San Francisco Is Buried in Campaign Mailers. Here’s Where They End Up

The end of the 2024 election season is just days away, bringing — for better or worse — a conclusion to the uncertainty over who will hold the offices of power come next year.

Another ray of light awaits us just beyond the horizon: the unceasing avalanche of campaign flyers will finally stop. But in the meantime, where do they all end up?

When I check my mail lately, I’m confronted by a mass of colorful ads praising one candidate or measure or condemning another. And although I already know who I’m voting for, the flyers keep coming. They clog my mailbox and litter the streets.

And I know I’m not alone in this. Campaigns and political groups are sending out tons of these mailers, especially in San Francisco, where a contentious mayoral race has become the city’s most expensive in recent history.

In the last two weeks of October alone, Supervisor Aaron Peskin’s mayoral campaign sent out over 225,000 mailers, according to public filings with the San Francisco Ethics Commission. They cost his campaign roughly $175,000.

“Aaron Peskin gets things done,” reads the mailer, showing the Board of Supervisors president shaking hands and smiling. The flip side includes quotes from notable supporters singing his praises.

For those who live with roommates, as I do, it’s common to see duplicates of the same flyer addressed to each voting-age member of the household.

Needless to say, all of the mailers I receive end up in the recycling bin, off to parts unknown.

Enter Robert Reed, spokesperson for Recology, San Francisco’s recycling company.

“This is the biggest season for campaign mailers … so, yes, we’re seeing more of them here,” Reed said during a recent tour of Recycle Central, a processing facility on Pier 96.

Every day, Recology trucks bring roughly 450 tons of recycling to the site. Those materials are then loaded onto conveyor belts, where nonrecyclable materials are pulled out, and the rest are separated into categories through a mix of by-hand and machine sorting.

On the conveyor belt, the boldly colored mailers stood out, dotting the blur of moving waste.

Reed explained that, as far as paper goes, recyclers are happy to get campaign mailers because they’re printed on high-grade stuff.

“These oversized postcards are printed on a paper called cardstock, and it has a long fiber, and it’s a heavy paper,” Reed said. “You can feel the quality of it. It is high-quality paper, and we want to make sure that it gets recycled.”

Reed reached into the bunch and quickly plucked out a few.

They included one supporting Daniel Lurie’s campaign for mayor, another denouncing Lurie as the “trust fund guy” — referencing the fact that he is heir to the Levi Strauss fortune — and another in support of Supervisor Catherine Stefani’s run for the California Assembly.

After the paper products are isolated, they’re compressed into large bales and moved by forklift onto shipping containers.

“We sort and bale over 100 bales of mixed paper here at Recycle Central every day. On a good day, it’s 130 bales,” Reed said. “They then go to a paper mill where they’re made into new paper products like cereal boxes. And that’s good. That saves trees.”

And who knows, maybe after a few cycles of paper reincarnation, that discarded paper will come back as a new mailer for the next election.