These salt ponds are going to be transformed in the next few years. The question is how. (Photo by Matt Baume.)

In a collection of salt evaporation ponds tucked between a freeway, a sleepy little marina, and the headquarters of Dreamworks Animation, the San Francisco Bay’s ecological future hangs in the balance.

The ponds themselves look deceptively blank: Vast flat rectangles of shallow water once used by Cargill to produce salt, the two-and-a-quarter square miles are fenced-off and nearly featureless, like an enormous bank of flattened solar panels.

To the west is Bair Island, itself a former salt pond. After four years of restoration, veiny tributaries and puffs of native scrub have begun to reemerge, drawing threatened species like the California Clapper Rail and Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.

To the east is Bayfront Park, a capped landfill where you can climb a slope with rolling green hills on one side and Cargill’s barren salt ponds on the other.

Although the future is uncertain, this much is clear: The salt ponds are going away. But there’s a debate over what takes their place, and both parties say they have lofty, environmentally friendly goals.

On one side, David Lewis, executive director of the environmental group Save the Bay: “I grew up here, in Palo Alto,” he says. “When I was a kid growing up, and there was still major salt production going on, the salt pile was a major landmark. It’s basically right next to the 101, and it was at least five or six stories high, and it looked like snow.”

On the other, urban planner Peter Calthorpe, whose plan to develop the salt ponds is fiercely opposed by Save the Bay: “I have a very personal connection because I grew up in Palo Alto,” says Calthorpe, one of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism. “Growing up there, nobody ever went to the bay side,” Calthorpe continues. “When we wanted open space, we went to the hills. … In the peninsula, there’s very few places you can go and be in relationship to the bay.”

There’s no debate that the San Francisco Bay desperately needs wetlands restoration. The 1999 report “Baylands Ecosystem Habitat Goals” estimated that of the original 190,000 acres of tidal marsh, only 16,000 remained. Of 500 species of fish and wildlife, 20 were endangered or threatened. The report recommended that 100,000 acres of tidal wetlands be restored.

Twelve years later, 44,000 acres now exist, with 32,000 anticipated over the next few years. That’s largely thanks to the advocacy of Save the Bay, which was founded in 1961 to prevent a plan that would have filled the entire waterfront with urban development, reducing miles of bay to a thin river.

Since then, Save the Bay’s initiatives have run the gamut, from blocking runway expansion at San Francisco International Airport to identifying violations of the Clean Water Act to pushing for plastic-bag bans.

Now, they’ve set their sights on stopping Arizona real estate company DMB from implementing its Saltworks Plan.

Several years in the works, the Saltworks Plan is DMB’s attempt to turn the 1,400-acre Cargill salt ponds into a cluster of high-density housing projects, mixed with parks, sports fields, and some wetland restoration. Peter Calthorpe is chief designer.

The Saltworks Plan aims for a balance on the 1,400-acre site: 804 acres of open space, and 632 acres of development. Some 436 acres would be set aside for wetland restoration, an interpretive center, and schools. Parks and rec would comprise another 255 acres, and 113 acres would go toward buffers and sports facilities. The development would include extensive bike paths and an extension of the San Francisco Bay Trail.

Urbanist Peter Calthorpe believes a development that includes dense housing, parks, and wetlands provides multiple benefits. Environmental group Save the Bay wants them restored to tidal marsh.Photo: Matt Baume

High-density housing would occupy the remainder of the land.

So why build at all? Why not turn the entire site into wetlands?

For Calthorpe, it comes down to the San Francisco Bay Area’s desperate need to balance jobs and homes. It’s not just an environmental issue, he says; it’s also about social justice.

According to the regional Metropolitan Transportation Commission, Redwood City — within whose bounds the salt ponds lie — is classified as a major regional employment center, hosting between 50,000 to 100,000 jobs at employers like Google, Yahoo, Oracle, and Kaiser Permanente.

There’s just one problem: not enough residents to fill the jobs.

“For four decades, we’ve been building more jobs than housing,” Calthorpe says. “In Silicon Valley and the Peninsula, that problem has doubled. Because of that, we’re spreading outward. There’s 200,000 in-commuters every day into the Bay Area — people who can’t afford to live near their jobs.”

