In 2002, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed an ambitious resolution to address the increasingly sticky problem of how to handle the city’s waste. The resolution called for the city to divert 75 percent of its solid waste from its landfill by 2010.
Proponents said the effort would reduce the public health and environmental risks posed by landfill dumping and waste incineration; save taxpayers money; address the problem of the city’s landfill, which was approaching capacity; and spur manufacturers to minimize waste in production.
It was an ambitious goal, but, as it turns out, an attainable one. Today, San Francisco diverts 77 percent of its waste from landfills, and the city has set a “zero-waste” goal for 2020.
San Francisco’s success has been due, in large part, to strict state laws regarding waste disposal. The 1989 California Integrated Waste Management Act mandated that cities and counties divert 50 percent of their solid waste from landfills by 2005. (San Francisco was already closing in on that figure by 2002, the year it passed the resolution calling for 75 percent diversion.) Another law, passed in 2006, bans the disposal of universal waste, or u-waste—a category that includes electronics, batteries and products containing mercury—in California landfills.
Those laws have prompted dramatic waste reductions beyond San Francisco. Overall, the state has exceeded the 50 percent landfill-diversion goal every year since 2005; in 2009, it achieved a diversion rate of 65 percent, according to figures from the state Department of Resources, Recycling and Recovery.
While Californians are typically considered to be on the environmental leading edge, it was strict government regulations that really spurred the state’s landfill-diversion efforts, says Lynne Pledger, solid waste director for Clean Water Action of Massachusetts.
“It wasn’t a grassroots swell of interest in this. It was a top-down thing,” says Pledger. The “chicken and egg” debate notwithstanding—were the laws created in response to public interest, or did widespread public interest follow the laws?—the regulations, with their strict performance standards, forced communities to rethink the ways they dispose of their waste, she says. It’s not dissimilar, she adds, to the way seat belt laws have made most of us buckle up without a second thought.
“Once there’s a regulation, people adapt,” Pledger says. “And once you get started, it’s obvious you can do more and more.”
Pledger—and many like-minded environmentalists—would like to see Massachusetts communities start doing more to reduce the waste heading into landfills here. At a public forum in Northampton on June 30, she’ll make the case for Valley communities to adopt their own “zero-waste” programs.
*
What, exactly, does “zero waste” mean?
In 2004, the Zero Waste International Alliance developed a definition of the concept. It states, in part, “Zero Waste is a goal that is ethical, economical, efficient and visionary, to guide people in changing their lifestyles and practices to emulate sustainable natural cycles, where all discarded materials are designed to become resources for others to use. Zero Waste means designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury them.”
Pledger describes that definition as quite good, if “a little bit on the flowery side,” with its talk of mimicking the cycles of nature. She offers her own, more pragmatic definition: “Zero waste is about systemically reducing your waste, year by year, on a plan where you’ve crunched the numbers and you’ve thought about what you really may be able to do.”
“We’re not going to argue about whether you’re going to get to zero, because that’s not the important thing,” she adds. “The important thing is getting as close as you can.”
The utilitarian nature of her definition is no accident; at the June 30 meeting, Pledger—who also sits on the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Solid Waste Advisory Board and on the steering committee of a nonprofit alliance called Don’t Waste Massachusetts—will focus on how local communities can develop and implement their own zero-waste policies. While no Massachusetts municipality has done so yet (“but soon,” Pledger predicts), in other places, the creation of such a policy typically begins with a local legislative body adopting a zero-waste resolution, which includes the designation of some entity, such as the Board of Health, to come up with a plan. That plan needs to consider what the community’s waste streams are—that includes organics, such as yard waste and food waste, and the more daunting category of products and packaging—and what means are available to reduce those streams.
That’s where things can get challenging. Right now, Pledger says, Massachusetts does an OK job composting yard waste such as leaves and grass clippings, but does less well with composting food waste. According to Mass DEP data from 2005, almost 900,000 tons of food waste are produced in the state each year, accounting for at least 10 percent of the total municipal solid waste generated. Less than five percent of that food waste was being composted, the report noted.
That composting rate has surely improved in the six years since the DEP report; backyard composting is becomingly increasingly popular, and municipalities are expanding public composting options. To mention just one example, the city of Northampton last year launched a municipal composting program in which residents can bring food waste to the city’s transfer station, where it’s collected and sent to a commercial composter. Last year, the eastern Mass. towns of Hamilton and Wenham became the first communities in New England to offer curbside compost collection, for a small fee.
But good composting intentions can only go so far without the capacity for large-scale processing of the waste. The 2005 DEP report found that Massachusetts had, at the time, 30 organic-material composting facilities, capable of processing a total of 150,000 tons a year, but that they were not being fully utilized.
In addition, an analysis conducted for DEP determined that the state would need to compost or otherwise divert 450,000 tons of food waste a year in order to meet a 70 percent landfill-diversion goal it had set for 2010. To that end, the state is working to expand composting options, including offering financial assistance to compost operations and helping businesses such as supermarkets and restaurants develop workable composting plans.
