Topline:
California is about three years into a new law to keep food waste out of landfills. One way to do that? Turn food waste into fuel. We look into how it works and what it means.
Why it matters: The holidays are a time where we tend to eat a lot of food…and throw a lot out. Americans throw away about four pounds of waste per day — higher than anywhere in the world.
Keep reading...for more on how food waste is turned into fuel.
You might remember our food waste guide from earlier this year — we received questions from more than 500 of you about California’s recent law to keep food waste out of landfills.
One question we got a lot: Why do some cities, such as Pasadena, require us to bag our food waste before putting it in the green bin? I went on a food waste journey to understand why.
When you drive on the 134 Freeway, between Glendale and Pasadena…you may have admired the mountains opposite the view of downtown L.A. Well, that mountain is actually a landfill…Scholl Canyon Landfill.
Since 1961, that landfill has grown with L.A. County’s waste — officials say it only has a few years of capacity left. About 500 trucks a day dump everything from trash to food waste there. Americans throw away about four pounds of trash per day — higher than anywhere in the world.
At the top of the landfill, workers pick through green waste spread across the ground, getting rid of plastic and other contaminants.
“ There's not automated magic to some of this handling of waste,” said Michael Chee, a spokesperson for L.A. County Sanitation Districts. “There are actually people in here digging and separating and pulling plastic out.”
A worker tosses a whole bag of raw chicken into a dumpster that’s half full of bagged food waste. Nearby, a coyote sneaks some nibbles from food waste not yet collected.
The workers are also grabbing bags of food waste to put in a separate dumpster. This is why cities such as Pasadena ask residents to separate their food waste in bags — ideally bags you already have, like bread bags, carrot bags or potato sacks, said Gabriel Silva, environmental programs manager with the city.
(Tip: It’s not worth buying more expensive “compostable” bags — they’ll be torn off and go to the landfill anyway and using bags you already have further reduces waste.)
Silva said the bagging helps them more easily separate the food waste from the yard waste because they’re going to different places. The yard waste will be composted and the food waste will be turned into fuel.
This isn’t how it’s done everywhere: Many jurisdictions are primarily composting their food waste. But it’s all part of California’s new law to keep food waste out of landfills, where it decomposes and releases methane…a climate super-pollutant.
Once the food waste dumpster at Scholl Canyon is full — once or twice a week, it gets trucked a half hour away to the Puente Hills Materials Recovery Facility.
There, in a huge warehouse, a frontloader lifts bags of food waste.
Will Chen, the supervising engineer, explained how an attachment on the frontloader shreds the bags so the food waste can be dropped into a hopper. The hopper then shreds the food waste itself, filters out contaminants, and eventually turns the food waste into a kind of slurry.
The slurry is then piped into storage tanks.
“We have meters that are trying to monitor how thick it is because that's pretty critical for us,” Chen said.
Thick like a smoothie, folks here like to joke.
The slurry has to be able to easily move through the pipes and eventually into a tanker truck so the food waste goes to its final destination: the A. K. Warren Water Resource Facility, a wastewater treatment plant, in Carson.
At the Warren facility in Carson, the food waste slurry goes into huge tan circular structures called anaerobic digesters.
“They store about 4-and-a-half million gallons of sludge, and that's where all the bugs are eating the material and converting it into gas,” Chen said.
Microscopic bugs eat the food waste and wastewater slurry, then convert it into methane gas. The gas from the food waste is then piped across the street to a new compressed natural gas, or CNG, station.
There are three main categories of biofuels:
These fuels are less carbon-intensive than traditional oil and gas, meaning they emit less carbon into the atmosphere to heat up the planet, but there are other environmental consequences, such as cutting down trees or depleting soil to grow massive amounts of soy and corn for fuel.
At the station on a recent day, there are L.A. city garbage trucks and other heavy-duty trucks already fueling up. The gas generated from food waste will also be sold to SoCalGas for use in their pipelines. About 5% of the gas SoCalGas currently delivers is from biofuels, according to the utility. They expect that to grow to 20% by 2030.