The housing shortage doesn’t just put tens of thousands of air-choking cars on the road, Calthorpe says. It also causes home prices to spike, with San Francisco and San Jose homes selling for around three times the national median price.

Options for improving density with urban infill are limited, argue proponents of the Saltworks development. There are no other sites suitable for restoring the jobs/housing balance.

It’s hard to predict what proposed new homes in the development would cost, since the size, timing, and complexity of the project are still moving targets. There’s likely to be a wide range of prices, Calthorpe says, with at least 15 percent of units classified as affordable housing. The density will help keep prices down, he adds.

To its backers, the appeal of the Saltworks Plan is clear. It strikes a balance between sustainable development, wetland restoration, and regional jobs and housing — and it’s Redwood City’s only chance to make that play.

David Lewis doesn’t see it that way, and at first, neither did One Bay Area, a planning initiative from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG). Tasked with planning the region’s sustainable growth, One Bay Area released an Initial Vision Scenario last month, calling for 97 percent of new housing to be built within the existing urban footprint.

Rather than building on undeveloped land, the document cites infill potential along highways: Telegraph Ave., International Blvd., Mission Blvd., El Camino Real, San Pablo Ave. All told, One Bay Area expected the number of regional households to grow by 902,600 by 2035.

But of those households, the report anticipated that San Mateo County, where Redwood City is, will account for just 93,800 units. The bulk of new housing will rise far across the bay, in Contra Costa County (154,000 new homes), Alameda County (212,700 new homes), and Santa Clara County (253,900 new homes).

According to Calthorpe, the claim that 97 percent of necessary housing could be built within existing urban areas is based on out-of-date housing projections. Calthorpe claims that planners have chronically underestimated the need for housing, and points out that One Bay Area increased the projected need for housing by 250,000.

Save the Bay has rounded up a lengthy roster of local opponents to the Saltworks project. They point out that formal comments to the city are 10-to-1 opposed to the project, with residents writing, “I fear a disaster in the making,” and “This isn’t just about housing, this is also about good planning.”

The Sequoia Union High School district estimated that the new residences could strain existing facilities — although the plan for the development calls for new schools to be built. And even the League of Women Voters has weighed in, claiming that the project “does not concentrate development along existing transportation corridors.”

Save the Bay wants to restore the wetlands to their natural state.Photo: Matt Baume

As crucial as new housing is, there’s also no arguing that restored wetlands are sorely needed. Wetlands protect cities by slowing wave energy and absorbing floodwater. They reduce the need for levees, and sequester carbon. Plants filter water by absorbing and retaining pollutants.

Restoration would benefit animal life as well. According to the 1999 report on baylands habitat, restored salt ponds should provide islets and foraging for plovers and terns.

Calthorpe’s plan for the Saltworks includes such restorations — in fact, it would act as both levee and habitat. “You can build an engineering levee that’s riprap [piles of rock] and concrete,” he says, “or we can turn those levees into grand parkways, and we slope the edges and turn them into complex wetland ecologies. It’s a more expensive configuration. And it’s a configuration that the Saltworks is planning to put on the ground.”

The fact that some of that ecology would be squeezed out by development doesn’t much matter, Calthorpe says. “There’s plenty of bay salt ponds to be converted. Plus or minus 700 acres is 2 percent of what needs to be restored. Does that have a huge environmental impact? No.”

For now, the site isn’t serving anyone, a nearly empty void between highways and habitats. The primary occupants are brine shrimp that turn the ponds various shades of red. When seen from airplane windows, the colorful geometric shapes look like a vast work of modern art.

But David Lewis sees more than that when he stands at the edge of the water. “I see a site that’s crying out to be restored to tidal marsh,” he said. “If Save the Bay hadn’t started the successful movement to stop more of the bay from being filled in, and won a moratorium on additional landfill in the bay, all of the shallow areas could have been filled in and we’d have had a narrow river. That success is celebrated by the Bay Area. It’s proud of the bay’s history — stopping inappropriate development in the bay.”

