We are indeed fortunate to live in the enlightened city of San Francisco, where recycling is a way of life. Some of us are more into it than others, assiduously parsing each individual tea bag towards the compost and moaning inwardly when we see that a plastic bag has insinuated itself into an otherwise pristine recycling tub. Others are downright degenerate, bundling their cardboard toilet rolls along with shiny energy-bar wrappers and flinging them all into the black bin destined for landfill. Far from being a matter of individual weakness, a failure to recycle is a blot on civic pride, as is made clear in a thrilling new documentary called Racing to Zero , opening Friday at the Roxie.
Zero in the title stands for zero waste, zero landfill, nothing going into the black bins. The self-imposed deadline for the city of San Francisco, to which Mayor Lee has given his imprimatur, is the year 2020. That deadline has been on the minds of the people whose minds work that way since the early 70s. We are currently generating irredeemable trash at the rate of 400,000 tons a year, or half of what we were generating 15 years ago, but equal to what we generated in the early 70s. The fact is, we have to work a lot harder today than we did then to combat lifestyles based on accelerating addictions to disposability.
Racing to Zero, produced by Diana Fuller and directed by Christopher Beaver, wastes zero of its purposeful 57 minutes in lecturing us on our predilection for products wrapped in trashy plastic and recyclable cardboard that we sometimes fail to conscientiously separate out in the blue-for-recycling and black-for-landfill bins so conveniently provided by the city. The film wisely steers clear of imposing any guilt trips, focusing rather on a concept somewhat ineptly described by James Kao, of Green Citizen, as "cradle to cradle." We're not talking human babies here, but items produced to serve a human need, which wear out, or get boring, and need to leave our sight, but can and must be repurposed for some other human.
"Out of sight, out of mind" doesn't work for Robert Haley, the curly-haired gentle giant who is Zero Waste Manager for the city's Department of the Environment. The concept of "throwing something away," as though objects could be made to magically disappear, seriously needs to be composted. Zero conveys, with a subtle, lyrical simplicity, not unlike Soviet cinema of the 1920s, how all our yucky urban garbage can be spun into gold-like threads of useful hand-me-downs to Goodwill, raw materials to eclectic artists, electronics to Green Citizen, concrete to Ferma Corporation, stubborn plastic to MBA Polymers, glass to bottle-makers, paper to China, and most sublimely, food scraps to heroic earthworms called Red Wrigglers, who shit them out as life-giving mulch for farmland a wee bit north.
Like Soviet cinema, this vision is utopic, but it is not unachievable, and as the film gently reminds us, the goal of zero waste will only be achieved by communal effort. "There are financial incentives," says Haley, and there are laws. And there is a third way. "This is the culture of San Francisco. In San Francisco, this is what people do. And then, people will naturally tend to follow that social bar. This is all part of the educational process." Otherwise known as peer pressure, or wanting to be cool, or fashion. There's an idea: overly art-directed shots of models tossing carrot tops, to-go cups, and slightly nibbled burritos into green bins.
Unlike Soviet cinema, Zero is devoid of ideology. There's no reference to our proud hippie heritage, which includes the San Francisco tradition of the free table: any designated area in a building where people discard still-useful items. The simplest and most antithetical to a market economy, this repurposing method is said to have originated with the Diggers, or perhaps they brought it back. The Diggers were a group of hippies who performed in the parks, provided free food, medical care and housing, and generally offset the pernicious grasp of private property any way they could. Their spirit did not die with the 60s. It's alive and well to the extent that we practice commonsense, life-enhancing civic virtues.