“We definitely see that there is a demand for CNG fueling, which is why we're doing this,” Chen said. “However, it's not going to be forever. I think CNG is going to have a place in the transportation sector until electrification technology and/or hydrogen also becomes more prevalent and more available.”
Chen said L.A. County has the capacity to process a lot more food waste than it’s doing right now, but the biggest change in waste management since recycling takes time to ramp up. As more jurisdictions implement their food waste programs, Chen expects to see the volume go up significantly.
In the long-term, if CNG demand goes down, he said they can instead use growing volumes of food waste for electrical generation on site — after all, the Warren site will be the hub of one of the world’s largest water recycling efforts over the next ten years, and that will require a lot more electrical power. They’ll also be able to export excess power to the grid.
”We may have to pivot where instead of this biogas going into the pipeline or transportation fuel, we're going to go for more electrical generation,” Chen said.
Infrastructure remains a challenge for increasing these efforts. L.A. County Sanitation Districts are in a good position to implement more biogas production because they already have the necessary infrastructure, Chen said. And as they transition their fleets to electric, Chen expects the carbon footprint of transporting that food waste to these facilities to go down significantly as well. Already, their trucks largely run on biofuels.
CalRecycle estimates that California needs as many as 100 new or expanded organic waste recycling facilities to recycle an additional 20 million to 25 million tons of organic waste every year.
The agency, which oversees the state's waste management, estimates there are now 20 operating standalone anaerobic digestion facilities, with six more planned, and 10 co-digestion facilities — like the Warren facility in Carson — with 10 more planned.
The state is providing more than $120 million in grants to help boost that infrastructure.
”In L.A. County alone we're estimating that there's 4,000 tons of food waste that's generated every day that needs to be diverted,” Chen said. “It's going to be a collective effort across the entire state, and it's going to be a long and kind of costly journey. I think we'll eventually get there, but there needs to be heavy investment put into the infrastructure that's needed.”
Scientists say reducing methane is a key part of addressing human-caused climate change. While methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere nearly as long as carbon dioxide, it’s about 80 times more powerful at heating up the planet.
In California, our main sources of methane are dairies, landfills and oil and gas operations.
Methane at landfills is primarily because of food waste decomposing. Methane at landfills is usually captured then “flared,” meaning burnt. Burning methane instead of just letting it escape is better for the climate, but it’s bad for local air quality.
Some landfills also use the methane they capture to create electricity — that’s what Glendale is planning at Scholl Canyon Landfill.
“ I think [using food waste for fuel] is definitely in the right direction,” Chen said. “Now, instead of it going to the landfill where it's basically left to rot in the ground, you're able to fuel trucks, you're able to produce power, you're able to heat people's homes with the trash that they would have otherwise just kind of forgotten about. So it really does push the needle in the right direction and help us be a lot more sustainable.”
Compressed natural gas does have fewer dangerous emissions than diesel, and doing something with that food waste helps eventually lower methane emissions from landfills. But Katherine Blauvelt, a researcher with Industrious Labs, a nonprofit think tank, said that doesn’t solve the problem of existing methane emissions from landfills.
“The big problem with putting too many eggs into the biomethane basket is that it creates misaligned incentives that perpetuate our current harmful take-make-waste system,” Bleauvelt said in an email to LAist. “Very simply put, you can’t turn waste into energy without a lot of waste, and landfilling food is a terrible waste of precious resources and money. We can create more jobs and spur economic development when a community does more than use something and trash it.”
The state is considering updating its landfill regulations to help address the issue.
Something else to consider? The cost. Turning food waste into fuel is a lot more expensive than tossing it in a landfill.
Aaron Smith, an agricultural and resource economics professor at UC Berkeley, questions whether it’s worth it.
“ To deal with these problems, you have to pick something, and right now the feasible thing to pick is biogas production from food waste,” Smith said. “But I think a downside sometimes is that you might end up locking in or using a mitigation method that ends up being more expensive than other options could be.”
