Organic waste: recovered organic waste product procurement targets.

Existing law requires, no later than January 1, 2018, the State Air Resources Board to approve and begin implementing a comprehensive short-lived climate pollutant strategy to achieve a reduction in statewide emissions of methane by 40%, hydrofluorocarbon gases by 40%, and anthropogenic black carbon by 50% below 2013 levels by 2030. Existing law requires the methane emissions reduction goals to include a 50% reduction in the level of the statewide disposal of organic waste from the 2014 level by 2020 and a 75% reduction by 2025. Existing law requires the Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, in consultation with the state board, to adopt regulations to achieve these organic waste reduction goals that include, among other things, requirements intended to meet the goal that not less than 20% of edible food that is currently disposed of be recovered for human consumption by 2025 and that may include penalties to be imposed by the department for noncompliance, as provided. The department's regulations provide for, among other things, the calculation by the department of recovered organic waste product procurement targets for each local jurisdiction. This bill would require any penalties imposed by the department on a local jurisdiction that fails to meet its recovered organic waste procurement target to be imposed pursuant to a specified schedule based on the percentage of the local jurisdiction's recovered organic waste product procurement target achieved. The bill would exempt jurisdictions in possession of a specified rural exemption from these requirements until December 31, 2026. Beginning January 1, 2027, the bill would authorize the department, in its discretion, to provide rural counties and jurisdictions located within rural counties that are exempt from organic waste collection requirements an extended recovered organic waste product procurement target schedule. The bill would also authorize the department, in its discretion, to create an adjusted recovered organic waste product procurement target schedule. Existing regulations permit renewable gas procured from a publicly owned treatment works (POTW) to count toward a jurisdiction's recovered organic waste product procurement target only if certain conditions are met for the applicable procurement compliance year, including that the POTW transported less than 25% of the biosolids it produced to activities that constitute landfill disposal. This bill would make that condition inapplicable until January 1, 2025, as long as the other conditions specified in the regulation are fully met and no more than 50% as an annual average of the biosolids produced during the prior calendar year are transported to activities constituting landfill disposal before January 1, 2025.