned , the definition of who is included has been changed.

the bar has been raised to remove the smaller one. the definition is anyone with a rolloff compactor. a rolloff compactor is one of these large units. 10-30 cubic yards that is so big that a truck cannot empty it on site. they have to pull it up onto a flatbed and drive it all the way to the transfer station or the recycling facility, empty it and bring it back. those are really big units. the smallest is 10 cubic yards. after that, if you don't have a rolloff compactor and you have more than 40 cubic yards, you are included and as i was giving you the visual, that would be a lot of totes. when you look at these big-box bins, they go from one up to 6 cubic yards. the very biggest that people would have. this includes 124 of the largest office buildings. ninety-seven of the large department buildings.

they are all high-rise. they are typically well over 100 and averaging 3-600 units. we have a combination of wholesale, retail, shopping centres and some of the largest restaurants at 95 and only about a dozen restaurants now included we have some schools that have been reduced and there's only a handful of secondary schools. there is a few colleges and universities and a few hospitals and a couple of the largest churches. a couple of the big food pantries and a couple of museums that total 42. there are convention facilities as well. they are a model and have been doing this kind of starting for a long time and are at 95% recovery rate.

there's a couple of industrial office buildings and there are 15 city properties. since this is the budget and finance committee, the inclusion of city properties brought to this. we are looking at the following agencies that have those 15 properties. real estate has three and that includes the hall of justice, city hall here because there is a rolloff compactor. we have public health, general hospital, we have sfmta and we have five of the large sites that are included. the public library, a couple of port facilities including pier 39 and a couple of p.u.c. facilities for a total of 15 different properties. i want to say that we have been working closely with city departments for decades and helping them be leaders in the city and internationally and we

are really committed to continue working with them and particularly focusing on these properties that are included in the legislation to do everything we can with them to make sure they're doing a great job and that they -- when they get audited in the future, that they have their act together. we can see a couple of -- we have seen a couple of cases where some facilities have used zero waste facilitator type sorters that have really helped. but we have been able to get a lot of departments to be model actors. we think out of the 15, most of them are in good shape. there are only five that might need additional help to avoid being out of compliance. these are just pictures to show that we offer a lot of training. multilingual training and we offer a lot of collateral materials and signage and we work to help optimize program set up. we do the same in the commercial sector as well.

just to touch on this, some of the amendments that the supervisor mentioned and he will introduce later, help address city departments. a key thing is that the audits that happen over a three-year period, we want them to happen during the time of year that helps city departments in the budget planning process. to the amendment goes from only having audits from july to january the thought there is that half of the year is better for their budget planning. >> i'm sorry, it is better for the department? >> yes. >> that is based on what assumption? >> if a city department were to not pass an audit and be triggered to have to take action of using a zero waste facilitator and they didn't have the resources -- if they weren't able to designate existing staff but they needed to hire additional staff and they didn't have the resources and authorization to do that and they needed to request authority from the board of supervisors

through the budget process, the timing of the audits is such that it helps them in their budget planning for the next year and the second bullet here -- >> kind of. because amir's office gives budget instructions in the fall during this time of the year. that assumption -- >> -- >> did you work with that with amir's office? >> the time. that came up was july to january if that is too late, that can be revised. we can shorten the time. whatever would make sense. if it is july through november. >> i want to make a note to the mayor's budget office that we should try and look at that. that might be something that the mayor needs to be building in to her budget guidelines to the department head that way.

it will be a streamlined process and it won't be -- i guess anything is up for debate when it comes to the outback process. i just wanted to caution this. >> we should make sure that that timeline is what makes sense. again, what is in there now is a six or seven month timeframe but it could be shorter than that in terms of when the audits would occur. and then, very importantly, given that if a department needs to go through that budget approval process, they would have the time to do that and get necessary authorization to acquire whatever resources they need before having to do that. it allows them whatever time that takes and then that kind of covers -- it acknowledges the board of supervisors would need to approve additional resources and the time to go through that. i mentioned where those

