Coby Skye’s Next Chapter: Leading SLO County’s Integrated Waste Management Authority

In conversation with VX News, Coby Skye reflects on his transition from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works to leading the San Luis Obispo County Integrated Waste Management Authority (IWMA), where regional collaboration is advancing organic waste diversion and SB 1383 compliance.

Skye explains how evolving waste streams—ranging from lithium-ion batteries to embedded electronics—are increasing technical complexity and safety risks across the sector. He also makes the climate case for organic waste diversion, arguing that reducing methane and other super pollutants represents one of the most immediate and cost-effective climate interventions available. Looking ahead, he emphasizes the growing need to scale domestic recycling and recovery infrastructure for batteries, solar panels, and other renewable energy technologies as California accelerates its energy transition.

“I often think about waste as sitting at the intersection of multiple sustainability issues…tied to waste reduction and toxics, of course [but] also…in renewable energy, water quality, and climate” - Coby Skye

Coby, step back and reintroduce yourself to our readers.

What motivated your transition from Los Angeles County Public Works to leading the San Luis Obispo County Integrated Waste Management Authority?

Thank you for the introduction; I was with Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Works (LACDPW) for about 25 years, and most of my work was centered on waste reduction and recycling programs for over 10 million residents in LA County, which was an amazing experience. 

In 2024, I retired and launched my own consulting practice focusing on circular economy and zero waste policies and infrastructure. It was an absolute blast and I had the chance to travel all over the world and work on some fantastic projects. 

Then, I was encouraged to apply for my current position, as the Executive Director of San Luis Obispo County Integrated Waste Management Authority (SLO IWMA).

SLO IWMA is a joint powers authority, or JPA, up on the Central Coast, and I absolutely couldn’t turn down the opportunity. First, to work in such a beautiful part of the state, and second, to return to my public service roots. 

Elaborate on SLO IWMA’s mission, scope, structure, and responsibilities.

It’s a small but mighty team. We have only seven full-time positions, so it’s radically different from LA County Public Works, but we’re focused on many of the same issues. 

We’re implementing waste reduction programs to ensure our member agencies comply with state regulations. We deal with household hazardous waste, organic waste, and making sure we comply with SB 1383 by keeping organic waste out of landfills and helping meet the state’s climate priorities.

It’s a smaller microcosm, but a lot of the exact same issues.

Your Authority’s governance is a Joint Powers Authority: Is that structure unique, or are there comparable ones in California?

There are quite a few JPAs structured very similarly in California. It’s really a way to be more effective. 

We have seven incorporated cities in the County, twelve community service districts that provide waste collection and recycling services, and of course, the County of SLO. Back in 1994, they formed a joint powers authority and essentially said: instead of each of us reporting to the state and meeting compliance requirements separately, we’re going to band together. We’ll delegate authority to the IWMA to ensure we’re complying and report on a regional basis.

Time and again, it’s been tested and found that when we work together, we do better, and we’re more effective. We have better communication across the region rather than each jurisdiction doing its own thing. 

I’m thrilled to head up this team that works across San Luis Obispo County. It’s a beautiful part of the state, and it offers the opportunity to work in a more rural area than LA County and address some unique challenges.

As waste streams evolve, what new processes are being deployed? What conversion technologies are now available in the marketplace?

One of the amazing things about SLO County is that it developed one of the first anaerobic digesters in California. It was ahead of the curve, which is why the county has really led in implementing SB 1383 and achieving compliance. We’re very close to farms and vineyards that apply compost back to the soil, so there’s already a marketplace for recovered organic materials. 

Anaerobic digestion also creates renewable energy, powering the community and economy by recovering organic waste, something I’ve talked about for decades. My earliest presentations were about conversion technologies that take what would otherwise sit in a landfill as a wasted resource and instead recover energy and products from it. Anaerobic digestion is a fantastic example. It works well here and is deeply integrated into our infrastructure.

At the same time, we’re grappling with single-use plastics and trying to shift toward compostable, recyclable, and reusable products while minimizing unrecyclable materials. That’s an exciting and ongoing initiative.

If State legislators like Ben Allen and Bob Hertzberg were part of this interview—what legislation or regulations would be cited as helpful?

Focusing on SB 54, which I believe is one of the most groundbreaking pieces of legislation we’ve had in years, I would say: support the governor and CalRecycle to implement these regulations this year. 

The impact will be significant—starting with plastic manufacturers, but extending to every product sold in California that uses packaging. Companies will need to rethink how they package and sell materials to comply with the law. But we’ll be much better off for it.

