Environmental Review Committee - Regular Meeting

Staff, can you please proceed with the roll call? Sharon Hanson? Susan Hanson? Here. Vice Chair Feng? Present. Commissioner Carter?

Here.

Commissioner Pat Gonkar? Here.

Commissioner Yang?

You're all present. Thank you. Alright. Let's move on to approval of the minutes. We'll start with item one. So approval of the July 17 Sustainability Commission minutes. Can you pull up the minutes, please? They're on the screen. You want a couple seconds? Do we have a motion to approve the minutes as written?

I do. I I put up a motion to approve.

Is too fast again? Okay. If you go on, take a second to look at the minutes.

You did great. K.

I reread them.

I read them last night. So k. Can we proceed with the roll call? Is there a

Yes.

Okay. It

was five second. They're not stupid. Sherry Hansen? Yes. Vice chair Feng?

Yes.

Commissioner Carter?

Yes.

Commissioner Pat Goenkart? No. Commissioner Yea? Yes. The motion carries unanimously. Okay. Great. Okay. Well, let's move on to postponements. Do we have any postponements? No postponements. Okay. Can we move on to oral communications? Yes. All right. So this is the portion of the meeting that's reserved for people that wish to address the commission on any matter within the jurisdiction of the commission, and not on the agenda. Speakers are limited to three minutes. Victoria, are there any attendees waiting to make comments?

Yes. Now is your opportunity.

Okay.

I'm gonna turn that to you.

Go ahead and hand

the speaker.

I do have a timer on

the screen. Molly, do you want some? Oh.

And I'm like, do you want a zip code?

Thank you.

I have this. I can get it for the website.

Okay. Great.

Yep. That's when

you're ready. Great.

Alright. Yeah. So my name is Owen. I'm a senior at Mountain High School. Thank you guys so much for having me. And I'm here to talk about my environmental app called Living Footprints. So I was inspired to create this app after taking AP Environmental Science where I learned how simple habits have hidden environmental costs. And despite the awareness that I gained from learning how daily actions impact the environment, I realized that many others didn't have this awareness. And so I want to create an engaging and accessible tool that connects people's daily routines to measured environmental effects. And so to get into how Bloom Footprint works, it was built in Unity, which is a game development tool, and it's designed to be a very interactive and game like experience.

And so you just walk through living spaces like a house or an apartment, and they use WSD keys to move around, and it's a first person perspective. And they interact with various household objects, like laundry machine or a fridge. And once they do, they're taken to a scene where they learn both visually and textually about environmental concepts and how that links back to the household impacts that they make or the household actions they make. A couple of environmental concepts covered phantom load, which is energy wasted through idle appliances, food contamination and recycling, water usage through native versus non native plants, and deciduous trees as temperature regulators. So these are just a couple, but I think there's around 12 to 15 environmental concepts that I cover in this app.

And I added features like task lists and sound effects to maximize engagement and make this game like experience instead of kind of an educational chore that kind of forces people to to play. So it's fun and easy to use, and it also teaches practical lessons about sustainability. It's best to make sustainable approachable for families and students, showing that small options really do add up. And so right now, this app is freely available to download online. I've been sharing it with local libraries and community centers to encourage public use.

One quick note is that this app can only be used on computers and not mobile devices. So about collaboration and partnerships, I would love to collaborate with the city of Sunnyvale to help share this resource with residents or schools. I think this tool could very well complement the city's ongoing sustainability efforts, whether it be through community education, youth engagement initiatives, or other opportunities. I'd also like to work together to pilot this app, so adding an additional environmental concepts or information specifically related to Sunnyvale and its environmental challenges. And so if you're interested, I'd be very happy to send a download link, a download video, or an eFire, which is this one right here.

And I also have business cards in my pocket so I can provide you guys with my positive information. So, yeah, thank you guys so much for everything we'll do to make our community more sustainable. And, yeah, thank you.

Yeah. Thank you.

And I believe we have a second speaker. Go ahead when you're ready.

Hi. Thanks for this opportunity. My name is Gautam. I'm a senior at Cupertino High School, and I'm passionate about the environment and computer science. So I've developed an app to apply my computer science skills to try and address this following the way that I saw was possible. So I created an app called ReStore. You can scan the QR code, download it in the Apple App Store. It's a mobile app. And, basically, the the purpose of it is to help people track their positive impact on the environment. And, that will motivate people.

They're able to track their their impact as they go and see their progress. So, yeah, it allows you to track action ranging from eating plant based meals to installing solar panels in your house to raising awareness and doing more community driven actions outside of your individual habits. So yeah. And then there's a there's social features with the app, like, you know, friends, and you can create challenges with your friends to motivate each other. You can set goals for yourself.

There's also resources to learn more about how to help the environment in general. So I have these these handouts here a little more than what's on this image.

Yeah.

That's some. That's you can see on there. The actions. So, yeah, I would love to work with you know, to help express this with staff within our community and. Alright.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I took a picture of your flyer. Can I pass it back to you? Because they feel very expensive. Yeah. Cool.

Print demo's very nice. So

Thank you.

Okay.

Are there any more public comments? We have no speakers on Zoom, Sharon. Okay. So I now close the public comment period. Okay.

Can we move on to writtencom communications? No written communications.

Okay. So can we move

on to staff and commission reports? Great. Are there any commission reports? Sorry.

Do you guys have anything to talk about?

I know Jack and I, we went to that summit a while back, the new summit.

The you know, that a that was a while back.