amendments are when you want to reference them. >> thank you. >> so, as you may have seen, there was a budget and finance and economic analysis impact report for the city agencies and there are assumptions based on talking with us and we looked at all the facilities and we are very familiar with them and we have dedicated staff that work full time in helping city departments do their best and comply. we only saw five facilities that we had concerned about that we would want to help improve. if those facilities couldn't improve sufficiently and they were not to pass an audit, and then if they did not have the resources to address that concern and had to hire additional resources, this report is based on those five facilities having to hire, potentially, up to 12 to a

full-time people. that is up to. based on up to five facilities hiring up to 12-foot full-time people at a rate of $40 an hour including benefits. that is where those numbers come from. 416 is based on one f.t.e. and the a 32 is based on two f.t.e. i do want to acknowledge that as has been mentioned in general, through the rate process, there are savings that can be had by increasing the recovery rates -- rate and didn't avoid contamination charges. those costs are not factored into this report to. you could have a department that sees a net savings and not a net cost. other changes, there has been stakeholder dialogue and we have raised, as i have just mentioned that increase has knocked out

114 -- >> one second. for clarity, we have not done it yet. we will be proposing, as an amendment to date which will address. >> thank you. this is being proposed by the supervisors. >> and we are also proposing that there is some language that in the process, if we are able to identify where those sources of contamination come from in the case of a commercial tenant facility, we would identify that and it would help a property owner know where the contamination is coming from. there's an additional 60 days allowed if a large refuse generator cannot -- it is not able to hire somebody given the lack of availability of the refuse and the companies available and aren't able to respond fast enough. this applies to the noncity government because they have a separate process. that is up to an additional 60

days being proposed. the other thing is there is a proposal to do a review of the whole ordinance and recommend changes in a report to the board after the three year audit cycle so we would have a three year audit cycle and then within three months we would report to the board on findings and any recommended changes. are there any questions about what is being proposed as changes? >> we will call you back up afterwards. i don't want to go in particular we will talk about the amendments and we have talked about some of the ones that we will be proposing. i will just quickly close and say that the city is committed to zero waste and it is really important to. there are a lot of benefits. we have a strong climate connection. we have a new climate goal that the mayor has adopted and we need to do more across the board and we are doing a lot. this ordinance would give us additional tools in our toolbox

that can be effective in a number of situations. with that, i thank you. >> i just want to add one more thing that i wanted to highlight when we originally worked on writing this legislation, we try to do some of the things that we are doing in the legislation now some of this -- these impacted parties and stakeholders have known about this as a concept and the slide that was emphasized by the department of environment and how over 80 account holders and office buildings in particular are already employed to, you may have said this in your opening remarks, the san francisco giants are one of the best examples that we have in the industry today. they have a significant number of sorters on site. and to the point that san franciscans might know about

this, but nonsan franciscans that are visiting the city may not necessarily know about these rules, the giants get people from all over the bay area and many of them are not san franciscans and many of them do not have the rules that we have in terms of mandatory recycling and composting. that is one of the reasons why, for large account holders like those, it makes sense to have sorters. makes sense to have people on site doing this work so that they would not only save the company money but also help us in our environmental goals. i wanted to put that out there because it is an important part in a conversation. this is not a new concept. this is not something we haven't talked about. we tried tried to do this ten years ago but we did not do it right. many of the folks that would be impacted by this legislation have known about it for a significant amount of time. >> may i ask a question. i was not here ten years ago and i was curious to know -- what we

are discussing in dealing with today, has the proposal changed in the ten years? >> yeah. this proposal, just in the last six months, has changed significantly. we are doing everything we can to be conscious of how this is not intended to hit small account holders. this is not intended to hit small businesses or small individual. this is about those that are doing a significant amount of volume. that is why the slide that talks about the hotels,, the apartment buildings, large three-5 unit apartment buildings and more. office buildings, really large amounts. that is something we were very conscious of. and then now, which i think it's really important to, there has been a decade worth of looking at best practices and seeing -- that is why i use the giants as an example. the ferry building is another one. not only did they have sorters

