Once again, our state legislators have passed a bill long on good intentions but filled with unintended consequences. This new mandate will require food waste, i.e. meal scraps, fruit peelings, etc., to be placed in the same container as the green waste.
Now let’s consider the consequences of this action during the warm to hot days of spring and summer. Food sitting in containers outside next to our homes will be an open invitation to various species of rodents as well as opossums, raccoons and flies, all the while rotting in the bin waiting for pickup day. The potential for various diseases from these now well-fed creatures moving freely about our neighborhoods is astounding, and here we are living in fear of an airborne virus.
Keep it in your home, you say, and place it in a separate container. Great, can’t wait for the pleasant aroma of rotting food to welcome us home each day, not to mention the horde of ants camped out in the yard looking for an entrance. Making your own compost pile is laudable but for most residents not very practical and the concept of community gardening has some possibilities, but once again in many communities not practical, and the idea of taking it over to a local compost site, well I thought that’s what we have been paying Waste Management to do all along.
On a much larger scale, let’s consider the grocery stores and restaurants. While a separate bin will be furnished by their local trash provider the scope of these issues mentioned above will multiply over and over.
I’m not saying we do not need to make some changes in the way we handle food waste and maintain landfills, but please could the Wizards of Smart in Sacramento allow some issues like this to be managed by local governments? The one-solution-fits-all mandate coming from Sacramento is, quite frankly the root of most of the problems we face in this state.
Dennis O’Neill
Valencia
