The City of San Diego is recognizing 10 local businesses and organizations that implemented or expanded innovative waste reduction and recycling programs. From establishing a cigarette butt collection and recycling program, to creating a system to track solid waste tonnage to identify diversion opportunities, the 2020 Business Waste Reduction and Recycling Award winners displayed forward thinking in their programs.   These businesses and organizations are helping the city reach its Climate Action Plan goal of achieving Zero Waste by the year 2040.   The list of winners, recognized for work completed in 2019, includes:  

1. LJ Crafted Wines — Wine membership utilizes reusable bottles with swing tops that are returned and exchanged for a sanitized bottle where customers choose which wines they want, directly from the barrel. This avoids single-use bottles, foils, corks and cartons.

 

2. San Diego County Regional Airport Authority — Established a cigarette butt collection and recycling program. The butts are collected and shipped to TerraCycle which composts the cigarette paper and tobacco. The plastic filters are recycled and turned into outdoor benches and tables. A total of 17 pounds were collected in 2019.

 

3. San Diego Mesa College — Composted 16.34 tons of pre-consumer food scraps from campus cafeterias and coffee shops for use in the on-campus garden.

 

4. University of California San Diego — All construction and demolition projects are required to divert 75 percent of debris from the landfill.

 

5. San Diego State University — Implemented the SkySpark solid waste tracking system: an online, interactive waste dashboard that tracks tonnages specific to buildings on campus to help analyze and identify diversion opportunities.

 

6. Jansen R&D (Johnson & Johnson) — Efforts taken to become a paperless facility, such as a switch to digital signage to reduce the number of posters and flyers, and canceled subscriptions to scientific paper publications encouraging use of the centralized library with online journals.

 

7. Hazard Center — Hosted annual Recycle/Spring Clean Up event for tenants to properly dispose of items that do not belong in the recycling container.

 

8. San Diego Zoo — “Recycles” electricity via a one-megawatt energy battery that stores and discharges energy during peak hours to assist with park operations.

 

9. Sharp Healthcare — Diverted 4.2 million pounds of material from the landfill. This included composting 500,000 pounds of food waste and reprocessing 106,000 pounds of surgical instruments. Expired, unusable medical equipment was donated to the nonprofit Ssubi is Hope.

 

10. San Diego Food Bank—  “Turbo Separator” takes unopened but damaged and inedible cans, boxes, and jars of food and separate the food from the packaging for compost and recycling, respectively.