VICTORY! DC Passes Styrofoam ban; Moves toward Zero Waste

Since Jan­u­ary, we’ve been work­ing to help get two bills passed in DC City Coun­cil, both of which passed unan­i­mous­ly on July 14th!  Sev­er­al aspects of the bills were made stronger through our efforts.  Tomor­row, DC May­or Gray pub­licly signs one of them into law.

The most excit­ing parts of these bills include:

• ban­ning most uses of Sty­ro­foam in food ser­vice in DC
• requir­ing dis­pos­able food ser­vice ware to be com­postable or recyclable
• trans­porta­tion ben­e­fits for those work­ing for larg­er employ­ers, sup­port­ing mass tran­sit pass­es, bicy­cling and carpooling
• requir­ing the city to come up with a zero waste plan, ensur­ing that at least 80% of our waste is divert­ed from incin­er­a­tors and land­fills (we’re cur­rent­ly at a mis­er­able 16%)
• requires bet­ter recy­cling edu­ca­tion and label­ing of bins
• starts curb­side com­post­ing collection
• man­dates elec­tron­ic waste recycling
• requires report­ing of where our waste and recy­cling actu­al­ly goes if col­lect­ed by pri­vate haulers

In more detail…

The two bills that passed are the ” Sus­tain­able DC Omnibus Act of 2013″ and the ” Sus­tain­able Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Amend­ment Act of 2014.”  Our efforts helped improve both bills, but we asked for many improve­ments that we could­n’t get through, and a cou­ple key things got weak­ened by last-minute amend­ments pushed by industry.

The Sus­tain­able DC Omnibus Act of 2013 ( bill; amend­ment):

STYROFOAM BAN AND MANDATE FOR DISPOSIBLE FOOD SERVICE WARE TO BE COMPOSTABLE/RECYCLABLE:  The new law bans use of Sty­ro­foam for food ser­vice busi­ness­es by Jan­u­ary 1, 2016.  It also requires any sin­gle-use food ser­vice ware (includ­ing uten­sils and straws) used in food ser­vice busi­ness­es and gov­ern­ment facil­i­ties to be replaced with com­postable or recy­clable prod­ucts by Jan­u­ary 1, 2017.

Approx­i­mate­ly 25% of all lit­ter col­lect­ed in the Ana­cos­tia River’s Nash Run trap is com­posed of expand­ed poly­styrene, also known as Sty­ro­foam.  We tried to get this ban extend­ed to store sales of Sty­ro­foam cups, and even the non-expand­ed poly­styrene (like those red or blue dis­pos­able “Solo” cups peo­ple use at beer par­ties), but could­n’t con­vince Coun­cil­woman Cheh’s staff to go that far.  Tox­ic styrene leach­es out of Sty­ro­foam into alco­hol and fat­ty food (meat/dairy), even from the non-foam kind, like Solo cups.  Safe­way (largest super­mar­ket chain in DC) lob­bied to weak­en the bill, and suc­ceed­ed in exempt­ing meat trays used to pack­age meat that is butchered in the super­mar­ket (includ­ing seafood).  They spread fear that butch­ers would lose their jobs because Safe­way would exploit a loop­hole in the bill allow­ing com­pa­nies to sell prod­ucts pack­aged in Sty­ro­foam out­side of DC.  They’d rather fire their butch­ers in DC and pack­age the meat out­side of DC to avoid using more respon­si­ble packaging.

One oth­er con­cern that we could­n’t get any­one to address is that cer­tain com­postable plas­tics leach more estro­gen-mim­ic­k­ing endocrine-dis­rupt­ing chem­i­cals than most petro­le­um plas­tics do.  The com­postable poly­lac­tic acid (PLA) kind is made from biotech corn ( 90% of U.S. corn is genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied as of 2013, and the stuff going to PLA is prob­a­bly even more­so).  PLA plas­tic was found ear­li­er this year to leach estro­gen-like chem­i­cals more often than any oth­er plas­tic test­ed except for poly­car­bon­ate.  91% of sam­ples leached.  See this doc­u­ment­ed in a March 2014 expose by Moth­er Jones Mag­a­zine.  As the DC Depart­ment of the Envi­ron­ment works up their rec­om­men­da­tions on alter­na­tives, we hope we can get them to high­light the alter­na­tives that do not leach dan­ger­ous chemicals.

