Los Angeles just announced a green business certification program they plan to launch on a full-scale in six months. The city hopes restaurants, retailers, hotels and others will participate.
Years in the making, the program is a joint-effort between the city’s environmental people and The GreenLA Coalition, 
with the chamber of commerce and convention and visitors group playing along.
The program would hopefully include many of the city’s 11,000 + restaurants, which would be great. Just one thing doesn’t work for me:
One of the proposed criteria is that restaurants would need to recycle cardboard, paper, glass, metal and plastics but could choose whether to collect food waste for off-site composting.
Let me get this straight–there’s neither a carrot nor a stick for handling food waste in a green manner? (Not to mention the lack of any incentives to reduce or donate edible waste)
In the LA Times article from above, we learn that restaurant participation in the trial green bin collection program (composting) is subsidized. And restaurants can usually reduce their trash bill by removing food from the regular waste stream. Then why not roll out green bin collection city-wide and make composting a mandatory part of the green business certification?
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