Beyond 40%: Record-Setting Recycling And Composting Programs

About Island Press

Island Press, a non-profit organization, publishes, markets, and distributes the most advanced thinking on the conservation of our natural resources — books about soil, land, water, wildlife, and hazardous and toxic wastes. These books are practical tools used by public officials, business and industry leaders, natural resource managers, and concerned citizens working to solve both local and global resource problems.

Founded in 1978, Island Press reorganized in 1984 to meet the increasing demand for substantive books on all resource-related issues. Island Press publishes and distributes under its own imprint and offers these services to other non-profit organizations.

Support for Island Press is provided by Apple Computers, Inc., Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Charles Engelhard Foundation, The Ford Foundation, Glen Eagles Foundation, The George Gund Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Joyce Foundation, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation, The New-Land Foundation, The J. N. Pew, Jr. Charitable Trust, Alida Rockefeller, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Florence and John Schumann Foundation, The Tides Foundation, and individual donors.

About the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) is a non-profit research and educational organization, providing technical information and assistance to city and state governments, citizen and neighborhood organizations, and industry.

Since 1974, ILSR has been fostering self-reliant communities by investigating examples of closed-loop manufacturing, materials policy, materials recovery, energy efficiency, and small-scale production. It teaches cities to consider solid waste and the by-products of any one process as the feedstock for another. The Institute stresses a formula that stimulates local employment, provides skills training, and adds to the local tax base.

ILSR presents a vision of self-reliant cities and provides the hard numbers to bring that vision into reality. By providing the tools and information to solve problems in ways that are both economically sound and environmentally sustainable, ILSR seeks to support an active citizenry, which is the foundation of a strong democracy.

Beyond 40 Percent: Record-Setting Recycling and Composting Programs is part of an ongoing series of technical reports prepared by ILSR staff. For more information on ILSR philosophy and practice, write:

Institute for Local Self-Reliance

2425 18th Street, NW

Washington, D.C. 20009

Phone (202) 232-4108

Fax (202) 332-0463

© 1991 Institute for Local Self-Reliance

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20009.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beyond 40 percent: record-setting recycling and composting programs by Brenda Platt ... [et al.].

p. cm.

August 1990.

Includes index.

9781610912525

1. Recycling (Waste, etc.) — United States — Case studies.

2. Compost plants — United States — Case Studies. I. Platt, Brenda.

II. Title: Beyond forty percent.

TD794.5.B48 1991

636.72’82’0973 — dc20

90-19181

CIP

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Table of Contents

About Island Press

About the Institute for Local Self-Reliance

Title Page

Copyright Page

List of Tables

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

How to Use This Study

Introduction

Observations

Data Definitions and Methodology

Case Studies

BERLIN TOWNSHIP, NEW JERSEY

LONGMEADOW, MASSACHUSETTS

HADDONFIELD, NEW JERSEY

PERKASIE, PENNSYLVANIA

RODMAN, NEW YORK

WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS

LINCOLN PARK, NEW JERSEY

WEST LINN, OREGON

HAMBURG, NEW YORK

WILTON, WISCONSIN

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

CHERRY HILL, NEW JERSEY

UPPER TOWNSHIP, NEW JERSEY

BABYLON, NEW YORK

PARK RIDGE, NEW JERSEY

FENNIMORE, WISCONSIN

WOODBURY, NEW JERSEY

Index

Also Available From Island Press

Island Press Board of Directors

List of Tables

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6

Table 7

Table 8

Table 9

Table 10

Table 11

Table 12

Table 13

Abbreviations

Acknowledgements

This report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance was made possible by the patience, diligent data-gathering, and hard work of many individuals.

We made dozens of phone calls to state and local recycling coordinators, solid waste professionals, recyclers, and local decision-makers in order to identify communities recovering the highest levels of their solid waste through source-separation recycling and composting programs. The assistance of these individuals was invaluable in getting this project off the ground. Approximately 80 surveys were sent to key contact people in those communities reporting the highest materials recovery levels. We extend our thanks to all who took the time to complete and return the surveys, and who had the patience to bear with us during follow-up inquiries, of which there were many. Without their participation and cooperation, this report would not have been possible.

Although most information for the report came from municipal recycling coordinators and Superintendents of Public Works, we also made calls to local landfills, private refuse haulers, county and state solid waste officials, and local political leaders to fill in our knowledge about various communities’ recycling and composting programs. We are grateful to these contacts for their helpful information.

In addition to the contacts listed in the case studies included in this report, people in the following communities provided information on their materials recovery programs: Marin County, California; Longmont, Colorado; East Lyme, Connecticut; Holly, Michigan; Fillmore County, La Crescent, Rice County, and St. Cloud, Minnesota; Monett, Missouri; Logan Township, Mt. Olive, Montclair, North Brunswick, Pine Valley, and Piscataway, New Jersey; Islip and Kingston, New York; Lane County, Oregon; Bellevue, King County, Renton, and Spokane, Washington; and Monroe and Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. We hope to include them in the next report in our series chronicling the development of materials recovery in this country.

