California has required residents and businesses to separate food and other organic waste for four years, but many people still remain unaware of the rule, prompting local governments to step up education and inspections.
The confusion extends to Los Angeles Koreatown.
“I didn’t know there was a law requiring food waste to be separated from regular trash,” said Sunwoo Hwang, 27, a Koreatown resident. “Separating food waste is common in Korea, but I thought that in the U.S. you just threw everything away together.”
Minjun Park, 25, said he had often seen friends who were born and raised in the United States dispose of food scraps with regular garbage.
“I assumed that was the correct way to do it,” he said.
California’s SB 1383 regulations, implemented statewide beginning in 2022, require local jurisdictions to provide organic waste collection services to residents and businesses. Food scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, fruit peels, grass clippings and leaves are among the materials covered. Local collection systems can vary, so residents should check the rules where they live.
In Los Angeles, residents generally place food scraps and yard waste in the green organics bin.
The goal is to reduce methane emissions from landfills. Organic waste decomposing in landfills accounts for about 20% of California’s methane emissions, according to CalRecycle.
California set a target of reducing organic waste sent to landfills by 75% from 2014 levels by 2025, which would limit annual disposal to about 5.7 million tons. The state has struggled to reach that ambitious goal, even as organics recycling has expanded.
CalRecycle reported that 11.2 million tons of organic material were diverted from landfills and processed into products such as compost in 2022. As of May 2026, 97% of communities required to provide organics recycling had programs in place, though implementation among covered businesses stood at about 75%.
Local governments are increasingly focusing on getting residents to sort waste correctly.
Los Angeles has promoted organics recycling through multilingual outreach and educational efforts aimed at both households and food-service businesses.
Sacramento has gone a step further by inspecting curbside bins before collection. City employees briefly open trash, recycling and organic waste containers and check whether materials have been placed in the correct bin.
When improperly sorted items are found, residents receive a “Let’s Sort This Out” tag explaining the mistake and how to correct it. The city says the inspections are currently educational and do not carry fines or penalties.
The inspections are part of the broader challenge facing California as it tries to turn a relatively new waste-sorting requirement into an everyday habit.
For residents, officials say the simplest rule is to check local guidelines before throwing food scraps into the regular trash — because under California’s organics recycling system, they increasingly belong somewhere else.
