2018–2024 · 19 JURISDICTIONS · CALRECYCLE + CA DOF
CalRecycle publishes four disposal figures per jurisdiction per year. Before comparing any jurisdictions, it's worth understanding what each one actually measures — and why CalRecycle itself warns against comparing them directly.
To check, we calculated tons per capita independently — raw disposal tonnage divided by population — using no CalRecycle baseline adjustments at all.
(Staff Reviewed Tons × 2,000 lbs/ton) ÷ (Population × 365 days) — tons from the CalRecycle Diversion/Disposal Progress Report, population from the CA Dept of Finance E-4 estimates. Independently calculated, not pulled pre-computed from either source.
The two lines sit almost on top of each other. That's the point: Population Annual is, for practical purposes, tons of landfill-bound waste per resident per day — a real, physical quantity, just one that doesn't separate out non-resident waste generation (tourism, commuting workers, commercial activity). See the "Tons per capita, absolute scale" tab to see how large that gap gets across jurisdictions.
Same read as the population chart: below target = overperforming on a per-job basis, above = underperforming. Still jurisdiction-specific, still not directly comparable across cities.
Because the two targets use different denominators for the same tonnage, the gap between them is really a proxy for how commercial/job-dense a jurisdiction is relative to its resident population — sorted here by employment target, highest first.
Coronado and Del Mar sit at the extremes for opposite reasons. Coronado's employment target (43.9) is more than 3.5× its population target (12.0) — a small resident base against a large military/hotel/tourism job base. Del Mar's two targets are close together (20.3 vs. 24.6) because its small population is matched by an almost-equal-sized local commercial footprint. Wherever the two bars diverge sharply, expect the resident-only Annual figure to be the more misleading one for that jurisdiction.
All 19 jurisdictions at once, one metric at a time. Each mini-chart auto-scales to its own range — built to compare trend shape (rising, falling, spiking) across jurisdictions, not absolute magnitude. For magnitude comparisons, use the "Tons per capita, absolute scale" tab instead.
Same 19 jurisdictions, same metric as the small multiples tab — but plotted on one shared axis instead of 19 independently-scaled mini-charts, so absolute magnitude differences are visible.
Click a legend row to isolate a jurisdiction. Remember: this metric moves almost identically to Population Annual PPD — it inherits the same resident-only-denominator caveat, it's just calculated independently rather than pulled from CalRecycle directly.
Annual disposal rate as a percentage of each jurisdiction's own target — the more fairly comparable cross-jurisdiction view, because it normalizes each jurisdiction against its own baseline instead of comparing absolute rates with different baselines.
Dashed line = 100% of target. Below the line = under target (overperforming relative to own baseline). Above = over target. Escondido is the only jurisdiction consistently over 100% on both bases.
Same percent-of-target data as the trend tab, laid out for two different questions: where does each jurisdiction stand right now (heatmap), and which jurisdictions are actually trending toward or away from their target over time (ranking below)?
Rather than just comparing 2018 to 2024 (sensitive to a single noisy year), this fits a trend line through all seven years per jurisdiction and ranks by that slope — percentage points of target per year. Negative = trending toward overperformance. Positive = trending toward underperformance.