The electric carmaker agreed to pay $1.5M to settle a case brought against it by California prosecutors, who say that the company improperly stored and discarded hazardous waste during manufacturing, this week.

The district attorneys from 25 counties around the state, including eight Bay Area ones — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma — jointly filed the lawsuit Tuesday in San Joaquin County Superior Court, per the Chronicle. The lawsuit claimed that Tesla violated many state regulations about the proper storage, disposal and management of hazardous waste.

The suit singled out Tesla’s Fremont factory for generating hazardous painting byproducts, using contaminated materials, and potentially toxic spatter from welding car panels, as Silicon Valley News reported. It also alleged that dozens of Tesla service centers in Bay Area cities including San Jose, Gilroy, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Dublin, Fremont, Burlingame, San Francisco and San Rafael, produced toxic waste.

This lawsuit was the result of years of investigations into Tesla’s waste management, according to the Chronicle. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office’s Environmental Division apparently started looking into it in 2018 and conducted undercover inspections of  trash containers at Tesla car service centers.

Tesla pretty quickly agreed to settle, SF DA Brooke Jenkins said in a statement released Thursday. Jenkins said that Tesla agreed to proactively screen waste for hazardous material before disposal, adequately train employees on hazardous waste management, and enlist a third-party entity for annual compliance audits over the next five years. It also will pay $1.3 million in civil penalties, along with an additional $200,000 to cover investigation costs.

Meanwhile, Tesla is still fighting lawsuits about the alleged racism and sexual harassment within the company.

Feature image via Unsplash/Paul Steuber.

It's that time of year again! 2003's Prop C mandated that the beautiful City of San Francisco issue an annual report on the state of our dear sweet streets and sidewalks, and here that is, once again: The Street and Sidewalk Maintenance Standards Annual Report.

To produce the report, issued last week for Fiscal Year 2015-2016, inspectors from contractor JBR Partners walked 183 selected routes in town — about half of them commercial, half of them residential — at the midpoint in the week between street cleanings. Compared to FY 2014-15, these inspectors found less litter and grime on streets, with about twice as many routes free from "excessive" litter.

That's the good news, here's the bad: The big three hazards on streets — feces, needles, and condoms, or FNC as they're known in the biz — were spotted more often than last year along residential routes, though inspectors found conditions to be roughly the same on commercial routes.

For another metric, the City’s SF311 customer service center fielded an increase in reports about feces and the like on streets, suggesting a palpable uptick in "FNC" sightings. In fact, 311 calls grew by 25 percent in FY 2015-16 to reach an average of 34,480 requests per month.

Going by 311 calls, reports of needles saw a 41 percent increase across the city, moving the proverbial needle quite a bit. Last year saw 2,527 reports of needles, and this year there were 3,551. The SF Public Works "Hot Spot" team, which actually performs needle cleanups, also noticed a big uptick here, counting internally 16,000 needles picked up in FY2015 and then 23,300 in FY2016 — an increase of 40 percent.

Human waste reports were up 39 percent, with District 6 bearing the brunt of that.

via the Office of the Controller

311 requests regarding broken glass were also up, tied to car break-ins, by 24 percent this year. That includes an astronomical jump after April and May media coverage brought attention to the issue of broken glass and car break-ins, possibly skewing the numbers.

via the Office of the Controller

Graffiti was also up according to the report. So who's responsible for cleaning up this mess? Mostly the answer is Public Works. Per the report, "among the twenty-two street and sidewalk standards evaluated, the Public Works department is generally responsible for the maintenance of the streets and Public Works assets located on the sidewalks." To keep up and help "operationalize" findings, the report recommends that the number of street and sidewalk evaluations each year be increased.

But trash, needles, and shit on city streets don't just spontaneously generate: A large factor in all of this is that San Francisco's population is up 8 percent since 2010, with 60,000 more residents as of January 2016. "This continued growth of people living and working in San Francisco places additional demand on the City’s service systems," the report explains. More people means more trash, and maybe it also means more people to complain about crap on the street. However, the report notes that the increase in 311 reports far outmatched the increase in new 311 users. Aw, crap.

Previously: Report Cites Fewer Needles On Sidwalks, But Complaints About Them Rise Anyway

A tweaker's paradise, indeed. This Saturday in Sausalito, you can drop off your used and unwanted electronic devices for proper disposal. Computers, printers, copiers, scanners, fax machines, servers, main frame units, networking equipment, systems, printed circuit boards, telephones and cellular phones, stereos, televisions and flat screens, DVD players and other consumer electronics will be accepted.