Yeah. That was months ago. Yeah.

Lot I mean, Cupertino was mentioned quite a few times in the meetings I was in, because there's a lot of breakout meetings. So we weren't always in the same room. But Cupertino was mentioned multiple times as being one of the leaders in sustainability.

Yeah. For sure.

And there's a lot of enthusiasm in the young folks. I was pretty amazed at the maturity.

Yeah.

I was quite encouraged by, you know, how pass seeing how passionate the high school students are.

Got it.

But we even encourage them to attend some of our commission meetings. I think that group used to send a representative, I think, a while back to attend these meetings. So it would just be great for students to just sit in the back and give comments to them. So but, yeah, it was a very nice engagement opportunity.

Yeah.

In the South?

Yeah. Great.

Anyone else? Did you attend any of the meetings that we talked about?

No. Think they're the ninth. K.

How did that go?

It was fun.

Did you

Right. So few suggestions I have is one is the name was not, like, really not really, like, like, on the display. People cannot see the name the environment. That was nothing. And then the second thing was we ran out of the.

Mhmm. Right at the

end. Yeah.

I heard that.

So I don't know what we can do for that. But a lot of kids are disappointed. Doing it. So

Great.

There is recycling and waste reduction committee next Wednesday, so try to attend that if they don't cancel it again. So

And we had the which is a fair with the VR, but you did I was mostly sucking people in to do the VR, but I you were more involved with your experience of of doing the virtual reality.

Jack attended Fall Festival and represented at the booth at Fall Festival.

I need a translator. That's very good.

He was playing with the VR. Okay. Did you try the VR?

No. It did I mean, it was being used. Right?

Yeah. We had a lot of participants.

I was pretty good at sucking I mean, bus buskering. Right? Getting people to come in and use it then

You did a great job.

Yeah. Yep. Got a line.

I heard great things about the the bike fest too. Both of you did a good job. Thank you for representing us here.

I'm super bummed because I was supposed to go to Bike Fest, but I got accepted into something called Splash. It's through Santa Clara County Office Of Ed, and we're developing an education program to use waterways as a base. You know, I've been using climate change, but I thought, what the heck? So I was in Santa Cruz that day doing doing the workshop. So it's, like, 10 sessions a share. So anyway. Okay.

Sorry. One more thing. I'm just curious. Did they ever get that economic development committee started?

I have not heard anything about that. I mean, I they they they keep trying to find building up the slots. I don't know if they've ever filled up enough slots.

I know they voted.

Yeah. The last council meeting, they were finalizing who was gonna be

on it.

So council member Wong and council member Moore, I believe or no. Or the mayor? I don't know. Can't remember. But two council members, and then they approved you guys being on it and the other

commission, I think, where it has a representative. Yeah.

Well, that's not any longer.

I don't think It's not planning. But we're but the four represented sectors, I believe, we're still searching for people. At this time, we don't have a date of when it's starting. We'll let you

know So I was just curious, but thank you. Yeah.

In process.

Yeah. I'll probably meet at Christmas.

One two more months? We

have a few staff reports.

I just have one more. Okay.

Go ahead. To the mayor's meeting,

and it was very interesting. She had a tea festival for moon tea service for moon festival. So we basically ate moon cake and tea, and it was not the same for your health. We didn't even give our reports. So it was very different anyway. So she's taking it another day.

K.

K. Now go ahead. Thank you. Yeah. Full business then. Right.

Staff staff updates. Sorry. You all are aware and most of you are signed up for the Crest Award dinner on the twenty ninth. I'm excited. I'll see you there. Let me know if you have any questions, and thank you all for submitting your answers to their questions. It should be a fun evening.

Our next Yeah. What's the the attire for now?

Oh, that's a great question. It's cash. I think it's pretty casual. Yeah.

It's not like.

Summer? Summer? Not like This cash is

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.

There is a free home composting workshop on Saturday, October 25. Does that sound right? Yes?

It's gonna be it's just be fabulous.

And a paper shredding event on November 15. And then our coat drive collection will start the week at week after Thanksgiving.

What drive?

The coat drive collection. So this is in partnership with Recology. It happens in that the library, we have a bin and collect warm coats that are then donated.

K. Ursula? So a few quick things. Bingle use plastics, we've been working on still doing outreach to the businesses, but we're heading in the direction of enforcement. So we may be out by early twenty early next year, early twenty twenty six.

We may start issuing notices of violation. But we are continuing our slow, gentle work on that. And then after June, when council approved our new post collection agreement, the start date for C and D going to a new facility is November 21. So we were just talking on that facility today, getting ready to for that change. So that'll be way more diversion

to C and D.

So that's exciting. And then last is as you know, we have a stormwater pollution prevention permit, and they re up every five years or so. So it's now time to kick off talking about it. So it's still we're only in year three or something right now.

Which would it

Stormwater Pollution Permit

Oh, stormwater. Okay.

Permit. Yeah. So it's called the municipal regional permit for short. One thing, but we're in MRP three point o right now. So four point o kickoff is starting in a couple weeks. So myself and another staff member are gonna go participate at a meeting in Oakland and to see kinda what the waterboard's thinking about in terms of there tends to be a focus each time around.

Will we get a report earlier than three months from now?

Report.

Well, I don't so that we're a little bit more educated.

It's I mean, this MRP thing is a very slow moving thing, and it won't even go into effect for another year and a half or something.

K.

Won't be much to report in three

years, I guess.

Okay. Okay.

