Employee-Owned Composting: How Recology Turns San Francisco Scraps Into Soil

Employee-owned composting is the quiet engine behind one of the best known recycling programs in America. Recology, the San Francisco company that collects and processes the city’s waste, has been owned by its workers since 1986, and it helped build the three bin system that other cities now copy.

How employee-owned composting started at Recology

In 1986 a group of 570 employees bought the company then known as Norcal through an employee stock ownership plan. The company took the name Recology in 2009. Recology says it now serves more than 100,000 commercial customers and over 2.5 million people across California, Oregon and Washington. These are company figures.

The San Francisco model

San Francisco passed the first mandatory composting and recycling ordinance in the country in 2009. Residents sort waste into three bins for recycling, compost and trash. Recology ran the first US pilot curbside composting program in 1996, and its spokesperson told Waste360 in December 2025 that the city’s collection runs at roughly 500 to 550 tons a day for composting and about 450 tons a day for recyclables.

What the numbers show

In its 2022 sustainability update, Recology reported that it recovered 735,490 tons of organic material in 2021 and operated eight composting facilities, including Blossom Valley Organics in Vernalis, California, which handles more than 320,000 tons a year. The company says recycling and composting avoided 1.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent that year, about nine times its own operating emissions. Those are company reported numbers from 2021.

Why it matters

Food scraps in a landfill break down without air and create methane. Turning them into compost avoids that and returns nutrients to farm soil. The employee ownership structure adds another lesson: a company whose workers share the gains has a reason to run a long, steady program rather than chase a quick profit.

Newer figures would help, since the most detailed numbers here date from 2021. Still, the program is a working example for any city or business that wants to cut landfill waste.

Sources: Recology about page; Waste360, December 2025; Recology 2022 sustainability update. Figures marked as company reported come from the company itself.