“The frustrating thing to me,” Peter Calthorpe says, “is that I do a lot of work and I rarely get to see a site that offers so many opportunities for good things. And to reduce it to one thing is silly when you can do six good things.”

Editor’s note: We’ve added the video below, from the Redwood City Saltworks developers, at the request of Peter Calthorpe. It includes footage of parts of the site that were not accessible to our reporter.

Hayes Valley Farm is flourishing where a freeway ramp used to be.Photo: Zoey Kroll

The city’s largest agricultural experiment to date may be the Hayes Valley Farm, which is growing on the former site of a freeway ramp. The ramp was demolished, but the lot sat empty for years as development funding wilted in the recession. Then, in January of 2010, a dedicated group of farmers and permaculturalists began to convert the property into usable farmland.

With a border of mature trees and areas of direct sun, the location was well-suited for gardening. But the soil needed work. It was polluted, choked with weeds, and lacking in nutrients.

That’s where Bayview Greenwaste came in. Hayes Valley Farm spread tons of the company’s high-quality mulch across the lot over the past year — and they haven’t had to pay for a single pound.

Sanjay Bhas founded Bayview Greenwaste in 1998. The company, located on the city’s southern waterfront, collects plant waste — for a fee — and then grinds the organic matter into mulch that it gives away for free to anyone who wants it. Nonprofits, municipalities, private citizens, schools, and power plants (which burn organic matter instead of coal) count themselves among the company’s beneficiaries.

At Hayes Valley Farm, Bayview’s raw material was essential. Volunteers began by laying down a layer of cardboard, followed by ground-up organic matter, a process known as sheet-mulching. “As far as I know, it’s the largest sheet-mulching project ever done,” said David Cody, one of the Hayes Valley Farm’s founders. “It takes a forest hundreds of years to make an inch of topsoil. Hayes Valley Farm will make two feet of topsoil in less than five years.”

They’ve cultivated the mulch by planting fava beans and clover, which recharge nitrogen levels. Urban farmers have been re-learning the sustainable farming techniques last seen in the city a century ago. Now plants will thrive where cars once roared through, surrounded by existing old trees, beehives, red-tailed hawks, and an increasing population of butterflies.

“Before Sanjay was around, all that compost was going to the dump,” Cody said.

Sanjay Bhas and his mulch at Bayview Greenwaste.Photo: Matt BaumeOn a recent day, Bhas stood on the grounds of Bayview Greenwaste next to a pile of branches, leaves, and tree stumps. He estimated that the pile of debris, the size of a small house, would take a few hours to grind.

Making healthy mulch is a science. Bhas uses a giant thermometer to measure the internal temperature of the piles to make sure they’re hot enough to kill organisms, and frequently tests for lead and arsenic.

“It’s a learning process every day,” he said.

Bayview Greenwaste occupies a key role in San Francisco’s burgeoning gardening scene. Community gardens have blossomed around the city in the last decade. According to the Recreation and Park Department’s last count, there are three dozen gardens on public land, and countless more on private lots.

Francesca Vietor, the newly appointed president of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, has directed her staff to identify more city land that can be used for urban farming and food production. The city is also exploring changes to outdated laws that prohibit residents from selling homegrown produce.

High on the slope of Potrero Hill hides a small community garden known simply by the nearby intersection: Eighteenth and Rhode Island. Like the Hayes Valley Farm, it was an empty lot until someone decided it could be put to better use. The property owner, a physician, granted gardeners permission to fortify the soil, to plant trees, and to construct a greenhouse.

“We’ve grown thousands of pounds of food in this tiny little space,” says David Cody — thanks, in part, to mulch provided by Bayview Greenwaste.

Bayview Greenwaste’s mulch can be found at local schools as well. A program called Urban Sprouts maintains gardens at six public schools, with 750 students per year learning to grow food, flowers, and herbs.

“We’re a really small grassroots organization,” said Audrey Roderick, Urban Sprouts’ program director. “So having access to large quantities of materials is important.” Staff use car-shared pickup trucks to haul mulch to their installations.

