Many people around the country scoffed at the state of California when it passed a law in 1989 to achieve a 50 percent recycling rate by 2000, but the state’s residents proved the naysayers wrong. California already has 58 percent of its trash removed from the waste stream, and recently Governor Jerry Brown signed a new piece of legislation called Assembly Bill 341 that would divert 75 percent of trash from landfills by 2020. These sorts of lofty goals are nothing new for the progressive state, and it will increase revenue and create jobs for thousands of California residents, according to Earth911.com.