Okay. I just it's somewhere if there's something gonna hit us. And

so No. No. It's a long gentle policy thing.

Yeah. So why does it mean by permit?

I'm sorry. What does

it mean with what? Permit. Permit.

Permit. It's a permit that all jurisdictions in the Bay Area are under to prevent pollution to the storm storm water system and to the the creeks in the bay. We all are in the same watershed, and so we're under a permit together. And there are 21, 22 sections, different things we have to do. Yeah. So they're reissuing it.

Those are the spray painted things that say this flows to the bed? Right. And the things that we did at the last meeting to scoop the stuff out or whatever, the exit water.

That's part I mean, that's that's very small part of it, those signs Yeah. To try to tell people not to dump are part of it, but they're, like I said, 22 other sections that were

Yep. This

cover all nature of things.

The screens are not so much for pollution. They're for from preventing them to get clogged up. The pollution

We even consider yeah. It's yeah. We're dying music conversation. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. New MRT coming.

Alright. Thank you. Okay?

Would anyone, like, like, contact card for an app or

No. That would be great. I don't

You can watch it.

Yeah. I'll just

leave Yeah. Leave one, and we'll take Okay. I'll just leave one. K. We'll take a picture out where you don't have Okay. Are there any more reports? No. That's it. Okay. So we can move on to old business? There's no old business. Okay. Let's move on to new business then. Okay. We have some presentations.

Oh, sorry. This bar is in the way. There we go.

Where's my play button?

Okay.

I bear with me as we're going to go through a lot of legislation and there's no pictures. So today, we are going to talk about different categories for state legislation and how they fit together and how they affect Cupertino specifically. Most of these that I will talk about today are mentioned in our climate action plan. So just giving you an update on how they're going, if they're going. So a b 32 was adopted in 2006.

This gives California Air and Resource Board, CARB, authority to design and implement and enforce regulation to reach a greenhouse gas emission standard. That is a work in progress. It's just giving authority. So that is a state level the the state is doing stuff, and then there's a lot of downstream laws, which we'll get into, more and more. But s v 32, right, that says that we're gonna, reach 40% below by 2030, and then they just adopted, December, which says net zero by 2045.

Those two things are mentioned in our climate action plan. Anything with a little asterisk at the end of the bullet point is mentioned in our climate action plan. So going in, we are still in advance and progress more progressive than the state's climate goals. And then a 100% clean electricity is talking about the people who are procuring and generating electricity. You may have heard that we California has more solar power now than any other state, so we're doing great on, advancing that goal.

And then a b thirty five and thirteen eighty three, I'll talk about in just a second. So these are planning laws that are, have already been in effect now. The greenhouse gas planning s b 35, that one's basically the one that says that we need an environmental sector to our general plan and a climate action plan, that offers CEQUA incentives. So we've completed that a number of years ago. The next one down, the water conservation landscaping act, you may be more familiar with the term WELLO, water efficient landscape ordinance.

So this is something that's been in our planning code for a long time now. It applies to new landscapes and saying that they must be water efficient. They're getting more and more restrictive. So we're staying on top of those updates and making sure that our landscaping is drought tolerant whenever new construction happens. Moving right along, building energy benchmarking.

So a b eight zero two, I've we talked about this, when we talked about commercial, energy and building performance standards. So this is something that I work on every year that reports municipal buildings over 50,000 square feet to report consumption normally to the state. That's both our electricity, gas, and water, to say how efficient our buildings are. The only building municipal building in Cupertino, that qualifies is the library. However, we do report on all of our municipal buildings, and are doing okay.

Right? This is the one that you guys voted to try to or advise city council to adopt an energy benchmark locally. So we haven't gotten that far, but we are complying with the state's law. The Cal Green update, we are going to take this Cal Green update. This is a three year update that happens at the state level. This is going to go to council November 4 and with saying, you know, we have to comply with state law. Here's all of the new restrictions. So 2025 building code compared to 2022 building code, it does increase the EV ready chargers and EV charger ready percentages for nonresidential.

What does that mean?

So what's the difference between EV ready and EV chargers? Let's get into questions in a second. Yeah. What

is EV ready?

Write it down so you don't forget. I'll answer it during questions section.

Thank you Kim.

Okay.

So we're getting more progressive with our our Calgary update. It has a wrench because it's a work in progress. It should be adopted very soon. And then a frowny face, that we are compliant with a v one thirty. It did pass, which means that we have to freeze residential building codes updates, and that limits, there's some exemptions on what we can up update in that building code, which is all related to energy efficiency and trying to progress residential existing residential building code.

Right? So there's freezes on on any of those updates until 2031. There may be some wiggle room for exemptions in that that we could try to pursue in the future. Alright. Moving right along.

So advanced clean fleet, is exactly what it sounds like that they are requiring all municipal and commercial fleets to go electric. This is a tiered scaling. The number of vehicles that we purchase every year as a jurisdiction has to be, electric. And we have done a lot of assessment that's been funded by Silicon Valley Clean Energy and working with Optony and getting, PG and E has approved our 95% rate for installing new chargers at the service center. So we're installing 10 new chargers and then another 10 that are EV ready.

So we'll have the plugs ready to go, and, that way in ten years from now, we can just plug in all of the the wiring will be ready. So we can just buy the charger itself. And this should hopefully satisfy our requirements for the city once we'll transition all of our vehicles to electric that can be transitioned. So there's some exemptions for, like, street sweepers and bigger vehicles that don't have a great electric alternative yet. EV charger permit review times and streamlining, this is also in our climate action plan that we've satisfied.

