Recology

Recology is the company that takes the rubbish out of San Francisco — and, more particularly, the company that takes it out so well that the city of San Francisco, in 2009, became the first major American city to make composting mandatory for residents and businesses. The firm traces its founding to 1935, when two collection companies serving the city’s growing population merged into the Sanitary Fill Company. In 1986, the firm’s then-parent Norcal Solid Waste Systems was sold to its 570 employees through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan; forty years on, Recology is still 100% employee-owned, which is unusual at its scale and in its industry.

The firm provides collection, recycling, composting, and disposal services across more than a hundred jurisdictions in California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada — under the long-standing operating arrangement with the City and County of San Francisco that goes back to 1932, and through municipal contracts with cities and counties throughout the western United States. Operations include household and commercial collection, transfer stations, organics-processing facilities, and material-recovery facilities; the firm processes the city of San Francisco’s compost stream into the agricultural soil amendment used by Napa and Sonoma vineyards.

What distinguishes Recology in its sector is the combination of employee ownership and civic operating mandate. Almost every American waste-management firm of comparable scale is either publicly listed (Waste Management, Republic Services) or privately held by financial owners; Recology has been employee-owned for nearly four decades, which materially shapes the way decisions are made on the operating floor. The firm’s contract with San Francisco — the country’s most-watched municipal recycling regime — has set the standard against which other American cities measure their own waste-diversion ambitions.

The practice has worked with Recology at the San Francisco operation on Lean process implementation across operations.