We owe many thanks to the staff at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. In particular, we benefited from the hard work of Steve DeBroux, Michael Gessner, Ingrid Komar, Renee Nida, Neil Seldman, and Jan Simpson.

We would like to extend special recognition to Deb von Roeder, a volunteer at ILSR, for her significant contribution to this report. Her diligent work addressing miscellaneous questions and issues, modifying text and tables, and reviewing the final report is greatly appreciated.

We thank Jodean Marks, our copy editor, for her meticulous reading of this book. Her intelligent queries and demand for clarity have made this book more accessible to the reader.

In researching and writing Beyond 40 Percent: Record-Setting Recycling and Composting Programs, we have had the support of many people. Special thanks go to Daniel DeMocker for his continuing encouragement and care in so many ways.

Finally, we would like to thank numerous individual donors and the following foundations for their ongoing support: The Educational Foundation of America, The Moriah Fund, The C.S. Mott Foundation, The Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, The Public Welfare Foundation, The Rockefeller Family Fund, The Town Creek Foundation, and The Veatch Program of the North Shore Unitarian Universalist Society. We extend special thanks to the Prudential Foundation for supporting our research with a grant to document the best recycling and composting programs in New Jersey.

How to Use This Study

This book addresses the question of how to achieve very high levels of materials recovery through the collection of source-separated materials. Other ILSR publications present information on initiatives to reduce waste at the source, mechanical processing of mixed waste to recover non-source-separated materials, and how to plan for maximum recovery.¹ ILSR’s report Salvaging the Future: Waste-Based Production (1989) addresses the important parallel issue of the potential for scrap markets.

The raw information gathered by ILSR can be found in the Case Studies, pages 73-260. The Tables extract the most important information from these studies and present it in a comparative format. (See pages 67-70 for data definitions and the methodology used for making comparisons.) The Charts extract information from the Tables (and from the case studies only occasionally) and present it visually, to provide a basis for drawing some tentative conclusions. Each level of extraction distills the data into more easily accessible and readable form, but also makes the resulting conclusions more suspect. We urge the reader to jump back and forth between charts, tables, and case studies.

The case studies provide comprehensive in-depth information about each community. By and large, case study data are provided to us by recycling coordinators and other local officials, who may have estimated the data or relied on other sources, such as private haulers. Berlin Township, for instance, measures waste disposed in cubic yards since there are no weighing scales at the local landfill. The Township uses the State conversion factor to calculate approximate tonnage disposed. In other cases, ILSR staff have estimated tonnage recovered. For Hamburg, which does not keep records of the amount of yard waste composted, we have converted volume amounts based on truckloads into tons. For five communities located in states with beverage container deposit legislation, we have estimated the tonnage recovered through this legislation and have included it under waste generated and materials recovered.

In brief: The case studies give a context for each program, and the nuts and bolts of program operations. The tables provide comparative data, and the charts visually present information to help us form some tentative conclusions.

We don’t want the reader to lose the forest for the trees. Therefore the Observations section highlights what we believe to be our most important findings. But we also don’t want to lose the trees for the forest. The charts and our interpretation of them should be seen simply as entryways to the more in-depth material contained in the tables and especially in the case studies.

The tables list all 17 communities by recovery rate. Those that have recovered the highest percentage of their waste are listed first. (See Table 2.) Many of the charts present data on a smaller sample — those communities which are relevant to the subject matter of the chart and for which the relevant data are available.

This book documents, not a sample, but rather the vast majority of all communities that have achieved high levels of materials recovery. Yet so many program elements (e.g., mandatory versus voluntary, curbside versus drop-off collection, number of materials targeted) vary significantly across communities that any conclusions made in this report should be considered informed judgments only. For example, mandatory programs tend to have higher participation and recovery rates than voluntary ones. However, voluntary programs that incorporate economic incentives have also achieved high participation and recovery rates. Containers provided to households for storage and set-out of recyclable materials can increase participation and materials recovery levels. Yet an inappropriately sized container could actually burden the collection program. In the south section of Seattle, residents receive a 60- or 90-gallon container in which they can commingle all their recyclable materials (mixed paper, glass, metals). Provision of a 5-gallon container might have limited the amount of materials collected.

Introduction

Before the turn of the century, the nature of local and regional economies made recycling and composting relatively easy. Milk bottles were returned locally to be washed and refilled. Organic food and plant wastes were used on nearby gardens or farms. Quilts, rags, and even paper were created from discarded textiles. The old economy had elements of a two-way system, a closed loop.

In the late twentieth century, economic trends undermined this cycle and created a one-way material flow from producer to consumer, ending up at the garbage dump. Consumption has soared. Reusing materials has become much more difficult. The producer is separated, sometimes by thousands of miles, from the ultimate consumer. Products are much more complex. Product packaging that once consisted only of paper may now include a combination of plastics, paper, and even metal. Plastic packages often combine several different resins. Disposable products have become the norm. Even products traditionally considered durable, like cameras and staplers, are now disposable.

In the 1980s, spurred by citizen action against old leaking landfills, new landfills, and profligate waste, the pendulum began to swing back. An unprecedented rise in the cost of waste disposal followed. Communities and businesses turned to the two major alternatives to landfilling: incineration and materials recovery (recycling and composting).