The efforts to keep food waste out of landfills are partially why your trash bill has likely gone up. But as landfills fill up and methane pollution worsens climate change, it’s a tough problem to solve when we have so much food waste in the first place.
“You can imagine a much more efficient system where we wouldn't have as much waste, but given that we do have the waste and have to deal with it, then this seems like one of the only options,” Smith said.
Ultimately, the tougher, but more effective, solution is that we need to generate a lot less waste in the first place.
Topline:
A new free record shop for survivors of last year’s Eaton and Palisades fires is celebrating with a grand opening party Saturday night.
The backstory: After losing his home in the Eaton Fire, Brandon Jay founded Altadena Musicians to get instruments back into the hands of musicians who lost gear in the fires. Now he’s doing that with vinyl records, too.
Read on ... to find details.
A new free record shop for survivors of last year’s Eaton and Palisades fires is celebrating with a grand opening party Saturday night.
After losing his home in the Eaton Fire, Brandon Jay founded Altadena Musicians to get instruments back into the hands of musicians who lost their gear in fires.
Now he’s doing that with vinyl records, too.
Record Shop grand opening
Altadena Music Center
1260 Lincoln Ave., Suite 1300, Pasadena
Saturday, May 30
Record donations starting at 1 p.m. Grand opening party is 6 - 9 p.m.
For more info and to register a free ticket, check out the Altadena Music Center event page.
LAist is a media sponsor for the event.
“We want to be here to help replace those items and support music in people’s lives that can’t necessarily afford it right now because they’re saving all their pennies just to live and also just to rebuild their homes,” Jay told LAist.
Jay says they’ve seen roughly 3,000 records donated so far. Now they have a dedicated space on Lincoln Avenue where fire survivors can sign up for time slots and shop for up to 10 records a month.
“It’s a really lovely distraction but it kind of keeps me going as well just to know that we’re trying to build something great for the community and keep us all moving forward,” Jay said.
The store will carry copies of the benefit album, Gimme Shelter: Songs for LA Fire Relief. The compilation features cover art by Shepard Fairey and L.A. specific tracks from artists like Elliott Smith ("Angeles" of course), Norah Jones, The Flaming Lips, as well as a cover of "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads performed by Jay and about 50 other fire-impacted musicians.
Topline:
Ziggy Marley is back with a new solo album that includes the first song he's written about his father, Bob Marley. Brightside also marks Marley's experimentation with recording at a different frequency.
What's the frequency: Marley said he recorded Brightside at 432 hertz — a departure from mainstream music recorded at 440 hertz — to change the emotional listening experience.
His own space: Marley recorded at Rebel Lion Studio, his newly-built facility in North Hollywood. After more than two decades in L.A., Marley said the city's concentration of creatives has played a major role in his own growth as an artist.
What's next: Marley says he's already working on his next album, a children's book and a return to film production of some kind, saying he wants to explore his creativity next in a visual medium.
Reggae star Ziggy Marley has spent decades carrying one of music’s most celebrated legacies. But until now, he had never written a song directly about his father, Bob Marley.
That’s changed with “Many Mourn for Bob,” a track on Marley’s ninth solo album Brightside, his first release recorded in his new studio in North Hollywood.
Marley was just 12 when his father died of cancer in 1981. Now 57, Marley says the song instinctually emerged after years of life experience and producing the biopic One Love, which revisited his father’s struggles like an assassination attempt amid political violence in Jamaica.
“He went through some things that was really tough on a human being – and just understanding him in that light is to have a little bit more emotional, deeper connection to his experience,” Marley said in an interview at his studio.
The deeply personal track is part of a splashy return for Marley, who's touring behind Brightside and will perform at the Hollywood Bowl on June 21.
Reggae Night XXIV featuring Ziggy Marley and Burning Spear, with a DJ set by Zuri Marley
When: Sunday, June 21, 7 p.m.
Where: Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., Los Angeles
The new album blends political themes, optimism and musical experimentation.