We’re increasingly dependent on plastics. We see them everywhere. Sadly we also see plastic pollution everywhere. We see discarded plastics in the ocean and microplastics showing up throughout the environment—including in newborn babies. That’s deeply concerning, and SB 54 is one of the most promising efforts to directly address this by reducing packaging and shifting toward reusables. It includes firm, measurable reduction requirements—the first law with meaningful, quantifiable reduction targets for plastic packaging.

Let’s revisit anaerobic digesters. Are these technologies relied upon today?

Absolutely. We now have quite a few anaerobic digestion facilities operating in California, and they’re expanding across the U.S. The technology matured earlier in Europe, where they recognized the value of diverting biodegradable waste from landfills. Digesters accelerate decomposition, create compost, and recover renewable natural gas, which is a natural byproduct of anaerobic digestion. It’s chemically the same as conventional natural gas but comes from a renewable source rather than fossil extraction.

From a climate perspective, renewable natural gas produced from recovered organic waste is considered a negative carbon energy source. That means each gallon equivalent reduces climate pollution rather than adding to it.

Coby, for readers unfamiliar: Expand on the broader organic waste challenges.

On the organic waste side, because of SB 1383, we’re probably in better shape, but I think an area where we could be more anticipatory is at the intersection of renewable energy and waste. 

I often think about waste as sitting at the intersection of multiple sustainability issues. It’s directly tied to waste reduction and toxics, of course, but it also plays a critical role in renewable energy, water quality, and climate. In California, for good reasons, carbon emissions have become the common denominator for measuring the effectiveness of environmental policy. What often gets lost in that conversation is that addressing waste—particularly organic waste—is frequently one of the most cost-effective strategies for making significant climate impact.

If we reduce so-called “super pollutants,” especially methane and black carbon, through waste reduction strategies, we can have a substantial impact. That buys us time. It helps blunt the impacts of emissions that have already occurred and allows us to change the trajectory of climate change. 

We’ve already exceeded one degree Celsius of warming, and we’re on track for significant additional warming. We’re seeing the impacts in floods, wildfires, droughts, and supercharged storms.

LA County in particular has been hard hit in recent years. If we want to reduce the frequency and intensity of these disasters, good organic waste policy is part of that solution.

From your current managerial vantage point, does policy align with operational reality?

An area where we’re not quite meeting expectations, because there isn’t that connection to what’s needed on the ground—is the intersection between the renewable energy sector and the waste sector.

One example is wind turbines: at the end of life for those really immense infrastructure projects, there isn’t an effective way to recycle wind turbine blades, so they end up being landfilled. It would be fantastic to see more investment in technologies that can make use of those materials.

The same concern applies to solar panels and batteries. I don’t think we’re investing anywhere near enough to manage the volume of batteries entering the waste stream. What further complicates that is that we’re seeing batteries in every product you can imagine. Greeting cards that make noise, little toys that light up…everything interactive like that has a battery embedded in it; and a lot of people don’t necessarily think about that.

It’s a two-fold problem: One is that the resources in those batteries, which can include rare earth minerals and lithium—are being mined at increasing rates. We could be recovering those materials, but we don’t have the infrastructure for it. 

Second, think about the last toy or product you bought that had an embedded battery, and if the information clearly said, “Don’t throw this away at the end of life. Bring it to a specialized collection facility.” Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do with items that have embedded batteries.

If they’re thrown in the trash, not only are we losing those resources, but we’re creating fire risks. If a battery sparks against something metallic, or gets crushed in recycling machinery, it can ignite and we’re seeing more of these fires in trash vehicles and recycling facilities. It’s a really bad way to manage the waste stream. 

We need more outreach, better labeling, and long-term investment in battery recovery infrastructure to prevent these increasing incidents of fires in our waste system.

You referenced fire risks in the waste system. Reflect on the Woolsey fire, and the more recent Palisades and Eaton fire(s), did the scale and intensity of those events impact post-fire cleanup and waste operations at all?

Firstly, at the time, the most significant wildfire impacting LA County was the Woolsey Fire, and then the recent fires significantly dwarfed Woolsey in terms of scale and impact. 

In both cases, because of the intensity of the fires: the temperatures created, the winds that were supercharging them—every aspect was made worse by climate conditions. Climate change didn’t directly cause the fires, but it made them more intense. We had stronger winds driving them faster, higher temperatures, and conditions that made it much harder for firefighters, especially aircraft, to contain them.

What happens in these fires is that you’re not just burning vegetation. You’re burning structures. Think about a typical home with vehicles with batteries and electronics, paint, plastics, leather, household hazardous waste under sinks and in garages. All of those materials are burned and either enter the air or are deposited into the soil. That creates an incredibly complex cleanup operation. 