Basically, it's saying that we have to allow people to get a EV charger over the counter. So if someone walks in and says, want an EV charger in my house or commercial building, there's a streamlined checklist. They don't have to go through the whole application process and wait for it to get approved that we offer them over the counter within a reasonable amount of time. So we're great at doing those building permit reviews. Waste.

Hopefully, you are all familiar with S B 1383 at this point. So diverting organics and edible food. Before that, there was three forty one, which required multifamily and commercial to have a recycling container, but 1383 requires them to use their recycling and organics container. And then the last one on this list is a has a clock next to it because we're waiting for more direction on what this looks like from the state. But plastics and packaging extended producer responsibility, meaning that by 2032, plastic producers, container producers must make packaging recyclable or compostable with stricter labeling.

I there's a lot of general confusion from the public on if it has the arrows one through nine, that obviously means it's recyclable, when in reality, those numbers don't translate to actually recyclable. So that should be coming out with more direction on how that affects us, but it will have some impact on our foodware ordinance. We don't have producers within the city boundary, so getting more direction on that. AB fifteen seventy two just passed, so this is a ban on watering nonfunctional turf. So grass that is not used for parks or recreational activity.

And cities have to stop watering all of these spaces by 01/01/2027, so very soon. So we're working hard on identifying, that. And then we're wait also waiting on direction on how we report to the state on that. A lot of this reporting may happen through SJ Water and Cal Water, that the they have to report directly to the state instead of the city, but we will probably work with them in partnership on enforcement and those sorts of regulations for commercial and multifamily properties.

What is HR?

Write it down. Homeowners association. Emergency resilience. So these are pretty general emergency resilience, climate ready safety elements. So this was adopted a while ago that we have to have this risk assessment and safety element in part of our general plan.

And then we're working on the fire safe council's working on a wildfire risk reduction strategy and funds to help prevent wildfires. And then I just wanted to touch on some federal really quick. There's a Clean Water Act, which is what regulates our storm water. So this Clean Water Act basically gave authority to the California Water Board and regional water boards to put restrictions on, and that's what Ursula was talking about with the permit. So they give us an allowance of how polluted our water can be, and so we have to comply with have going under that pollution level and monitoring and reporting what pollutants are going into our waterways and showing that we're doing our due diligence to enforce nonpollution.

So there's not really state laws for storm water, but there is federal laws, and they're still in effect. And as far as we know right now, this one's not being challenged. The Clean Air Act definitely has some speculation, and it is being challenged a little bit right now. This is essentially the same thing as the Clean Water Act, but now we're regulating cleanliness of air. It's not greenhouse gas regulations, right, but it's like soot and dirt.

This is where the spare the air days can come from. Right? So regulating the actual, like, heavy pollute not pollutants, but dust in the air. And that's what created California Air and Resource Board and the air quality districts. So we we're under Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

And, unfortunately, the inflation reduction act, which was US climate spending, has gone away. This is one of the major changes from federal that we saw. We were going to get funding for new EV chargers in the city, and and those grant funds went away pretty quickly. That was one of the first things to go. So we don't have any questions or follow ups for you right now, but if you wanna have a discussion, it's which policies stood out to you, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

Okay. Go ahead.

Okay. I think you already answered the the EV ready. The electrical has to be there, but not necessarily the the charger.

Correct.

Okay. That okay. Non potable

watering? Recycled water.

Recycled water. Yeah. That had to do with that ties into what we discovered we can't do because it's prohibited in expense for the gray water. Correct?

Correct.

So we just basically say no?

Right now, there's no California laws that require us to have recycled water.

Well, you it said that there if you went back on the slides and you've talked about the government lawns and whatever

Oh, the watering of grass. Yes. Right.

And then mention government as well as other HOAs and private property.

That they're gonna have to stop watering their grass.

Grass out there.

Uh-huh.

K. So if it's non potable Right. Then what is it? I mean, it's it's not gray water then. You're not

Recycled water would be allowed to water grass. Yeah. But

we can't get the recycled water.

Correct.

Okay. So my question is, you just are we just saying no, we're not gonna do it?

At this time, yeah. It's been proven to not be economically feasible for the city. Right? That was the report that went out about a year ago, the engineering study.

So we're going to say no?

That has been the direction this year. Yes.

Okay. Yes. Wanna make sure that

Yeah.

Yeah. But so they'll the alternative so you cannot water at all or you can water with non portable water. So we're just going to say we're gonna stop watering, and the idea is to switch. You can water drought tolerant landscaping. You can still have landscaping.

It's that green stuff that's all gonna go away.

This is functional turf, so this would be used for picnics and people playing.

Okay. So what I'm trying I don't Yeah. I didn't get what

Nonfunctional meant.

Yeah.

Yeah. So functional versus nonfunctional. Recreation, soccer fields, cricket fields, all of our parks will stay parks.

Okay.

It's like park strips if a if you had grass in the middle of your road.

Oh, okay. And those places were already were already putting drought tolerance.

Yeah.

Okay. Decorative. That was that was

Yeah.

That was a

good question.

Is Is this for Commercial or residential?

Commercial and multifamily.

Government.

And government. Yeah. Okay. Yes.

So, Sharma, 341. Right?

Okay. What about 341?

So it says, can you do that?

Yeah.

My computer wants to respond. That one was a while ago now that it required every commercial and multifamily property to have a recycling container.

So we have the people who make sure that that happens. Right? Like

Yeah. Yeah.