According to Marin IJ, "E-waste collected will be shredded and mechanically separated into steel, aluminum, copper and plastic for use in the manufacture of new products. No e-waste will be landfilled or exported as e-waste."

The Sausalito Sustainability Commission will accept your waste from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at City Hall (420 Litho Street) in the rear parking lot on Bee Street.

[Marin IJ]

Yesterday, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu introduced a ban on unsolicited Yellow Pages in San Francisco that would force phone companies to get consumers' permission before dumping the directories on their doorsteps. If you recall, Senator Leland Yee was unsuccessful at passing a similar bill before the state Senate last summer.

Although consumers are able to opt-out of receiving the Yellow Pages, Chiu's office estimates that more than 1.5 million are distributed in San Francisco per year, many of which land in the recycling bin (or worse, the landfill). There have also been more books delivered more frequently in recent years thanks to two or more competing companies distributing in overlapping geographic areas.

The Yellow Pages Association says the ban would be an infringement on their constitutional right to distribute speech, and AT&T's lawyers are probably letting their fingers do the walking typing up more paperwork as we speak.

If successful, San Francisco would be the first city in the nation to pass such a ban, and other cities will be watching. It's estimated that local governments and consumers spend approximately $54 million a year to dispose of phone books and an additional $9 million to recycle them. Phone books are difficult to recycle since they're made with low grade paper, and are sometimes distributed with materials such as plastics and magnets that become contaminants in the recycling process.

The White Pages will not be affected by the ban.

[Via Chron]

Recycling technology sure has come a long way, and it looks like San Francisco's Recology might be leading the charge.

After noticing the forlorn Mr. Potato Head pictured on the "Recyclable" label of our recycling cart the other day, we discovered that all plastic toys are in fact recyclable, as long as they don't have any electronic parts. (Of course, it's always better to donate the toy if it's still in good condition.)

And who knew Recology also accepts empty/dry paint cans, as well as flower pots and non-metallic wrapping paper?

Long gone are the days of removing bottle caps (leave them on) and making sure certain numbers of plastics are acceptable (compostable plastic isn't recyclable though).

In an effort to get people to use the (delicious!) Hetch Hetchy tap water and reduce the amount of plastic water bottle waste, the San Francisco Department of the Environment (SFE) and San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) announced the city plans to install a bunch of water-bottle refilling stations. (In our day, we called those "faucets.")

In Yerba Buena Gardens yesterday afternoon, reports SFWater.org, SFE Director Jared Blumenfeldshowed off the first pilot water refilling station care of from GlobalTap, "an international provider of new and innovative clean drinking water refilling stations." Following the kickoff spigot installation, "SFPUC and SFE officials hope to install additional stations throughout San Francisco in 2010." These stations will be installed in convenient public locations.

"San Francisco has been a leader in educating people about the negative impacts of bottled water,” said Blumenfeld. "Today we are honored to be the first U.S. city to host a GlobalTap filling station. Now San Franciscans can ‘BYOB’ (‘Bring Your Own Bottle’) every day."

This is in addition to the tap stations already dotted around the city at certain stores, cafes, and restaurants where you can walk in and fill up your water bottle. TapIt, a New York-based organization, already has 80 stations in San Francisco, with a total of over 400 partners in 10 states. You can find the station closest to you via TapIt’s search and mapping features.

We've become more and more hippie-ish in our near eight years living in San Francisco. We've mostly dwelled in compost-practicing households here, where it was a convenient process and just as easy to do as tossing waste in the trash. We now live in a large apartment building with around 30 units with no current compost option, although a few of us tenants are interested in setting one up.

We throw away a lot of coffee grounds, cashew pistachio shells, discarded stems from greens, garlic casings, etc., which not only feels like a shameful waste, but causes our eco-friendly trash bags to rot very quickly. This inevitably causes us to poke our fingers through the bottom when throwing them down the trash shoot. Disgusting!

Our building manager said the main issue is that the compost would have to be stored in the basement, and our landlord is understandably concerned about it attracting rodents, which are already a battle. Sunset Scavenger advised us that the home bin and roadside bin can both be lined with paper bags, and food should be tightly wrapped in paper milk cartons and newspaper, which will keep the smells from attracting rodents. They also said our building might qualify for more than one pick-up per week.

Do any of you out there inhabit a large apartment building that has composting? Is the above advice rodent-proof?

Also, check out what Jepson Prairie Organics does with the Bay Area's compost.

Image credit: justHugo, via Creative Commons