At Ida B. Wells High School, Urban Sprouts augmented its operation with beehives. Another garden abuts McLaren Park, drawing large flocks of birds. In the future, Roderick hopes to cultivate fruit trees.

The group’s biggest installation is at Log Cabin Ranch, a city-run “post-adjudication facility” for “delinquent” young men 45 miles south of the city, isolated from civilization and surrounded by wilderness.

The Ranch’s tennis court was too dilapidated to use, and the city didn’t have the funds to fix it, so Urban Sprouts turned to reliable old sheet-mulching tactics to transform the court into a garden. “It’s an urban ag demonstration in a very rural area,” said Roderick.

Another mulch recipient is the Free Farm, an agricultural installation on an empty city lot that housed a church before it burned down. A constellation of Episcopalian, Lutheran, and secular organizations teamed up with the property owner, St. Paulus Lutheran Church, to turn the quarter-acre sunken pit into a garden.

“The lot was all weeds, so we sheet-mulched,” said Joshua Griffin, an environmental justice missioner with the group. “Our entire surface, except for the beds, all of the paths and the labyrinth are all from Bayview Greenwaste,” said Griffin.

So far, they’ve produced 2,500 pounds of produce, according to Griffin — greens, potatoes, beans, squash, tomatoes, broccoli, and plenty of favas. They give the food away for free on weekends.

Private companies are also beneficiaries. “We’re an edible-landscaping company,” said Catherine Butler, owner of Urban Edibles, “with the idea of growing food where people live.”

Urban Edibles maintains about 10 gardens around town, mostly in low-density neighborhoods like the Sunset and Bernal Heights. Butler uses Bayview Greenwaste for sheet-mulching, and discovered that the mulch makes prime material for vermiculture – that’s worm-farming, for the uninitiated — when a neglected potato tower tipped over. “That’s how the worms got in there, and I found that they just loved it,” she said.

Bayview mulch has been a boon for private backyard gardens, too. San Francisco resident Ross Yeo used it to jump-start his own 1,000-square-foot plot, where he grows native plants, flowers, and a couple small fruit trees. “I think it’s great for projects where you need a large quantity of material to get started,” he said.

Good clean fun at Hayes Valley Farm.Photo: Zoey KrollMost of these installations are in it for the long haul, but the Hayes Valley farm could go away if the lot’s owner finally secures financing for long-promised condos.

But David Cody is optimistic. “Maybe the economy will get to the point when we don’t need condos,” he said, though it’s hard to imagine a day when the San Francisco real estate game ceases to be lucrative.

Even if the farm eventually vanishes, its painstakingly nitrogen-charged soil displaced by a new building’s foundation, it will still have spurred a transformation around the city.

“That’s one of our legacy goals,” Cody said. “It’s a depot where people are coming to learn, and then exporting knowledge, plants, and soil to take back to their backyard.” All you need to get started is a nice load of mulch.

If you want to keep garbage out of landfills, you have to stop thinking about it as garbage. Instead, think of it as resources. If you’re throwing away the part of that veggie burger you couldn’t finish, you’re throwing away potential compost for the vineyard that’s growing grapes for the bottle of wine you’ll drink with your next meal.

This is how Jack Macy thinks. He developed San Francisco’s trailblazing composting program and is currently Zero Waste Coordinator for the city. Here, he shares the city’s secrets to success.

Q. What makes San Francisco’s waste management unique?

A. We have policies to push us all the way toward a future of sending zero waste to landfill. Those general policies came out of developing programs to divert as much material that can be recycled or composted as possible. In addition to comprehensive recycling, we also have a composting collection program that includes not just yard trimmings and plant debris, which is common in California, but all food scraps and other food-soiled paper products that would not otherwise be recyclable.

Q. How has San Francisco’s waste management changed over the last decade?

A. We were the first ones to do large-scale food composting in the state, starting on the commercial side in ‘96 and on the residential side in ‘97. We started citywide in ‘99, and by 2000 we’d established the framework that we have now and it’s been expanding as we seek to get everyone involved.

