San Francisco's Trash Inspectors Get Up Earlier Than You Do

It was still dark out at 5:30 a.m. when I met up with James Slattery in San Francisco's Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. I hopped in his car and we drove until we spotted a pair of headlamp beams on the sidewalk. Banaag Novicio and Nora Calderón – a pair of municipal cart auditors – were looking through curbside trash cans. They'd been working for at least 30 minutes already, walking from house to house, methodically popping open the lids of green (compost), blue (recycling) and black (landfill) bins to see which homes were correctly sorting their trash and which ones weren't.

Slattery is an assistant coordinator with the city's Department of Environment, and he heads San Francisco's first-of-its-kind trash monitoring and neighborhood outreach program. It's part of the city's broader effort to become 100-percent "waste-free" by 2020. Slattery joins the early-morning crew once or twice per week, but admits he still hasn't gotten used to getting up that early.