on site but they were conscious of the packaging that they have. it makes it easier because almost everything goes into composting at the ferry building matter what business is there. they are able to control that. i know the giants have more control over that. the thinking about the packaging onto the people on site and dealing with the population of people who are coming out of town that may not necessarily -- we have had a lot more time. i know i said this in the beginning, the thing that shocked me was when we had the hearing that when we got the initial information, we thought it was only 50% of what was in the waste stream that was still compostable. by the time we got to the meeting, they had whittled down the information further and it was actually 60%. i appreciate the information that the department of environment has done to show the case studies and show that when they have people on site, they will not necessarily change the volume, but you will change where the volume goes. instead of it going into trash, a lot of it does kind of what we

have seen more recently where ecology now has a really tiny bucket for the trash and they want -- they want us to be more conscious of our moving behavior this is on a large scale. >> thank you. i want to go back to the department of the environment presenter. one of the things i saw that was missing on the list of potential folks that are going to be affected by this is public housing and i don't know if they are a carveout for the legislation. if it is a carveout of the legislation, but i want to be very careful. i represent district ten which has the four largest public housing units. sunnydale has less than a hundred units. based on your definition on large generators, i would probably include many of our public housing sites. >> supervisor, let me answer that question. we can let the department of environment to jump in. i have a list in front of me.

when we change to the definition from 30-40, some of the public housing sights in your district fall off the list but some stay on. >> exactly. >> the ones that stay on, and we can talk about this, the ones that stay on are in your district, sunnydale, as you said , and a hundred unit property and then, i don't see any of the other -- i see sunnydale but i don't see hunter 's point and i don't see alice griffith. >> it is small. you will not see that one. >> it would have been there originally but now we will be raising it to 40 and they also break their account into separate accounts. so there's multiple garbage accounts. if they had one, they would still be on this list. let me say this. >> hold on. my question still has not been answered. >> they will still be on the

list. but to that point to, and again, i know that there are folks who will come up today to talk about , not just public housing but they will talk about low income housing and the limited amount of budget that they have to operate those buildings, and i would say -- this is the point i will hand over to the department of environment. those buildings, in many cases are spending a significant amount of money on trash collection in their trash account that they would be able to realize significant savings if they were diverting more away from landfill. >> that is good to know. i would like to see those productions. i don't know if they come from the controller's office or the department but i need to be convinced there will be cost savings. i don't know how much you know or how much you have been following the conversation around the horn -- the housing authority. we have some financial challenges. very real challenges that are expensive and i am uncomfortable

moving legislation forward that would further exacerbate that cost for housing. >> i can appreciate that. i know there are a number of affordable housing his that are paying extra on the refuse bills because of very high levels of contamination. so there is an opportunity for them to reduce it significantly. it looks like we knocked off a dozen of them with a change to 40 cubic yards and there is may be another ten or so on the list i'm looking at. i am not sure if it is -- his sunnyvale avenue in your district? >> yes. i don't know what list you are looking at. >> we don't have that list. >> this has some -- >> can you put it on the overhead to your left? >> i can put it on the overhead.

i. i just have to keep it confidential. >> if it is confidential than don't put it on the overhead then. >> i will. i will cover it up. >> please turn on the overhead. ohno. one more time, please san francisco government television. no. all right. perfect. thank you. walk me through what i am looking at here. hunter's view phase i one and phase two. >> above this redline, there are properties that are no longer included because of -- they will no longer be included if the

revised definition is adopted. >> hold on. so the redline and above, they are excluded? >> that would be excluded at the revised definition of 40 cubic yards. >> that still includes robert pitts and the pangs. >> below the redline are still in. >> that is pretty significant. do we know how many units that is in total? we can find it. >> it is not right here. we can get that to you. >> as we continue to have this conversation i will need to see some quantitative numbers around what these costs are and particularly i am interested in the argument you are making, supervisor and to the folks that are supporting this legislature. i want you to prove this and show me where there are potential cost savings and the controller's office could opine at some point on where the cost savings would be. i'm looking at you because you are independent of politics and

could offer some help in crunching these numbers. thank you. >> we can definitely do that. robert from housing is just over 200 units. we have -- they are paying an extra charge. we can give you -- we can get you information on the number of units and do some theoretical cost-saving protections. >> all right. i would like to have more than theoretical cost savings. >> we can talk about if they were to go from a certain level out of compliance or increasing their recovery rate, a lot of the use -- >> perfect. >> a lot of these have very low recovery rates as low as three%. because of that, they are getting zero discount and if they were to do better, they could save a lot of money and

could easily exceed the cost of the facilitator. >> i understand. i think i am so closely tied to the culture around public housing and i have been representing them for that let past a years. sometimes things that look easier on paper is a challenging we are talking literally about a cultural change, keeping in mind , there are renovations that are happening. [please stand by]