Following our lead, a lot of jurisdictions have taken our guidelines. California and the West Coast [are] doing more with this comprehensive approach. And that results in a lot of material being diverted.

If you look at what we accept as recyclable and compostable, it adds up to 90 percent of everything that’s being discarded. If everybody recycled or composted what they could, we’d be at 90 percent. We recognize that we’re not going to get everybody to do it.

Q. Who led the change?

A. It really came out of our department. We were looking at the larger picture of why recycle and compost, and there’s so much more than just saving landfill space, it’s about conserving resources. In our case, our department, we were the activists promoting it. We’ve had the political support to push the envelope — both the mayor and the [board of supervisors] and visionary people in our department have helped us do that.

We adopted our goal back in 2002 — eight years ago — and we weren’t the first, but we were the first in the state to set a date on zero waste.

We have a commission on the environment appointed by the mayor, and we often work through the commission on developing policies. So we were doing that with the zero waste thing and bringing in different local organizations.

[Randy Hayes] said we had to pick a date, and we’re like, well we don’t know when we can get there. And he said let’s do it in 2020 and we said okay.

When the zero waste policy went to the board of supervisors, they adopted the 75 percent and they decided not to pick a date for zero waste. They kicked it back to the commission on the environment and said once the city certifies that it’s met 50 percent then you can pick a date for zero waste.

Q. How did you overcome skepticism and gain buy-in?

A. We weren’t saying we’re going to tax businesses or raise your rates — it was just saying, “we want to recycle and compost as much as possible.” Why would people be against that? We weren’t saying what a specific impact would be, and that’s something that had to be figured out as we go along.

The mandatory [composting] was a much bigger deal to pass, because that was a direct behavioral thing we were asking people to do. We went through a long stakeholder process, meeting with apartment associations, business associations, building manager associations, the chamber, to get their impact and support on how mandatory would work.

There are a lot of laws that ask people to do things and there’s a lot of common sense behind this too. People have been recycling for a long time, we’ve had the compositing program for a decade, but not everyone was participating.

Q. Were there new costs associated with the new system?

A. We’ve created a rate structure so that when people compost and recycle more, it’s easy to save money. If you reduce your trash service, which is very easy on the commercial side, you’ll save. The average small business that goes from not recycling and composting to recycling and composting, it’ll save hundreds of dollars a month. And a large business will save thousands.

From helping them to physically set up a program and providing stickers and signs and doing training of janitors, we have a whole team of people who do this training. We provide all the assistance you need to help make this program easy to implement. There are thousands of businesses that are participating.

Our goal is not to come out and start beating people with a stick and start fining people. We want to use this as a tool to help educate people that they need to be participating, get their attention, and we’re doing outreach and assisting people in participating and benefiting financially.

Q. Has it been successful?

A. The impact has been tremendous. From the time that mandatory composting was passed in April last year, we’ve gone from 400 tons a day of compostables being collected to almost 600 tons. Within a year we saw an increase of about a quarter in the number of businesses participating.

We have a restaurant next door and he has a resistance to government telling him to do something, and he had this mind-frame that it was too hard to do and we kept working with him and finally got him on the program, and they’re like, oh my God, we’re saving so much money and it’s so easy.

Hopefully we’ll see the program continuing to expand. Alameda County, Contra Costa County, and now San Mateo County are rolling out programs. So there’s more and more food scraps. And in addition to composting, we’ve been doing digestion of food scraps. We’re looking at different technologies to digest all our stuff first and then compost that.

[Composting is aerobic -- in other words, it uses oxygen. Digesting food scraps is anaerobic. It's more expensive, but it produces useful methane gas.]

Local governments are responsible for managing these material streams. Often we’ll have a contract with a private hauler. We’re a little different in that we have a permanent hauler system going back to 1932. We have an exclusive hauler and we regulate that hauler like a utility. The city helps set the rates that the collectors charge residents and businesses and it’s those rates that fund the whole system.

Residents only pay the volume of the container that’s being collected for landfilling, and whatever they put in blue or green, they’re not paying extra for that.