Its lead single, “Racism Is a Killa,” featuring Big Boi, pairs the heavy topic with an upbeat groove that he hopes will make the song more accessible to young people.
“We just wanna come out straightforward, like I never want to come out tiptoeing,” Marley said. “I want to say something that can catch your ears or catch your thoughts.”
That tension between darkness and hope runs throughout Brightside. Marley described the album as a reflection on enduring difficult periods – from the pandemic to the Los Angeles wildfires – without losing sight of optimism.
“Sometimes we get lost in that so much that we don't realize that there is always a bright side,” Marley said.
The album also experiments sonically: Marley recorded Brightside using 432 hertz tuning instead of the standard 440 hertz in most mainstream music. Advocates of 432 hertz believe it produces a warmer, more meditative sound better synced to the natural world. (You can hear the difference for yourself here.)
“It's a lower musical frequency, but it's a higher frequency in a next sense of your spirituality and emotion,” he said. “So even though the numbers go down, the frequency actually go up.”
Marley sees the move as part of a larger search for new creative approaches.
“I'm very open-minded and always trying to evolve and just experiment with life and music,” Marley said.
The Grammy winner, who joins James Blake and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead as the most high-profile artists to record at the lower frequency, floated the idea of a larger movement among artists.
“Let's just have a revolution in the music industry,” he said. “Let's change the frequency.”
Marley works out of his Rebel Lion Studio in North Hollywood, its name a nod to his 2018 album Rebellion Rises while also a play on the word “rebellion.”
He described the studio as an extension of the independent spirit his father built with Tuff Gong Studio in Jamaica.
“My father had a dream, and I had a dream too,” Marley said.
Like with Tuff Gong, Marley also plans to expand the studio operation to include vinyl pressing as records continue their resurgence in the streaming era.
“There’s always gonna be a vinyl present going on,” Marley said. “A thousand years from now, people that we're still gonna need vinyl records to listen to music.”
For years, Marley said, he worked out of smaller home setups and rented facilities before deciding to build a larger permanent space in L.A.
Marley said the city has become central to his own creative evolution over the last two decades of living and working here.
Drawn initially by music, friends and the city's small but tight-knit Jamaican community, he says being surrounded by creatives from different backgrounds helped push his artistry in new directions.
“I left my safety and my community, my tribe, and come out by myself to L.A.,” he said. “But it's a great experience. It really helped my growth as a human being being here.”
Fresh off the release of Brightside, Marley says he’s already working on another album – a notably quicker turnaround since his last album, the family-music release More Family Time in 2020,
“We're doing back to back,” he said.
He’s also busy writing a children’s book based on his feel-good hit anthem “True to Myself” and eyeing opportunities in front – or behind the camera – inspired by his time working on One Love and making the video for “Racism Is A Killa.”
“Same philosophy, same message, but within visuals, you know?” Marley said excitedly. “I want to create some stories and try out. I feel it coming. I can feel it.”
Topline:
A City Council committee voted Friday to shelve a proposed ballot measure aimed at cutting L.A.'s “mansion tax” nearly in half. Ysabel Jurado, chair of the ad hoc committee on Measure ULA, said it's too early to determine the tax's long-term effects on housing and revenue.
Why it matters: The proposal by Councilmembers John Lee and Marqueece Harris-Dawson would have asked voters in November to reduce the ULA transfer tax rate for multifamily and mixed-use properties to somewhere between 2% and 3.5%, down from the current rate of up to 5.5%.
How we got here: L.A. voters approved Measure ULA in 2022 to fund affordable housing and homelessness prevention. The measure taxes real estate sales over about $5 million. Since taking effect in April 2023, ULA has raised just over $1.1 billion from 1,633 real estate transactions, according to the city’s housing department. Critics say the tax has suppressed housing development.
What's next?: In its final meeting, the committee instead advanced a narrower pilot program that would reduce the property transfer tax only for newly built affordable housing projects. The ULA committee dissolves this weekend, but the ballot measure proposal was also referred to the City Council's rules committee, which could decide to take it up in the coming months.