>> i just wanted to say one more thing. i've spent, along with the department of environment, fielding a lot of questions from stakeholders. i have spoken to the ones on the account. and one of things they've said is, the pings and others, they said this is an opportunity they could put either youth to work, or residents to work that would then give them a job opportunity, maybe a part-time, maybe full-time, on the scale of some of these units, you're talking about so many it would probably be full-time. as jack said, 3% recovery rate is basically zero. so that amount of opportunity for cost savings would more than pay for itself. so i appreciate your question. i think it's really good.

we can drill down. i know there are other representatives from affordable housing and one of the first things they think about is operating budget and how they're going to pay for this up front. there are some scenarios that people have been able to get grants to get these up and running. one of the things, a significant movement that we've made to not only move the effective date of this from july -- january 1 to july 1, also spreading out the audit period over a three-year period allows us flexibility to work with places like affordable housing and subsidized housing to premier them and educate and -- prepare them and educate to allow them the time and readiness to implement this legislation. >> president cohen: thank you. >> supervisor fewer: thank you, chair. so i have, i think the intention

is good on this. i just have a lot of questions about implementation, about the data, who are we really targeting and just core belief that i think it's one thing to have people sort people's garbage, but it's another thing to really educate people how they can sort their own. so i'm kind of -- i keep going between, like i know we're doing an education outreach, but you know, we recently just changed the rules around what can be recycled. i don't think everybody knows that. what we can recycle and what not. so anyway, i want to say, do we have a list of the 80-plus properties who use zero waste facilitators? do we have a list of those? >> supervisor safai: a list of? >> supervisor fewer: and could

we get that list? 80-plus properties that use zero waste facilitators. >> supervisor safai: we can get that. i don't have that with me. >> supervisor fewer: also i see that schools are on the list. have we consulted the san francisco unified school district, are they aware this is coming before the board? >> a lot of them get removed if we go to 40 and it leaves up to four unified school district sites. could we possibly get a copy of that whole list? we don't know who is on the list and who is not. if really interfaces with another public agency, that agency should actually be

consulted when we are -- because this could ultimately affect them. and i believe our school district are our partners. i know there was one, burbank school? are they still on the list? >> yes, they are. >> so we're down to three unified school district facilities and we're definitely going to communicate with everybody that is on this list with a lot of time. we now have the effective date is july 1, and then people get audit over three-year period. our goal is to work with everybody. >> supervisor fewer: but you haven't communicated? >> we haven't, things are in flux, we haven't talked to the schools yet? i can tell you what they are. luther burbank is on here.

>> i just got it this morning. >> who furnished it to you? >> department of environment, why haven't we gotten this list. >> it's based on their service levels, so with the discussion and a lot of things being in flux in the service, so you know, we now have a list from ecology and we can certainly provide that. >> supervisor fewer: that would be great. >> there are three sites, luther burbank. district 8, 3750 18th street. >> what school? >> it doesn't mention the school name, just shows the address. 3750 18th street in the castro. and there is a school that is on -- 55 deharo. that is on the international --

>> international medical. >> i don't know if that's in your district, supervisor cohen. those are the three. and then there is two private high schools, st. ignatius and sacred heart. so i see five. >> supervisor fewer: when i see schools, especially, i look at other remedies. for example, if it is a high school. if you had someone who was sorting the waste, could it be a student in a club with -- because i think what we're trying to do is reduce the waste that is not sorted. and the waste that is contaminated. and i actually think the best way to do that is actually to educate everyone on how to do it, rather than have someone sort the waste for them. so i think it really starts with the schools and this could be a real learning experience fort whole school community. san francisco unified does serve