Every time when I do outreach, every level like, this time also two people came up to me, and they said that they live in a Harvard conflict, and they don't have very good way to reset. So are we doing something in this apartment? So

Yes. We have confirmed that every apartment complex at this point definitely has recycling, and all of them should have organics. It it's hard for the people in apartments specifically because sometimes they only have one organics container because that is appropriate for the size of their apartment complex, but they might have two or three trash containers. So they don't walk over and find it has been the biggest struggle with residents is that they don't take the time to actually look for it, but they do have one.

So is there any outreach you can learn about that? Like,

Yeah. Because

there is no space. Yeah. Everything on the street now.

So we are working on an outreach plan specifically for multifamily and to build those relationships with the property managers. Right now, Recology and, as well as our waste person at the city do go out and do boots on the ground work pretty much every day. And we're talking with all the businesses in the multifamily, and it's on the multifamily owner, the property owner, to have correct signage and to inform their residents.

So do we Annually. He doesn't have a fine or something?

Yeah. We do have a fine. And our first fine went out this week. So it is now per 1383, we had to start enforcement this year

Last year.

Last year. And so now they have gotten several warnings at this point, and we have progressed into fines. So there is an enforcement plan that is being executed.

Are we able to know who we've got? What forms?

I don't know that detail. I don't know if that's public information.

Yeah. I don't know. I'm not I know that I know who it is, but I don't know if I'm allowed to see it. Is funny.

The learning of recycling and especially the green waste just like that, it's gonna take multiple years.

Okay. Okay.

I got one more. I don't know if you know the answers, and thanks for the presentation, by the way. This is great. Do you foresee any federal policies that may override some of these existing state policies?

No. I think if the clean air and clean water acts go away, those could be challenged saying because those are saying the states have the right to regulate these things. But having that revoked and then having new federal enforcement come and saying, no. The states don't have the right. Like, it would have to pivot one eighty, which anything is possible right now.

But then it would have to trickle down from the state to then say stop all these operations, disband all of these organizations. You know, that would be a huge California Air and Resource Board doesn't exist. The water board wouldn't exist.

Just not the purview of the state, though?

Right. Well, that's what these clean air and water water and acts say is that it's the purview of the state. So if those acts could get challenged and say, no. It's for whatever reason they found ruling that the the the state couldn't regulate it, yeah, any of these acts can be undone.

I'm sure there will still be lawsuits nonetheless.

Great.

Both sides.

Yeah.

Got it. Thank you. Any

other questions? Just a quick one. The grant that was The US climate one Mhmm. How much did that how much did that impact city of Cupertino or the neighboring

We were in a group effort when we applied for that grant. Can speak more into the details of it. But it was several jurisdictions that came together and said, hey. We wanna do EV charger network regionally. I wanna say we were gonna get

It was around $500,000 worth of charging. Yeah. It was For our portion. For our, like,

numerous districts? Cupertino. Oh, just just Yeah.

Yeah. There were a lot. It was SPC in San Jose and some other cities and us, and our little portion of it was Okay. And we it it got awarded, but then fund us. Okay.

Any other questions? Any members of the public that wish to speak? We have no speakers in person and no speakers remotely, chair. Okay. We don't need to make a motion. So we've won out the number two.

Is there open discussion on on which ones you find most interesting, or do you do you want to discuss? You don't have to. There's no motion. So

Yeah.

Alright. So let's go ahead and move on to item number

two? Three.

Okay. Alrighty. So we did a waste characterization study in last year. And so we did it because the cap tells us to do it every so often, and it had been since twenty eighteen, nineteen that we did the eleventh one. So it allows us to, you know, see how we're doing, see what we might wanna change. Next one. And what is that exactly? So this image, I thought I would just throw this in there. Mhmm. Like, you have an idea of what a waste characterization might be.

This is what it looks like in real life. There's a bunch of people in Tyvek suits and with laundry baskets doing extreme weighing of things. It's kinda what it looks like in real life. Next one. And so for for single family, they might grab cart contents and tarp them.

It it's all anonymized. So now they're just dumping it in tarp, taking away, laying, laying, then taking it somewhere so they can spread it all out and sort it. Next one. And the multifamily and commercial, they might follow a truck back to the sorting location, dump the whole load, and take a scoop, like a representational scoop, and then do the extreme sorting and dividing from there. And so we asked them to look at all three streams, garbage recycling, and and organics.

They got 211 samples from four sectors because we wanted them to look at municipal garbage as well as well as single family, multifamily, and commercial. And we had 63 different material types that we identified for them to sort into. And the methodology is intended to have a 90% confidence level.

Next slide.

So comparability groups that they we settled on were something is recyclable, something is a contaminated recyclable, and that could be either actually organics or traditional recycling. It was contaminated And then compostable, obviously, if it was compostable. And then potentially recoverable is actually something you should have taken to, say, HHW event or some other, you know, paint or something you should have taken somewhere else, not put in your trash, and couldn't be recycled through the curbside program. And then nonrecoverable would be what's actually supposed to go on her garbage. So next one.

So just to give an idea of how many tons we generate in a year, we're around 42,000 tons of all the materials from the sectors. And you can see how municipal is so tiny that it's a little Bars don't even show up. We're a very tiny amount of the overall stuff generated. And commercial gen produces the most trash, but multifamily sends the largest proportion of their material to the trash. So and just to keep in mind, this was just all on regular accounts and not debris boxes or construction.