A City Council committee voted Friday to shelve a proposed ballot measure aimed at cutting L.A.'s “mansion tax” nearly in half.
The ad hoc committee on Measure ULA voted 2-1 to set aside a proposal by Councilmembers John Lee and Marqueece Harris-Dawson that would have asked voters in November to reduce the ULA transfer tax rate for multifamily and mixed-use properties to somewhere between 2% and 3.5%, down from the current rate of up to 5.5%.
However, the ballot measure proposal was also referred to the City Council’s rules, elections, and intergovernmental relations committee, which could still choose to move it forward.
Instead, the ad hoc committee advanced a narrower pilot program that would reduce the property transfer tax only for newly built affordable housing projects.
The pilot program won't need voter approval in the form of a ballot measure. Committee Chair Ysabel Jurado, who introduced the substitute language, said she believes the city should avoid a ULA ballot measure because it’s still too early to evaluate the measure’s long-term effects.
“ I'm against going to the ballot, but I'm for making fixes that make this better,” Jurado said.
Voters will see a separate proposal on their ballots by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to effectively repeal Measure ULA.
If the L.A. City Council does not approve reforming the measure, the only decision on the ballot in November may be whether to keep the mansion tax in its current form or end it.
L.A. voters approved Measure ULA in 2022 to fund affordable housing and homelessness prevention. The measure taxes real estate sales over about $5 million. Since taking effect in April 2023, ULA has raised just over $1.1 billion from 1,633 real estate transactions, according to the city’s housing department.
The city projects it will generate about $500 million in the coming fiscal year — about half of what proponents initially promised. It has funded about 800 new affordable units and helped stabilize thousands of renters facing eviction, according to the housing department.
But critics say the tax has suppressed housing development. Several studies link the tax to a slowdown in apartment construction in Los Angeles, but ULA supporters say high interest rates and broader economic conditions are to blame.
The City Council's ad hoc committee on Measure ULA was formed earlier this year to study how the measure is working and develop potential reforms. That work took on more urgency inside L.A. city hall after the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association qualified a statewide ballot measure for November that would effectively repeal Measure ULA entirely.
Joe Donlin, director of the United to House LA coalition, which campaigned for the original measure, said the City Council committee made the right call by rejecting broader exemptions.
“By not taking up the extreme calls for broad, 15-year waivers that could cost the program about a third of its revenue, the committee acknowledged that ULA is working,” Donlin said in a statement.
A separate group of housing developers, union workers and advocacy groups calling itself the “Mend It, Don’t End It” coalition has been urging city hall to make changes to ULA. On Friday, the group said it supports the measure, but believes targeted reforms are still needed.
“Independent research shows that Measure ULA has slowed housing production in Los Angeles at a time when we need more housing, not less,” said Melanie Mendoza, a coalition spokesperson.
The debate over ULA's impact played out in the committee room Friday morning. The city's chief legislative analyst reviewed seven independent studies on ULA’s impact. Three of those studies concluded ULA had suppressed housing production and reduced property tax revenues, while four found no meaningful negative impact.
Before ULA took effect, Los Angeles collected about $22 million a month in transfer tax. After that, it dropped to about $13 million. But city legislative analyst Henry Flatt told the committee a similar decline happened in cities without the tax, including Glendale, Long Beach, Pasadena and Santa Clarita.
“We are not currently convinced that Measure ULA has had an extremely negative impact on general fund revenues,” Flatt told the committee.
The county assessor's office read the same period differently. Scott Thornberry, an assistant assessor with L.A. County, told the committee that commercial and industrial property sales are falling in the city but not elsewhere in the county.
“We are seeing, we believe, a trend line of impact to property tax revenue growth in the city of L.A. specifically," Thornberry said.
Instead of the ballot measure, the committee voted to develop a five-year pilot program cutting the ULA tax to 1.5% for newly constructed affordable housing projects that meet specific requirements.