58,000 public school students and there hasn't been any robust campaign around litter or littering. i know in my own district, i've launched my own one richibucto monday, which means picking up, sorting, recycling. all those things, but i haven't seen a really robust program that actually hits my community in different languages. i have a large russian speaking community, a large chinese speaking community and i think it's so new of what can be recycled and not. i'm questioning myself, but now i know that a milk carton, you can recycle. i think most people don't know. i guess what i'm struggling with is that i don't know who these offenders are. it's a list of people that could be on the list and this confidential list we just got. and why are we -- who are the

offenders and we know now that not all large generators are offenders. we know that there are some that are offenders and some are not. but we don't actually have the data on there. i haven't seen the data on the ones that are actually violators and ones that aren't. and then also, what are we doing around education and how many resources are we putting toward education? another thing that is concerning to me, we actually haven't talked to other entities that could be impacted by this. and then when i see things like food pantries, are food pantries still on this list? that is concerning to me, too. and i think, is this the only way that we actually solve this problem? or are there other opportunities to solve this problem while we

infuse an education piece in it? so i guess those are some of my questions and i actually think that i -- that i haven't had the answers to those questions. and so in order for me to actually come on board with this, i think some of those questions need to be answered. because some of the, i guess, the large waste -- what are they called? large refuge generators, i have questions about. and is this the only way to do it? and what are we doing around education, too? because we can hire zero waste facilitators and keep hiring and hiring. and another thing, is this a civil service classification? what is the pay scale for these people? and if it is civil service classification, what is the classification? and have we vetted this with the

civil service commission? if this is a job, it should be a living wage job, a unionized job. all these questions i have about it. >> president cohen: all right, thank you, supervisor fewer for sharing just a few of your thoughts. i think that in the spirit of this, it's right without a doubt. but this is going to have such a huge impact that we might need to pump the brakes on this and slow it down. supervisor safai, i have questions. you said the term contaminated waste, what exactly is that? i'm not familiar wit. >> so contamination means that material is in the wrong bin. so if you have your composting bin and someone is throwing in plastic bags or glass, that makes it really hard to market that material and it has to be cleaned up. that is contamination. if you have food going into

recycling, if that soils the paper and makes the sorting difficult, that's contamination. so it's basically the wrong material. we consider recyclable and compostables going into trash contamination. that's a term for having stuff in the wrong bin. >> president cohen: is there any data that drives this initiative for the department of environment? >> there is lots of data we've been talking about. we do comprehensive characterizations and then all the auditing, so ecology is out there looking in bins all the time. and they've been ramping that effort up, so the drivers leave a lot of courtesy tags, letting people know if they leave the wrong materials in the bin. audits are comprehensive. that's taking the material out of the bin and sorting through it. so that is why i showed you the results of auditing the very large generators. >> through the chair, jack, can

you put slide number 6 back up? >> i think that's the one you're talking about. so this slide shows, out of 561 audits of compacters over three quarters have -- over half report recyclables and compostables, so over half the material shouldn't have been in there. that's the key reason we've been going in the wrong direction. one of the key factors. so you see that in almost over 20% of recycling and over 10% of compost compactors were also contaminat contaminated. the primary need is to help recover more material out of the

trash, but we have to make sure there is not too much contamination because that impacts 0 the process to market the material. >> president cohen: when were the audits conducted? >> this is over several years. >> president cohen: i appreciate that. this is budget and finance, over which years? >> this is the information from ecology. i'm not sure how far back it goes. i can check on that. >> president cohen: what is the threshold for contamination that you have to hit in order to become out of compliance? what is that threshold? >> well, because of the marketability issues and trying to keep contaminants out of compost and the soil, the strictest standard is for composting, it's generally around 5%, but there are kind of prohibitives, like glass and

hazardous waste. so if they're able to identify a bottle, that can be enough. so it's basically less than 5%. recycling we've had to become more strict over the last year because of the market challenges. you may have heard some 0 the press around the markets being tighter in terms of contamination. so that is around 5%. and it's been a lot higher on trash with the -- giving people more slack i think as we go toward zero waste, we're going to have to be stricter on that. so recology has been failing somebody on a trash audit and proceeding with extra charges when it's over 50%, but we envision that number definitely needs to come down. as we move forward in the future. and i just want to add that the priority of our program over the last couple of decades is on

