Santa Ana Businesses Reduce Waste for Climate Change

Downtown Businesses are Reducing and Diverting Food Waste and Recycling

Downtown Santa Ana businesses are always looking for ways to support our customers and our planet.

​Recently, some of your favorite downtown restaurants started recycling and diverting food waste to help avoid decomposition in landfills, which leads to greenhouse gasses like methane and carbon dioxide polluting our air and causing climate change.

51% of the waste in California restaurants is food waste, which decomposes into methane, a gas that is more harmful for the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. To help solve this problem, the City of Santa Ana is encouraging businesses to join the Santa Ana Recycle program. This is an effort to facilitate the transition to using recycle and organic containers to reduce the amount of landfill waste.

The guiding principles of this program were set forth by the State of California making recycling mandatory with Measure AB 341. This will require businesses that generate four cubic yards or more of waste per week to have a recycling service. The service can be a combination of reused, recycled or composted items and can be done by self-haul, subscribing to a hauler service, arranging a pickup of the recycled materials, or subscribing to a recycling service that may include mixed waste processing that yields diversion results comparable to source separation.

Businesses in Downtown Santa Ana are already joining the Santa Ana Recycle program:

• El Rincon Mexicano – The owner, Martin Ocampo incorporated organic recycling in hopes of helping the community.
• The Den Café - Nicole Walcott, a Den Café partner, mentioned that the recycling program has made their waste disposal cheaper and because of it their weekly waste pick-up has decreased. The Den Café  has served the Santa Ana community since 1994.

Beyond Downtown:

• El Carbonero –Owner, Maria Ramirez, admits that the idea of recycling and coming up with a plan was difficult for her. With help and training from the recycling program, Maria was able to create and implement a plan within a month.
• Irvine Pipe and Supply - They used to send 100% of their waste to the landfill. After signing up to the recycle program, they are now recycling 70% of their waste. And it was as easy as having one, two, three, four recycle bins in their yard.

Now it’s your turn! The City of Santa Ana Recycle program is currently working with different businesses in efforts to transition them towards this mandatory community change. To join the lead to recycle and sign up for the program call (714) 780-2700 or email santaanarecycles@santa-ana.org.

Check out this training video to see how these businesses are Joining the Lead to Recycle!

Story by Abraham Gomez
Photos from the Santa Ana Recycles Video