While those kind of large-scale operations are being developed, Pledger says, “Everybody should be composting in the backyard. It’s the simplest thing in the world.”
*
Less simple is addressing the problem of the non-organic material, the throw-away products and their packaging, that makes up almost 75 percent of the waste stream in the country, according to 2007 figures from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2007, 122.9 million tons of that waste ended up in U.S. landfills and incinerators—triple the amount in 1960. Those materials’ effect on the environment may end in the landfill, but it begins much earlier, from the mining of resources used in their production to the energy-consuming and emissions-producing manufacturing process itself and the transportation system that carries the goods to stores and then, eventually, to landfills.
One strategy for addressing that kind of waste is the Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, movement. EPR is defined by the national, nonprofit Product Policy Institute (Pledger is the group’s northeast organizer) as “the simple concept that those who produce, manufacture and use a product should be responsible for taking it back at the end of its life.” When producers bear the responsibility for the end life of what they make, PPI maintains, “they will design them with recycling, reuse, and cost efficiency in mind.”
The EPR model, which has taken off in the European Union, is finding some traction in the U.S. According to the PPI, 33 states have EPR bills that require producers to take back certain categories of products, such as mercury-containing thermostats or, in perhaps the best-known example, soda bottles. Eighty percent of those laws were passed in the last seven years. Twenty-three states have “e-waste” laws, which make electronics manufacturers responsible for the end life of their products.
Massachusetts does not have an e-waste law, which creates a difficult situation for its municipalities. Because they contain toxic materials such as lead, electronics like computer monitors and televisions are banned from landfills. That means towns and cities must pay for private disposal of these items—a burden, the Boston Globe estimated in 2009, that costs Massachusetts municipalities a combined $2 million to $4 million a year.
An e-waste bill has been filed in the Massachusetts Legislature this session (previous bills failed to make it to a vote). According to Clean Water Action, boards of selectmen and city councils in 182 Massachusetts cities have passed resolutions calling for its passage. The bill, which is backed by the Patrick administration, is expected to get a favorable report from the Joint Committee on Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture. “But then it’s got to pass,” Pledger notes.
Meanwhile, some states have gone even further. Last year, Maine—which already had an e-waste law— became the first state to pass a “framework” EPR law that will create a streamlined way for the state to identify other “troublesome” products for which manufacturers will have to take ultimate responsibility. Efforts to pass similar laws are also underway in a handful of other states, including Rhode Island.
In the past two years, local legislative bodies in 11 Massachusetts municipalities have passed resolutions calling for the state to adopt framework EPR legislation; that list includes Springfield, Amherst, Northampton and Holyoke, which was the first community in the state to pass such a resolution.
*
Putting waste-reduction policies in place, Pledger says, is “definitely a matter of political will.” She points again to the model of San Francisco, the first city in the nation to make recycling and composting mandatory. In that community, residents put out three bins for curbside pick-up: one for trash, one for recycling and one for composting.
Curbside composting is actually not a new idea, Pledger points out. When she was a child in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, she recalls, the city collected food scraps separately from other waste. Other cities did the same; in Worcester, she says, the scraps went to a local piggery.
But the post-war years, Pledger says, saw “a turning point in our attitude toward our discards”; out went salvaging for reuse, and in came the convenience and ease of disposable products. “There came this attitude that you can bury it in a hole in the ground, and there’s always more of it,” she says.
That attitude has caught up with us in a big way. As an announcement of Pledger’s Northampton presentation puts it: “Our accelerated production and waste cycle is a root cause of our planet’s most confounding problems, including climate chaos and dwindling natural resources. Now, with area landfills closing and a state ban on building new incinerators, communities in the Pioneer Valley are looking for ways to reduce the amount of waste to be managed, save money and protect our environment.”
Recycling won’t do it alone. “It’s not an endless loop, as those arrows would have you believe,” Pledger says. “If you rely on recycling alone, it’s a downward spiral….
“Reuse is so much better than recycling,” adds Pledger, who makes it a point when she gives presentations to wear outfits purchased entirely from second-hand stores.
“I think we need a whole cultural change, and that’s not appealing to a lot of people,” she continues. But once people become aware of the problems caused by our current methods of production and disposal, it becomes harder and harder not to respond: “Your values change and your aesthetic changes, and you begin to think in a different way.”
Eventually, Pledger predicts, living wastefully will carry the same social stigma that other, once commonplace vices now carry. “Some day,” she says, “I think wasting is going to be the new smoking.”
Lynn Pledger will present “Aiming at Zero: Planning for Zero Waste in the Pioneer Valley” on Thursday, June 30, at 7 p.m. at JFK Middle School, 100 Bridge Rd. in Florence. The free event is sponsored by the Amherst League of Women Voters, the Northampton Department of Public Works, the Sierra Club of Massachusetts, the Toxics Action Network and Transition Northampton.