And then next slide. Some of the metrics they looked at were the recoverability. So things that could have been recovered if they were placed in the right screen or properly prepared. Contamination, obviously, you're just putting the wrong place. Capture rate overall, how much of the recyclable material that was generated actually was captured properly.

But, yeah, those are those. Next slide. Just to give an idea, this is just a snip of the material types. You don't have to observe. It's just letting you know kind of all the different ways we divvied up the materials.

And then next slide is launching into kinda what we found. So at a high level, what was in the garbage? These colors are fairly self the key, but the green one is organic. So we're seeing whether you're single family, multifamily, commercial, municipal We're all terrible at keeping the organics out of the garbage is sort of what we learned from this. The the brown is really what should only be in the garbage.

And, you know, orange, maybe if you cleaned it outright or something and moved it, could have recovered it. I mean, those are actually the Take backs. The take backs. Yeah. Those should have been taken back. And the light blue is the contaminated recyclables. So we're seeing a lot of obviously, over 60% of stuff really shouldn't be there at all. Next slide. And then diving in a little bit deeper on single family on what was in the garbage. Here, we're just seeing it broken out in a different way.

And next one is the top items that we found. It was kind of clear from the bars, but food and paper towels, stitched papers, those were top of the list. Then we have a lot of paper. And you can see plastic takeout containers that could have been recycled are in there at the bottom and other compostable paper. Next slide.

The recycling is about 30% contaminated across the board, so no one's doing super awesome at that either. Again, you see our same little categories. So definitely room for improvement there. But it's interesting to me that across the categories, we do have pretty similar here. And then the next slide. You just see that in a slightly different way. Oh, yeah. All that stuff that was contaminated or food or shouldn't have been in there at all or just was straight up trash.

I'm going up on there.

Next slide. Other composite materials and finds are often multi material composite or items not elsewhere identified sort of a miscellaneous catch all. Definitely some loose film.

They get

composite things where multiple things are squished together. Those are always confusing. Next slide. Moving on to organics. Single family actually does really well at organics because it's mostly yard waste. Right? So that's gonna be the bulk of the tons. So we see multifamily doing pretty well. This non you know, the nonrecoverable material for commercial, that's just basically trash, and you want them in green bin instead of food or food soiled paper. And then the next one.

Yep.

Just different way to look at it. And next one. This was we asked them to kinda look back and see how it compared. So single family doing about the same as they were. We did see a nice bump in multifamily and commercial in terms of proper items getting into the recyclables bin.

So we never know if that was just a this is a snap in time, you know, one one two week period, but it indicate improved understanding of recycling. Next one. This was the one I was super jazzed about to check on because of S D 1383. So this is yeah. Know, we've been working away at S D 1383 since 2022. Are we making any progress? Are we getting more of the compostable material out of the garbage and into the green? And for single family, we did see a little shift, and we saw a similar shift in, you know, disposed in the garbage went down and but then the green

went up a bit.

So I was happy to see that little nudge. I mean, obviously, from months earlier, what's still in

the garbage? Yeah.

We saw quite a ways to go on that, but that's why we're happy that council approved going to the smart station because then we have a chance to get some of that back out again. Excited about that. So some of the top problem materials that we use are, obviously, compostables in the garbage. Multifamily is just that they have a hard time sorting. When we go to conferences, every multifamily, everywhere in all cities all the time all have hard time sorting, so no one has solved that. It's not that we're just not putting the right stuff

on recycle bill.

You can yeah. And then a lot of stuff that shouldn't be recycled. People try to recycle. Didn't see someone just tucked a whole microwave into one of the streams. Plastics in the organics is a problem. You know, you can imagine the bag of lettuce went around and didn't wanna take it out of its plastic bag, you know, that kind of thing. In commercial, we see gloves end up a lot in, you know, most. Next slide. Foodware is interested, you know, what's happening with all the takeout containers. So we're correctly sorting some of the plastic ones.

And commercials, not doing great with plastic takeout containers. We're all doing a little bit better with cups or commercial is anyway. So then the the amount of data is is really impressive that they give us. So we're still this is still a work in progress to really digest a

little bit. But go to the next slide.

I was just curious. Well, how many tons are we talking about? So we're seeing from their estimate, 299 tons of paper, 442 of plastic pickup containers going into all the different commercial single family. Yeah. That's fine.

And then I added up how much plastic per year, and how does it compare to last time around. So we're we have more plastic. And 40 it's interesting. We did this whole we'll see it on the next slide. But, yeah, about 47% is potentially recyclable.

So of all the plastic, only about half of it is actually something that could be recycled. And of that, only 30% is getting recycled. So it gives you kind of a drawdown on that. And then next slide. This was a graphic that Tori worked on a lot in 2022, and we had a lot of fun going back and forth and trying to tell the story of plastics.

This helped us when we were passing the single use plastics ordinance and doing a lot of outreach about plastics. So this shows up the world of plastic things generated in the city. About half are these things you just can't recycle. Cup lids and Styrofoam and Compostable plastic. Compostable plastics, toothpaste tubes, weird squishy Malty. Whatever. And then there are always some that are not prepared properly, dirty, whatever. And then

After a long time, ordinance

there are

take off that we did.

I take

off. You can easily paint. It should have. Yeah.

I mean, when you were trying to see if that's why I was looking at how much plastic. It's it's it's hard to tell. Right? I mean, when we're in the middle of a metropolis, people are bringing food from everywhere all around, so it's very hard to pinpoint. Are we gonna see a shift? And then the other thing is, you know, this is tonnage, and those are very light materials. So it's it's harder to drill down on those. But I wanted to show this graphic again just so it it does well. The the fifty fifty about half of all plastic is recyclable, and then we do on actually getting all of that in somewhere.

