It will be summertime, Mayor Jim Clarke estimates, before the ban on polystyrene food containers starts for entrepreneurs.

Besides the time it takes staffers to create documents, for the City Council to approve vague and specific guidelines for such a complicated task, and a phase-in period, another factor weighs heavily.

“Businesses have inventory, and we want people to be able to use up their inventory,” Mr. Clarke said.

Back to the calendar.

“Let’s say we don’t adopt the ordinance until the end of January or beginning of February, it will be six months from then before it actually goes into effect.”

“By that time, the six-month pilot recycling program, that we just started, will be complete, and we will know whether recycling is worthwhile doing.”

The mayor supports the concept of recycling.

The day after the City Council officially endorsed the polystyrene ban to hopefully purify the environment, Mr. Clarke and Council colleague Meghan Sahli-Wells drove out to Perris in Riverside County to pay a recycling visit an anaerobic digester.

“A very interesting facility,” said the mayor. “They take the green waste, they take the food waste and convert it into a mulch fertilizer. It also generates renewable natural gas that they use to fuel their trucks with.

“All of it is contained. This is an anaerobic digester, so there are microbes that eat all of these. They chop the stuff into small pieces, put it in the digesters, heat it up to 130 degrees, keep it in there for 21 days, and the little microbes eat the stuff and convert it into fertilizer they are able to recover.”

“They have a liquid, which they are able to separate, and turn into liquid fertilizer they sell to farmers.”