Lee, whose ballot measure was replaced with language advancing the pilot program, said he hadn't seen the substitute prior to Friday’s meeting and voted against it.
“This was just placed in front of me,” he said. Lee objected to a provision in the substitute recommendations calling for $30 million in new spending on homelessness support.
“Without knowing where this money's coming from, I'm going to have to vote no,” he said.
Lee told LAist he supports stronger oversight and technical improvements to Measure ULA, but believes a ballot measure is the right approach.
“Voters deserve the opportunity to consider targeted changes that would preserve the intent of the measure while addressing its unintended impacts on housing production and real estate activity in Los Angeles,” the councilmember said, in a statement.
Friday's meeting was the committee's final scheduled hearing. The committee, which is set to dissolve June 1, also voted to advance a narrower nonprofit tax refund limited to organizations that can prove all sale proceeds went directly to affordable housing.
The committee continued a separate motion on fire exemptions for Palisades fire victims, which will be heard by another council committee. A motion to loosen eligibility rules for the ULA Citizens Oversight Committee was noted and filed.
Councilmember Imelda Padilla, who introduced several of the committee's motions, said the process had been guided by a commitment to protect the measure.
"My goal has always been to listen carefully, bring people into the conversation, and protect ULA while honoring the voters' intent," she said at Friday’s meeting.
In her closing remarks, Jurado reflected on the three-member committee’s past work.
“We released $14 million in rental assistance to the most vulnerable Angelenos and $300 million for affordable housing,” she said. “We did in six or seven meetings what others couldn't do in five years.”
The ad hoc committee's recommendations now move to the full City Council.
Harris-Dawson and Lee’s ballot measure motion will be considered by the City Council’s rules committee at a later date, officials said.
Topline:
The annual movie-monster bash for horror fans returns to the Pasadena Convention Center this weekend. The event features panel discussions, celebrity photo ops, a monster museum, live makeup demos and over 400 exhibitors.
What can I expect: Rub elbows with legendary beastie creators, browse hundreds of vendors who traffic in the weird and unsettling, and marvel at the practical effects that’ll make your flesh creep.
What should I wear: Cosplay as your favorite filmic haunts or don a classic tee celebrating genre history. Just come ready to adore all things that gnaw and gash.
Read on... for more details about the event.
Monsterpalooza, the annual movie-monster bash for horror fans, returns to the Pasadena Convention Center this weekend, starting Friday night (May 29) and lasting through Sunday.
Now in its 18th year, devotees can rub elbows with legendary beastie creators, browse hundreds of vendors who traffic in the weird and unsettling, and marvel at practical effects that’ll make your flesh creep.
Dozens of panels and presentations are scheduled, including a deep-dive into the 95th anniversary of the Dracula and Frankenstein movies by writer Julian David Stone.
Stone said that the two classic movies have left a lasting impact.
“Dracula is a movie about supernatural horror..... and Frankenstein is about technological or man-made horror," he said. "You can just trace those two themes all the way forward to this past year with Sinners and Megan 2.0."
Stone first attended the convention in 2008, returning over the years as a fan, spectator and presenter.
“It’s just a terrific convention that celebrates all things horror,” Stone said. “There’s a lot of celebrities you can meet who were in these horror films and you can get pictures with them." He added that he’ll never forget when he met Carla Laemmle in 2010 — the last living cast member of the original 1931 Dracula.
If you’re jonesing to be photographed with high-profile entertainers (expect a fee for many), this year's event has a line-up that includes musician Alice Cooper, actress Lin Shaye from the Insidious movie franchise and David Howard Thornton, who plays Art the Clown in the popular Terrifier movie series.
Cosplay and crazy costumes are encouraged, although a T-shirt celebrating a classic horror movie will also do. Just come ready to adore all things that gnaw and gash.
Location: 300 E. Green St., Pasadena
Ticket prices at the door: Friday $50, Saturday $55, Sunday $55, 3-day pass $99
Hours: Friday 6 p.m. - 11 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