separation. we spend a huge amount of effort on education. we do more educating than any jurisdiction in this area. a lot of different campaigns. we continue do a lot of education. that is the priority to provide education. we've trained virtually all of the generators and a lot of their tenants. we provide all these resources. so our primary focus is to help on assistance and education, but there are cases with large generators where they still don't do an adequate job and this ordinance is about providing us with another tool. >> president cohen: did the department of environment work on this version of legislation ten years ago? were you part of that? >> actually, i was. >> president cohen: you mentioned something in your remarks previously about marketability. what is the marketability

standard we're trying to get to? >> well, what you basically have, you had china say we don't have more than half a percent of contamination in all of the paper -- almost all the paper that is going to china. that is nearly impossible to achieve. we don't expect people to sort that level. we've been working with recology and they've spent millions of dollars adding new equipment. it's now a state-of-the-art facility, but even with the best technology, if material comes in too contaminated -- >> president cohen: was that specifically built? >> that's the facility out at pier 96. if you haven't seen it, get a tour. it's an amazing facility. what we're looking at, that facility has to produce super clean material. how much contamination can we handle coming into that facility?

and that's where the 5% comes from. >> president cohen: seems like we should have clear compliance standards. >> what the ordinance provides is we determine the compliance standards in guidelines. we've learned -- i've learned personally from doing ordinances for the last 20 years in the city, that you can get overly prescriptive and get locked in and it's hard. we have principles and guidelines, and we want to not change them very often. in fact, it says we can't do them more than yearly. i expect not to change them nearly that often. but it's only going to be based on a significant change in the market place. and technology keeps improving. so i think we've been able to use the latest technology to help meet the market challenges. there are a lot of jurisdictions backing off recycling because they're not meeting the market standards, we're not having to

do because we're meeting the standards. >> so the technology is out there, and other jurisdictions have made the decision not to upgrade their technology so they're more efficient in sorting? >> recology is employing the best technology out there and they've been making upgrades, but even with that, we can't have people throwing in too much food and recyclables. there are things that are more problematic than others. that's why we have the threshold. i don't expect that to change, but it could, and we need to be able to make the change. we might be able to raise the limit. we -- >> president cohen: i understand, you want flexibility. i get it. i want to move on a little bit. you were talking about guidelines. i'm wondering how often are we going to be updating the guidelines on that? >> so there is language in there, it's part of the proposed changes -- >> we're going to limit -- >> we're going to do that no more than annually.

and i suspect much less frequently than that. we're interested in people being consistent and minimizing any changes. it would only be if it was imperative, that we would change that. >> president cohen: ok. i have a few more questions for the department of the environment. so what is the percentage of the landfill waste that is generated by the lrgs, which is the large refuse generators. what landfill waste is generated, is it better, is it worse at sorting than regular properties? >> well, it depends. there are really good performers out there. there are great facilities that are doing well without zero waste facilitators.

some are doing well with. what you're seeing here is three quarters have over half recyclables and compostables. those three-quarters match that pie chart we show you and supervisor safai said 60% of what is the trash is compostable. it's not that they're worse than other sectors. multiple families are particularly challenging, so they tend to be worse, but it's more like this is a tool that might work for these facilities versus we're not going to expect super small business or individual resident to do that. that's why we have a lot of other tools we work with around education to help others comply. >> president cohen: have you assessed or analyzed the businesses that are doing well, the reasons why they're excelling and in terms of their sort offing the waste product, do we know why?

>> there are certain models in office building. this is something supervisor safai was involved with a task force that the mayor's office commissioned when we were developing mandatory ten years ago. and that task force included property owners, managers, union companies, the janitorial union and we basically were talking about a lot of different ways to do an office building and what is more effective. one of the things that came out of that was having -- there are certain ways of having central collection so that everybody is not being serviced at their desk, because having three at the desk side is cumbersome. so you have them whack to a central location on the floor and have equal convenience for all three streams. we know a lot of best management practices and those are things we promoted. we work a lot with the large properties. we have a consultant team of experts that every day are out

there working with these and other entities. >> president cohen: my question really, is if you have a consultant, experts, people out there working, obviously some are working well and some are not working well, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about the legislation. what i'm trying to understand, for what reason is one segment of the community able to excel and the other part are not excelling or even meeting the standard? that i don't understand where that gap is. >> it's a good question. i guess it comes down to behavior psychology. we have some tenants that do a good job, they have the perfect program -- >> has there been a diagnostic. have you looked at, this tenant or this company does a very good job. let's do analysis and understand their process. what are they doing differently? why are they doing such a good job? that's what i'm trying to understand. i'm new to this legislation and concept.