Bales of plastic are collected at Recology’s Pier 96 facility.Photo: Walter ParenteauGarbage: it’s gross, it stinks, and all anyone wants is to be rid of it.

For most cities, that means sending thousands of tons of unwanted flotsam and jetsam to landfills every day. But in San Francisco, garbage is treated like a resource that shouldn’t be wasted. And that means formulating a plan to reduce the city’s garbage output to zero. Yes, that’s right: zero.

Sound impossible? Well, thanks to the country’s toughest mandatory recycling and composting laws, the amount of refuse that San Francisco diverts to recycling and compost is nearing 80 percent, and keeps on climbing each year. (Read a Q&A with San Fran’s top recycling official to find out how the city makes it happen.)

The beginning

San Francisco’s zero-waste quest was touched off by AB 939, a 1989 law that required California towns to divert 50 percent of their trash away from landfills. Inspired, San Francisco decided it could do even better.

Throughout San Francisco, public bins offer options for trash, composting, and recycling.Photo: Christopher Porter“There was a perceived shortage of landfill space,” says the bill’s sponsor, former California Assemblyman Byron Sher. “San Francisco was a poster city for the problems. … [The city] had to transport its solid waste over the Altamont Pass at considerable expense to the city.”

Randy Hayes, then president of San Francisco’s Commission on the Environment, saw a unique opportunity. The city worked with its exclusive waste hauler, Norcal Waste Systems (since rebranded as Recology) to run a dozen experimental pilot programs, augmented by community outreach meetings and teams dispatched to train businesses and residents. In 2000, a three-stream system was established: blue bins for recycling, green for compost, and black for landfill.

Collecting data about the city’s refuse was key. “We do a lot of analysis of what San Francisco sends to the landfill,” says Recology spokesman Robert Reed. “We look closely at the garbage … and we saw a lot of food, so we designed this urban food scrap collection program.” Following successful tests, home composting was made mandatory in 2009.

The new law has been met with more eagerness than outrage, thanks in part to a public education campaign that demonstrated the ease and convenience of composting.

The dreamers

The city’s success might not have been possible without Recology President Mike Sangiacomo, who was among the first in the hauling industry to push for new recycling and composting technology. At Sangiacomo’s behest, Recology recently joined The Product Stewardship Council to push for packaging reform.

Jack Macy and the city’s environmental staff worked hand-in-hand with Recology to develop a feasible zero-waste plan. “We wanted to say, ‘Well, when you’re at 90 percent you’re doing an awesome job, but then if you say that’s the ultimate goal, you’re saying it’s okay to be wasting 10 percent of your resources,’” said Macy, the city’s Commercial Zero Waste Coordinator. “As long as we’re taking nonrenewable resources and throwing them away, that’s not sustainable.”

Randy Hayes was one of the first to push for zero waste at the city level. He explained that due to state and federal leaders’ political gridlock, local initiatives are key to enacting environmental reform.  “The fallback becomes cities,” he said. “If you look around the world at bold policy shifts, you’ll see many more examples at a city level.”

San Francisco leaders were initially skeptical, and asked the Department of Environment to reach a 75 percent diversion rate before setting loftier targets. But zero-waste evangelists had a powerful ally: average San Francisco citizens. “I’ve carried a lot of environmental legislation in my time,” said AB939 sponsor Byron Sher. “But in the sense of one that was embraced by the public, this clearly has to be at the top of that list. People want to do the right thing.”

The money

Diverting waste from landfills required new technology and equipment, the cost of which was borne by Recology. The company spends “millions” to provide San Francisco residents with all those bins, and spent $38 million, to build a new recycling plant on Pier 96 in the early 2000s. Recology also spent $2.5 million in 2009-10 to upgrade technology at Jepson Prairie Organics, where they compost food scraps.

Most customers only see the three bins, but behind the scenes, Recology has developed 18 separate recycling programs — more than any city in the country — to maximize diversion.

In addition to the ecological benefit, San Franciscans have a financial incentive to sort their waste. Customers who reduce their landfill-bound garbage get deductions on their hauling bills, and there’s no fee for additional recycling and compositing bins. By sorting waste, businesses can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars, said Jack Macy.