Oth­er aspects of the bill include:

TRANSPORTATION BENEFITS: By Jan­u­ary 1, 2016, employ­ers with more than 50 employ­ees must pro­vide a tran­sit ben­e­fit pro­gram to cov­ered employ­ees.  This allows employ­ers to choose between 3 options: (1) a pre-tax elec­tion trans­porta­tion fringe ben­e­fits pro­gram cov­er­ing car­pool­ing, tran­sit or bicy­cling, con­sis­tent with and at least equal to max­i­mum fed­er­al ben­e­fits, (2) an employ­er-paid tran­sit pass for the sys­tem request­ed by each employ­ee, or reim­burse­ment of van­pool or bicy­cling costs (amount­ing to at least the cost of Metro fare), or (3) employ­er-pro­vid­ed trans­porta­tion in a bus or van­pool at no cost to the employee.

ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION: The new law sets up an envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion pro­gram in the city’s schools.  I was the only one to tes­ti­fy on this part of the bill, who cau­tioned that most “envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion” cur­ric­u­la are writ­ten by cor­po­ra­tions with con­flicts of inter­est in the sub­ject mat­ter, like log­ging com­pa­nies writ­ing the “Project Learn­ing Tree” cur­ricu­lum about forests and bot­tled water com­pa­nies writ­ing the “Water Edu­ca­tion for Teach­ers (WET)” cur­ricu­lum.  I urged them to adopt stan­dards to pre­vent that (sad­ly typ­i­cal) abuse of the envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion field, but was ignored.  It’ll now be up to var­i­ous gov­ern­ment agen­cies in charge of devel­op­ing the pro­gram (includ­ing Uni­ver­si­ty of DC) to ensure that the mate­ri­als are truth­ful and not par­rot­ing cor­po­rate pub­lic relations.

OTHER STUFF: The law also helps build­ing own­ers mea­sure ener­gy use, loosens restric­tions on bee­keep­ing, and helps increase the amount of trees in DC.

The Sus­tain­able Sol­id Waste Man­age­ment Amend­ment Act of 2014 ( bill; amend­ment):

DC’s recy­cling rate is a pathet­ic 16%.  It was sup­posed to be 45% twen­ty years ago and the city was sued mul­ti­ple times over it.  That law was ignored by Depart­ment of Pub­lic Works offi­cials who seem to think that 35% recy­cling is as high as you can go, and who would rather see you put your recy­clables in with the trash and have machines try to sort it all out, then burn most of it.

Thank­ful­ly, while we con­tin­ue to strug­gle with anti­quat­ed views among lead­ing Depart­ment of Pub­lic Works (DPW) staff, we got city coun­cil to force their hand by set­ting some require­ments on where we’re going.

SOLID WASTE HIERARCHY: City offi­cials have it back­wards and think that incin­er­a­tion (and land­fill­ing the tox­ic ash) is bet­ter than direct land­fill­ing.  We did­n’t get any­thing close to the zero waste hier­ar­chy we want­ed, but we did man­age to keep incin­er­a­tion on the same lev­el as land­fill­ing and to get it defined as dis­pos­al (a prob­lem to be avoid­ed) — rather than “diver­sion” (part of the solu­tion), as DPW would have it.  The hier­ar­chy is now: (1) reduce/reuse; (2) recy­cle/­com­post/­trash-to-bio­fu­el; (3) landfill/incinerate.  We think the trash-to-bio­fu­el is a big mis­take, though.  More on that below.

MANDATORY SOURCE SEPARATION / FOOD WASTE COMPOSTING: Any notion by DPW to do what Hous­ton, Texas is con­sid­er­ing — a ” One Bin for All” approach, putting all trash, recy­cling and com­post­ing in one bin to be sort­ed out lat­er — is now ille­gal.  The new law requires that every­one sep­a­rate recy­clables, trash and — at some point once a pro­gram is estab­lished — com­posta­bles, includ­ing food scraps.

ZERO WASTE PLAN: The city admin­is­tra­tion must now devel­op a zero waste plan designed to move DC toward May­or Gray’s Sus­tain­able DC goal of divert­ing 80% of our waste from incin­er­a­tors and landfills.

PAY AS YOU THROW: The law autho­rizes the city to imple­ment a “Pay as You Throw” sys­tem, which rewards those who waste less, but charg­ing less for waste dis­pos­al (like any oth­er util­i­ty where you pay for how much you use).  Such a sys­tem has been suc­cess­ful in boost­ing recy­cling in many oth­er cities and towns, but it’s polit­i­cal­ly hard in DC, since waste dis­pos­al is paid through tax­es, and they’ll have to move that pay­ment to a sep­a­rate fee, which peo­ple might see as a new tax of sorts, even though it’s just shift­ing it from one part of a tax bill to a new one.

RECYCLING EDUCATION: Pri­vate col­lec­tion prop­er­ties (any place where city trucks don’t do the trash pick­up) and waste haulers must pro­vide for recy­cling (and even­tu­al­ly, com­post­ing) col­lec­tion ser­vices, train­ing of jan­i­tors, prop­er sig­nage and label­ing of recy­cling con­tain­ers (with visu­als or descrip­tions of what is prop­er to put in them), and must annu­al­ly com­mu­ni­cate infor­ma­tion about source sep­a­ra­tion require­ments to indi­vid­u­als who dis­card sol­id waste at the property.