in my own house, yes, i separate and recycle and compost and i do it, but when i get rid of it, i'm done with it. now i'm dealing with legislation that has to begin to balance priorities. i'm committed to the overall mission to reduce the amount of waste that is going into the landfill. i understand that. but what i'm trying to piece out is where the data and numbers are so there is a baseline that we're setting to know if we're meeting our mark, what the mark is. and if we're not meeting the mark, for what reason? i want to understand the reasons why some are able to hit and some are not able to hit. perhaps in that reason, we don't need the legislation or maybe the legislation proposed needs to be tweaked. i don't know. and i'm not getting the sense from the presentation that there is a deep and thorough understanding as to where that distinction lies. and i'm not getting a good sense

as to what the data that is out there. you sent a really interesting curve model up there. i asked in the beginning, why are we on the trend up, doing a poorer job than years past when it comes to sorting of waste. and there doesn't seem to be an answer for that. you said there are various reasons. i want to know the reasons. it's concerning. i understand that. >> i did mention in my presentation that we've seen the booming construction has been a major driver.

and that's why we're looking at demolition, that may have added the most. because there has been so much construction. and we have a mandatory ordinance and we've been looking at where there is leakage of that out of landfills. there are a variety of challenges. i don't want to go into too much detail. >> president cohen: i want you to go in too much detail. we're in committee. now is the time. >> construction demolition debris is a factor. i mentioned that changing consumption habits and the growth of single-use packaging, plastics and all of that is a factor. across all sectors, people need to do better. that is a factor. and so we know in office buildings what are good models, but that doesn't guarantee you'll meet compliance, because it comes down to the behavior of

every single person in that building. and there are -- there is i think a lot of people are moving fast and distracted or just -- there are people who say, yeah, i just don't want to bother sorting. we've done a lot of deep diving. we've done surveys. we're constantly innovating on our marketing and education and social marketing. and i think that helps. but i don't think that the evidence shows that is not going to get us there across the board with every property. so you know, we want to do as much education as we can. we know that's valuable. you can never do too much education. people are bombarded with so many messages to get people's attention. we do a lot of that on a lot of different levels and work with properties to make sure their programs are efficient, they

meet principles, things are convenient. that can make a big difference, but that's not necessarily going to make it work for every property. that's why we've seen 80-plus properties, they're using them to perform better. whether they're motivated by maximizing their diversion discount recovery benefit, or getting off charges, or wanting to say that they're meeting lead gold. whatever the motivator is, we've seen that is an effective tool and we have properties that are out of compliance. they're paying all the extra charges and the property manager is just absorbing the cost because they feel like it's too hard otherwise to comply. so here, they could do better, but they're not taking the steps to do that and this is the way to say, look, if you after all this time are not able to adequately sort the material, then get professional help.

>> president cohen: where does one get professional help from? >> so you know, we provide a lot of professional help with the program and training setup. here we're talking about the role of zero facilitators that can go into a property and address the specific needs of the property. >> president cohen: so the role of zero waste facilitator? do i google it? >> there are nine companies that are currently doing it that we've identified. there is a history coming out of special events. these are people dedicated in helping to manage the material as it is coming out of the tenants floors. so when the material is consolidated and brought down -- and janitors are doing a lot of that. that's why you see in some of these buildings where they have zero waste facilitators, they've hired additional janitors who are designated to work at

helping material that comes down, so when it goes into the final collection container, they're doing a final quality control sort of that. and that has made the difference. there is a lot of examples where a property has gone from a load aversion rate to a heidi version rate. -- low diversion rate, to high diversion rate. >> i heard if it's a high school, maybe they're high school students that are doing it. >> i think there is an opportunity. janitors are handling the material. there are also other private and nonprofit entities that are at zero waste facilitators. so not every building has a janitorial company that is providing that service. >> president cohen: so do we currently conduct audits? the department of the environment, are you --