Woolsey required significant investment in cleanup and rebuilding, and the more recent wildfires—particularly in the Palisades and Eaton areas, were even more extensive. Recovery takes years. Even Woolsey took years to fully rebuild and remediate.  

Drilling down on contaminated materials. Have operations changed much since Woolsey? 

We definitely learned a lot from Woolsey, and those lessons were applied to more recent cleanup efforts. The processes and coordination are improving. We’re better at setting up staging areas, infrastructure, and coordinating with facilities that accept the recovered materials. We’re able to move more quickly. 

That said, the overall majority of recovered materials still go to landfill. A lot of what’s recovered is inert—soil, ash, debris—but it’s contaminated. We don’t yet have scalable technologies in the U.S. to clean and recover much of that material.

I’ve had conversations with companies in Europe that have more advanced screening and remediation technologies that could recover more of those materials. It’s possible, but we haven’t been able to scale it quickly enough to capture a large portion of that waste. Those conversations are ongoing, and it will likely take many more months to process all of the remaining material.

Wewill soon be interviewing John Shegerian of ERI. Elaborate on the growing need of safely recycling e-waste.

I’ll say that John’s company has done tremendous work advancing electronic waste recycling. The key question now is: how do we scale investment in U.S. facilities to recover materials coming out of the renewable energy sector?

As we build massive battery storage systems, we also need to plan for their end of life. How do we prioritize repurposing and reuse first, and then ensure proper recycling? We need recycling capacity at every scale—from small watch and hearing aid batteries to automotive batteries and warehouse-sized energy storage systems.

We’re also beginning to see solar panels enter the waste stream in significant numbers. So another important question is: how do we build domestic industries to recover those materials, rather than sending them overseas or allowing them to be wasted?

There’s a major opportunity here, and companies can play a significant role, if the right investments and policy signals are in place.

There’s controversy and frustration among consumers about recycling, particularly concerning separation policy.

Is that frustration justified?

There is certainly ongoing confusion, especially as the market has shifted in recent years and we had to be more particular about what plastic items we try to recover.  A few years ago—when China became more strict about the materials it would accept—materials that had previously been labeled recyclable but were really contaminated or mixed plastics without a good recovery rate could no longer find markets. That forced a shift in the outreach we were doing. We had to become more restrictive about what was truly recyclable and what should go in curbside bins.

And I think there are several recent policies that are creating more shifts. One of the things I worked on while serving on the statewide recycling commission was establishing a solid definition for what is recyclable and what is compostable. That recommendation ultimately became state law. A key part of that definition was looking at facilities in California that were actually recovering materials and sending them to real end markets. 

Everything is theoretically recyclable if you spend enough energy and money, but if it costs a thousand times more than producing a virgin raw material, no business is going to make that investment. If it’s too toxic or lacks viable markets, then it’s not responsibly recyclable in California.

Those new definitions are going into effect, and as I mentioned, SB 54 will require that packaging be recyclable, compostable, or reusable. That’s a huge shift because until now, companies could choose packaging based on cost or marketing appeal. Recyclability was often secondary…now, it has to be built in. 

Packaging must meet that real-world definition—meaning that when residents or businesses put it in a curbside bin, it actually gets recovered and sent to an end market, not just theoretically recyclable somewhere in the world.

To close, you’ve once again, agreed to participate in our 19th annual VerdeXchange Conference.

So, what type of cross-sector dialogue, across policy, infrastructure, and markets, do you hope to initiate or emerge?

I’m particularly excited to connect this conversation to the circular economy.

There’s been a lot of discussion recently around the “abundance agenda,” and I think that’s an important conversation. California regulations are sometimes held up as examples of environmental rules that, while well-intentioned, are so burdensome that they become counterproductive. They can make it harder to build the recycling infrastructure, renewable energy infrastructure, and water treatment systems we need to meet our goals.

I’m hopeful that we can start meaningfully addressing that by creating smarter, goal-oriented regulations—regulations that focus on the outcomes we want to achieve, rather than prescribing rigid, one-size-fits-all processes that don’t always work on the ground.

I’ve always believed that progress comes from getting everyone in the room who has a stake in the issue. Bring people together, talk directly about the challenge, and ask: what can we do to solve this? That usually requires everyone to make some concessions, but it produces solutions that actually address the issue head-on. 

VerdeXchange is one of the best places to have those conversations, and I’m really looking forward to continuing them this year.

We look forward to having you, Coby!