Are there laws for or against composting or what does the policy landscape look like?

I'll be the first to admit, this is something that I am not very well versed in.

I tend to focus a little bit more on what's going on in my own backyard.

But we do have Alyssa Browski from Food to Soil back on for her final episode this week.

Alyssa, with Food to Soil obviously, you're sort of interfacing at a broader scale with different households

and perhaps communities and governments.

Is there something that we need to know about the composting policy landscape?

Definitely.

This is something that can vary a lot from county to county.

I'm going to give examples of San Diego County specifically, but it's important to look up what's happening in your own neighborhood.

So in San Diego County, there's zoning restrictions that don't allow you to, for example, process food waste that's not generated on site.

That's an unincorporated county.

So cities like Julian or Hamul, those have restrictions that say you can't process anything that wasn't generated by you.

And so let's say that you were looking into composting for other people because you want to generate more compost.

You need to make, you need to understand that there is a zoning restriction against what you want to do.

Although it's subject to change and we're hoping that we see that change soon.

Other restrictions are, can you get paid for what you're doing?

So if you are on a zone that says no home businesses, that's going to restrict you from processing food scraps for an income.

And additionally, there's another aspect of hauling.

So let's say I want to haul food scraps and bring them to a spot where I process it.

That is also restricted based on where you are.

So Kevin, where you're located, we cannot set up the drop off locations that I described in the last episode.

...