The outcome

With the amount of garbage going to landfills steadily dwindling, San Francisco’s war on waste is so far a huge success. In 2008, the last year for which the city has data, the diversion rate was 72 percent, up from 69 percent in 2007 and 67 percent in 2006.

When the city enacted mandatory composting in 2009, the daily volume of compost grew from 400 tons per day to 600. And the initiative is spreading: In August of this year, nearby Marin began curbside pickup of kitchen-scrap compost.

The copycats

Spurred by San Francisco’s success, surrounding cities are rushing to reduce their own landfill dependency. Across the bay, Oakland established its own food scrap collection program, and has targeted 2020 for achieving zero waste. Eco-conscious Berkeley changed the name of its Solid Waste Commission to the Zero Waste Commission, and San Jose is currently running compost pilot programs.

“Eventually, we’re hoping that we’ll only have to pick up the garbage every other week,” said Carol Misseldine, Mill Valley’s Sustainability Director.

In some towns, private citizens step in when their leaders’ waste-reduction plans prove insufficient. Zero Waste Seattle, for example, pushes for citywide composting, as well as for carpet-recycling and the elimination of unnecessary phone books. In Portland, the Zero Waste Alliance seeks to expand the city’s composting program, which is currently limited only to business
es.

Top city officials from around the world have toured Recology’s state-of-the-art facilities. That’s welcome news to Randy Hayes, who went on from the city’s Department of the Environment to found the Rainforest Action Network and to serve as American Director of the World Future Council.

Ultimately, he said, the planet’s survival depends on our ability to reuse resources. “Waste is something we need to virtually eradicate from our society,” he said.

Alviso’s Medicinal All-Salt may look like ordinary table salt, but it has a little extra pharmaceutical kick. Exactly which drugs are present is somewhat unknowable, even to those selling the product, since it depends on which ones happen to have been recently flushed down local toilets. That mysterious grab-bag aspect is all part of the fun — unless of course, you happen to get a batch infused with industrial pesticides and flame retardants.

OK, so All-Salt isn’t really a commercial enterprise, despite the quaint and appealing packaging. Jon Cohrs and Morgan Levy, the team behind All-Salt, have a point to make.

Levy is a water management researcher at UC Berkeley. Cohrs is an artist. They have a mutual interest in making environmental issues more accessible, and cooked up the idea for All-Salt about six months ago. To make it, they gather brackish water from the Artesian Slough, which channels water away from the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant and into South San Francisco Bay. 

“We both wanted to do a locally specific project with broader relevance,” Levy explained. “Water sanitation is a notoriously un-sexy issue, and this is an interesting way to reconnect people with their local and regional water systems, not to mention highlight an important water contamination issue.” The effect of the pharmaceuticals on aquatic life is not fully understood.

The San Jose/Santa Clara plant treats an average of 100,000,000 gallons of wastewater per day. It’s the site of some of the country’s most extensive water-quality testing, and researchers have found that some chemicals make it through the 16-hour treatment process intact — including ofloxacin, carbamazepine, and fluoxetine. Yes, that’s right: at last, you can season your dinner with Prozac.

All-Salt’s a funny ice-breaker, but the science behind the project is solid. Both Levy and Cohrs spent months interviewing water industry insiders, compiling reports, and designing and testing various salt ponds. After some trial and error, they developed a quick workflow for collecting water in buckets, straining particles out with a nylon paint filter, and then letting the salty water evaporate on plastic sheets stretched over a large wooden frame.

So far, the project’s attracted plenty of attention and conversation. Levy’s favorite reaction so far: when a park ranger spotted Cohrs wheeling a dolly full of five-gallon buckets of water out of the Artesian Slough, the body of water near the waste treatment plant, he initially demanded a permit for collecting water. Then he realized that the Park Service’s authority stops just before reaching the sewage plant’s runoff.

Levy hopes the project will be an eye-opener for citizens. “It’s been really fun to research,” she wrote, “and will be even more fun to INGEST. Ha.”

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