And

I this is my favorite sorting picture of all time from doing wood flips, and it seemed like a good time of year to trot it out as the last one. So

But it works.

It is okay to put your pumpkin in your green card. So

I feel nobody looks sad.

Party's over for him.

Right?

Getting in line with so, anyway, that's very nice. Like I said, we're still exploring that. We can do more deep diving and try to parse it in different ways and look at it. But pages of pages. Yes.

Go back to the plastic one. Okay. From perspective of someone who lives in this world, we should to me, plastics are totally confusing, and I think we brought it up earlier about what things the labeling is not correct and whatever. It would make more sense to me if we had a toad that said plastic. I'm not we're not asking what type of plastic. Say plastic. Let them be sorted somewhere else.

That kind of already happened.

Okay. That's believe so.

Well, it's sort of, but it's sort no. It's because some of it is garbage, and I you know, you're struggling with it. Dirty. How much water do I waste to try to clean that piece of plastic?

Wipe it out.

Sometimes. Sometimes not. We just basically say clean and dry is what it says on the on the truck.

Yeah.

And as I'm going and I see that as a as a composter, as a I look at it and say, yeah, buddy, in your dreams because I wanna move you know?

Well, you're probably doing fine. A lot of

people are throwing away. I'm not doing I'm

not doing fine. I have no idea how to how to I mean, half of my stuff is probably put in the wrong wrong I mean, we we

I agree. Yeah. A lot of people have the skill to do it. Like, a lot of people tell us that they want to do the right thing. From the wrong

thing is

they don't know what is the right thing.

So you could just empty the containers. That would be, like, 90% there. Then get them in the blue cart, then green waste is

Well be one thing

But the blue cart, mean, that's nonrecyclable. I mean, how do I know what's I mean, in terms of plastic? I mean, basically, to me, that decision should either be at the not produce those things or b, have them being sorted at at the at the sorting thing.

That goes back to s p 54 that Tory talked about, which is anything

Yeah.

Packaged and sold in California is gonna have to be in packaging that is either official compostable or recyclable.

Well, this this is the domestic problem I have at home. Some people in our family want things to look pretty and hidden. I want things easy, simple, where I can just deal with it. Because if it's not real easy in things, no matter how much someone says they will deal with it, it doesn't get dealt with. And that's that's the whole our whole to me, our whole recycling and disposable thing should be mindless almost. And we're trying to make it more and more intellectual, which is not going to work.

There's Tori did put a description around the outside of the pie chart that explains what this is. There is a description. But, again, we have to rely on people to read and do what's right. And that's really difficult to get people to do. But that's what I think what Jack is saying. He said it has

to be Plastics are the worst or most confusing. So s p 54 will help. It doesn't go. Yeah. The target is twenty thirty two, so that's when they stop. And then once we start sorting to the smart station, great. If you put it in the blue part, Greenways is gonna sort it and take what they can. Put it in the gray, the black part, Smart station is gonna sort it and take what they can. So you're gonna be kinda covered. Gonna be kind of a belt and suspenders situation.

Well, yesterday, I was at a commercial composting site, and they was top showing us his agricultural stuff made from agricultural stuff and the stuff from Greenway. Greenway has dog poop bags in it and all sorts of other things in it. And it's like, it and I'm hearing this over and over on the on the composting site. Is this I mean, you don't you don't want to get stuff from our municipal compostings thing because it's got glass and metal and plastic

They

don't.

They're not.

I mean, it takes a special special environment for them to decompose. And if they're

That was a lot of the compostable produce bags. That was a lot that went into effect. Yeah.

Yeah. Pretty awesome.

I apologize for having

both of are for COVID. I wanna

make sure everyone has

an opportunity to ask questions.

We're still in questions.

Okay. Does anybody else have a question? Okay. This course is interesting. Okay. Yeah. We're making comments. So

That's fine.

Any more questions?

Well, my so I live in multifamily. I live in an apartment here. And I remember when I was still doing sustainability, that was the toughest thing. It's how do you reach the multifamily? Because these are a lot of the property management firms are out of town. But I'm like, I see it in my own compost bin. It's a bunch of random stuff in

there. Yeah.

So, yeah, I feel like the outreach, as you all know, outreach to property managers and then have the property managers tell their tenants.

Outreach and finding. Sorry. Yeah. I mean, there has to be some financial

But at the same time, the, you know, the property manager has no control over what their people do or the people. You know?

Understand.

It's it's a tricky

You know, picture signage so you don't have to read any words, but with a few pictures, with a few key pictures.

Thirteen eighty three already requires pictures and multi language. So a lot of that's already in place.

I I know. We have we have wastebasins at school. We have two ones. They they look the same to me. Well, I can't believe it's kind of irritating. Okay.

Should we move

on? Okay. So, do you have any members of the public that wish to speak? No. Okay.

I think we're done then. Right? Can we go ahead and move on to this, Sonali? No. Can we move on to future agenda setting?

So I had my friend in Massachusetts, they have a zero waste day, and I don't mind if we want one yet. So we can discuss if we want to do session. Victoria told me, I can go ahead with a switch over there.

So had expressed interest in what is it called? The zero waste day at schools. Do you wanna It's

in the city. They have a city in the city.

There's a city. So what is it exactly? If you wanna describe what we would do as a commission and what the day is about.