KNOWING WHERE OUR WASTE GOES: Pri­vate haulers will now need to reg­is­ter with the city and pro­vide details on where the waste and recy­cling goes.  The major­i­ty of the city’s waste is col­lect­ed by pri­vate haulers, and we don’t have a way to know where it all goes.

ELECTRONIC WASTE RECYCLING: Start­ing in 2018, it’ll be ille­gal to dis­pose of elec­tron­ic waste in the trash.  Lead­ing up to that, start­ing in 2017, com­pa­nies that sell elec­tron­ic goods must par­tic­i­pate in col­lect­ing elec­tron­ic waste for recy­cling, or sup­port­ing the increased num­ber of “con­ve­nient” col­lec­tion loca­tions (at least one in each ward).  They must also pro­vide info on how you can recy­cle what they sell you.  Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the bill does­n’t cov­er cell phones, PDAs, GPS devices, or house­hold gam­ing devices, among oth­er exemp­tions.  We tried to get cell phones includ­ed, but to no avail.  We also tried to get this pro­gram to be one where the com­pa­nies pay for it, but the city imple­ments it, so that it can keep jobs local and feed mate­ri­als to local non-prof­its for repair and reuse.  Instead, the elec­tron­ics indus­try fought back and got an awful amend­ment in last-minute which weak­ened the bill a lot.  We had pre­vi­ous­ly man­aged to put in a strong stan­dard that elec­tron­ic waste is not allowed to go to prison labor for recy­cling (where it cur­rent­ly goes), or be dumped on the third world, or sent to incin­er­a­tors or land­fills.  All of these stan­dards were stripped out.

TRASH-TO-ETHANOL LOOPHOLE: Sup­pos­ed­ly, coun­cil staff only intend­ed to allow for veg­gie oil biodiesel, but used lan­guage that sup­ports trash-to-ethanol schemes to count as if it’s “diver­sion” (like recy­cling and com­post­ing), not dis­pos­al.  This means that DC will become a mag­net for the very expen­sive and exper­i­men­tal schemes to turn trash into bio­fu­els.  One com­pa­ny, Fiberight, is already try­ing to get into the mar­ket in this region, hop­ing to build a plant in Elkridge, Mary­land.  Anoth­er com­pa­ny, called “Amer­i­ca First,” is try­ing a sim­i­lar scheme else­where in Mary­land.  This tech­nol­o­gy has been try­ing to get off the ground since at least 2000, and is only now start­ing to hap­pen in a few places in North Amer­i­ca.  It’s unclear whether it’ll even work or be afford­able, but it’s clear that it’s not com­pat­i­ble with a sol­id zero waste plan that seeks the high­est and best use of materials.

These plants will come with water and air pol­lu­tion issues, like­ly use of biotech enzymes, and (like incin­er­a­tors) a need to be fed through long-term con­tracts that com­mit min­i­mum amounts of waste — exact­ly what we should not have, if we want to min­i­mize waste as much as pos­si­ble.  We suc­ceed­ed in get­ting in a clause that pro­hibits long-term waste con­tracts (over 10 years), but it’ll take more to ensure that this sort of “waste-to-fuel” (WTF?) scheme does not pol­lute com­mu­ni­ties, com­pete with true zero waste solu­tions, or cost the city too much mon­ey.  Depart­ment of Pub­lic Works staff have already signed up DC to send waste to a trash incin­er­a­tor even though direct land­fill­ing was the cheap­er option (out of their mis­guid­ed belief that incin­er­a­tors are won­der­ful).  Let’s not repeat that with anoth­er expen­sive scheme.

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THANK YOU for read­ing this for, and thanks to all who filled out the action alert we did that sent a mes­sage to coun­cil to get these bills passed!

We were up against high paid cor­po­rate lob­by­ists from the Amer­i­can Chem­istry Coun­cil, DART Con­tain­er Cor­po­ra­tion, Safe­way, the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try, oth­er large cor­po­rate inter­ests, and even the may­or’s office, who lob­bied aggres­sive­ly against aspects of these bills.

We con­grat­u­late Coun­cilmem­ber Mary Cheh for tak­ing the lead on these efforts, and thank all those who helped make this pos­si­ble.  A big thanks in par­tic­u­lar goes out to Sier­ra Club DC Chap­ter, DC Envi­ron­men­tal Net­work, Insti­tute for Local Self Reliance, the Alice Fer­gu­son Foun­da­tion, Trash Free Mary­land, SCRAP-DC, Ana­cos­tia River­keep­er, and Surfrid­er Foundation.