The History of Solid Waste Management in the United States

It is amazing to recall that in 1970, the word recycling was not in standard American dictionaries. Today, materials recovery is the law of the land. Materials recovery plans are required in every state of the union. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in November 1989, reissued its New Source Performance Standards that require a minimum 25 percent materials recovery rate in order to obtain a permit to build a waste incineration facility (grass-roots recyclers argued for significantly higher levels). Currently, the EPA is developing similar guidelines for landfill permitting. For the very first time in federal policy, prevention is the official solid waste policy of the United States. The odyssey of materials recovery in U.S. history is important to understand our current options in solid waste management, and in appreciating the data presented in this book.

After the country experienced two decades of pent-up demand — the depression of the 1930s, when people had little money to spend, and the war years from 1939-1945, when people had money but there were few products to buy — the American people went on a buying spree. New products and new packaging transformed the waste stream from one that was readily handled by open-bodied trucks, which allowed for recycling, to one that needed large compactor trucks to compact the garbage so that the increased volume could be handled. These new trucks also had to tip their loads at transfer stations, where larger, stationary hydraulic systems pressed the garbage yet another time before transportation to landfills.

Recent research shows that the expanded waste stream is mostly the result of new packaging and the transformation of what were once durable goods (razors, beverage containers, and food utensils) into nondurable goods, ready for disposal within minutes of purchase (see Table 1).

Table 1

Products Discarded into the Municipal Solid Waste Stream*

(in millions of tons and by percent)

In addition to the sharp increase of per capita solid waste, the United States had a population explosion after 1945. The country’s new families were moving from the city to the suburbs. By 1960, the suburbs had suburbs. This meant that the land traditionally available for new landfill space for cities was no longer available because towns and cities had grown around the older central cities. Solid waste managers thus had more solid waste and fewer places to put it. Further, the discovery that existing landfills were leaking dangerous materials into soil and groundwater and the closure of thousands of unpermitted dumps began the movement to oppose all landfills.

By 1965, the federal government started to take notice. New laws allowed the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to begin research and technical assistance programs on behalf of local governments, which up to that time had sole responsibility for solid waste management. By 1970, the U.S. EPA was formed and took over an expanded research and development and implementation program. By 1976, EPA had the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) to bolster its authority. The first result was even more pressures on landfills to meet higher sanitary standards. Thus, in 1986, there were 6,000 operating solid waste landfills, less than one-half the landfills operating three years earlier.²

The pressure on landfills increased. Industry also was noticing the problem. Keep America Beautiful (KAB) was formed by the nation’s largest corporations, which produced the products and packages that made up the waste stream. Without proper disposal methods they could not keep selling products. In the late 1960s, KAB formed the non-profit research group called the National Center for Solid Waste Disposal. This soon was transformed into the National Center for Resource Recovery. Resource recovery meant incineration. Industry had found its answer to the solid waste problem. Despite the early programming of the EPA, which focused on recycling and reduction of waste, industry’s approach was soon adopted by the EPA, and in the late 1970s by the Department of Energy (DOE). Together, these agencies, and industry, promoted incineration of waste through a number of commercialization programs (grants, loan guarantees, below-market loans, price supports, energy entitlement grants, guaranteed resale of electricity, reclassification of ash as a nonhazardous waste).

DOE’s goal was to build 200 to 250 new waste incineration plants by 1992. These would consume 75 percent of the nation’s municipal solid waste and would cost from $11.5 to $21.5 billion. DOE waste incineration commercialization goals are as follows:³

The American public said no. Beginning in the late 1970s and maturing in the 1980s, the citizen-based movement has effectively stopped the EPA/DOE master plan. Since 1985, over one hundred plants have been canceled, more than were ordered in the same period. New orders for waste incineration plants are as follows: ⁴

In 1987, for the first time, more plant capacity was canceled (35,656 tons per day) than ordered (20,585 tons per day). The decline in waste incineration plant orders has been compared with the decline in nuclear power plant orders.

The movement to stop these plants was based on opposition to the pollution the plants emit, the pollution caused when virgin materials have to be mined and processed to replace those materials destroyed by incineration, and the high economic cost. Whereas the concern over pollution alerted citizens and mobilized citizen organizations, it was the unprecedented rise in the cost of garbage disposal that forced local officials to reconsider incineration. But what was the alternative to incineration? Here the citizens’ movement turned to another movement in the United States that had been growing slowly since the late 1960s: the grass-roots recycling movement.

The recycling movement was not a reaction to the landfill crisis, for there was none in the late 1960s when the movement began. Rather, they reacted to the level of waste in our economy and the pollution and the suffering these habits cause worldwide. Through the 1970s the recyclers built strong alliances with industry brokers and mills who wanted the raw materials, and with progressive government officials who realized the cost savings that could be realized through recycling.

In the mid-1980s, it was the joining of the citizens’ movement against incineration with the recyclers that has lifted the recycling revolution to its current status. The most dramatic demonstration of how effective this combination of interests can be was in Austin, Texas, in 1987. A mass burn waste