The San Francisco Bay Area has always been one of the country’s testing ground for cultural ideas, from Flower Power to solar power, and, in recent years, Mayor Gavin Newsom has positioned San Francisco as the unrivaled leader in green progressiveness. Yesterday, Newsom signed a new rule requiring residents to separate trash, recyclables and compost or face fines. The new rule, due to go into effect this fall, is thought to be the most comprehensive recycling and composting legislation in the country.

In a piece for the Huffington Post, Newsom explains,

“a number of years ago, San Francisco set a lofty green goal–we wanted to divert 75 percent of our resources from the landfill by 2010 and achieve zero waste by 2020. At the time, many people thought our targets were overly ambitious. However, San Francisco is poised to meet these goals. We are currently keeping 72 percent of recyclable material out of our landfill.

We recently conducted a waste-stream analysis and discovered that about two thirds of the garbage people throw away–half a million tons each year–could have been recycled or turned to compost. If we were able to capture everything, we’d be recycling 90 percent–preventing additional waste material from going to the landfill, and creating hundreds of green-collar jobs.

San Francisco already converts over 400 tons of food scraps and other compostable discards into high-grade organic compost every day. It’s so nutrient-rich that the final product is almost jet black in color. It’s snapped up by farms and vineyards across the Bay Area, we can barely keep up with the demand. By requiring all residents and businesses to compost, we’ll increase the amount of “black gold” available for sustainable regional agriculture and improve our environment…

I believe that composting will become second nature for Americans, just like sorting bottles and paper. It will take time, but I believe mandatory composting will spread across the country–improving the air we breathe and reducing our need for landfills.”

San Francisco already offers composting pickup service, even that is something few cities in the U.S. provide, and the new regulations making composting mandatory goes a big step further. Whether mandatory composting will trend like recycling has in most cities remains to be seen, but we’re curious to see which cities will be next. Burlington? Boulder? Austin? Portland?

Read more at the city’s recycling programs site - www.sfenvironment.org/.