So the day is about zero waste cleaning. Basically, if you want to give away something, then there's it's like what do we have? That we sell. Right? It's like garbage. But that's it. But it's not safe. Basically, this exchange stuff that we want. So, like, tree? Yeah. It's basically, like, fully cycle.

I don't know. Which is it.

But it's just alertness. Mhmm.

And we

gather at another location, like, We

should know that. That, we can decide how to.

So the I'm not hearing your your exact proposal. You want to bring an agenda item for the commissioners to discuss how to get involved in a zero waste event.

I mean, we can discuss how we can propose this to the city.

Okay.

City has.

Yeah.

Can discuss how we want to go about it. And if there is any if there is anything that we're on.

I think we have to discuss it first before we decide to propose it, though. Right?

Correct. She's proposing it goes on a future agenda.

To discuss. To discuss.

Possibility of doing a zero waste thing. Correct.

Yeah. I like the idea of having an agenda item to just discuss that maybe as a commission. We could do an advance or, like, the tech commission, for example. They they did a cybersecurity thing that was in a public safety commission. They do a forum every year. So I like the idea of talking about what we can do together.

You wanna put it on the next agenda?

Do you wanna put it

on the next agenda? We need two two commissioners to agree, and someone has to give me some formal wording.

Oh, do we have a motion?

Some wording first. Some wording? Ben.

Was it commission event discussion or the yeah. Discussion of possibility of my brain is not working right now, but somewhere along the lines of discussion of the commission getting involved and doing, an event or a panel or something like that.

Discuss the feasibility of considering the sustainability commission within

Or it's, like, maybe just events evaluation, commission event evaluation?

Event evaluation or event designing. Or

don't think we're designing anything because we have to discuss, like, if we're gonna be doing an event or not. So

I'm just thinking zero waste is gonna be difficult. Right? Because you have to designate it, and then you have to monitor it. Right? Right? If you're gonna do that, there's it's actually no delay. You can just declare it zero waste day, but then that's kinda pointless. Every day should be zero waste day. Right?

Well, if somebody comes up and says, okay. There's gonna be this event in in a few months, and it looks like a great opportunity for us to do something. I'm trying to figure out what you guys are talking about.

Yeah.

So if you I think

I think was mentioning that it's, like, the commission getting involved in hosting or supporting in events or playing a key role in

that event.

Same day. Right? The city has. Our city also has day when they will be camping. Like, there is a day in July or August. Yeah. So something similar to that.

Yeah.

Which is like But that's that's tangible. You take your your you take your tent, you will go sleep under the stars. Zero waste is gonna be tricky. Right? I mean, how do you even monitor something?

Discovered. I mean, I just do it, like,

Yeah. I'm a little confused on your idea. If it's similar to a garage sale or people just bringing things to donate and then people come and pick them up. So it's like a swap day.

It's a buy nothing day.

A buy nothing day. Basically,

buy nothing, zero waste is basically a loan, recycle, and reuse.

Yeah. My question is what's to stop people from making it a donation drop my stuff off day?

A dump day.

A dump day.

I was just thinking I like that idea. I have tons of stuff. Just

We have to call it off to the

Yeah. I mean, I'm open to just discussing it because I I feel like we cannot discuss it under this agenda item right now.

Yeah.

But I'll do that.

I'll just

get some money management, and we can get Okay.

We we do have a we do have a citywide garage sale, and that is, at least at our house, that's consider considered we're trying to get rid of stuff. We're not trying to make money, but people don't. If you just give it to them, they don't they don't want it. But if you charge them a few bucks, it's a deal, and they haul it away. We do have that already. Is that in your proof?

Yeah. Do you?

So we're discussing it now, so let's put it on the agenda for next time to discuss ins and outs of doing something that would promote zero waste.

Do you okay. So right now, it's discussed the pass a possible sustainability commission event or panel. Do you wanna be specific to waste, or do you my other idea is to bring consumption? Okay. So my proposal of how that would look is each of you bring the idea of how an event could work.

Right? So drop your your feasibility plan, who would be responsible for what, what's involved, how many hours you guys are willing to contribute to this type of thing, how it would work, and how the city could support you with it. So if you each come up with an idea and then you wanna talk about it and discuss the possibility of choosing one of the ideas. Does that sound okay?

Yeah. And if it is not possible, we can talk about that.

Yeah. That's a good idea.

But think it is not worth it.

K. So who wants to move that what I've written, discuss a possible sustainability commission event or panel about consumption?

We have a motion to add that to the? Somebody wanna propose a motion?

I can

Head Gwankar? In a second.

Now it's up in it.

Boom.

Great.

Can I do a little follow-up? Is that do we just Oh, wait. Quick follow-up. What was the last event that approved?

Like, the

last new event that was proposed?

From a commission?

Or yeah.

Tic just proposed a BOBA event that they got Tic, technology information something commissioned. T I c c. Communication.

Commissioner. Yeah.

Got shops to donate boba and had people come and drink boba and talk about technology.

That's awesome.

That's pretty awesome. Yeah.

Okay. They need the city approval too? Oh, because it was the commission. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Because we're not gonna consume anything. So

We could invite them. Celebrate an event. We could do trash talking. Right?

Whatever, event or panel you wanna bring to a meeting, that is totally okay. You can bring your

Okay.

K. Alright. Is there anything else under the new business? We're all set. Sorry. Okay. So anything else? Alright. Am I adjourn the meeting? Okay. This meeting is adjourned at 05:14.