Zero Waste

Zero Waste is defined as “The con­ser­va­tion of all resources by means of respon­si­ble pro­duc­tion, con­sump­tion, reuse, and recov­ery of prod­ucts, pack­ag­ing, and mate­ri­als with­out burn­ing and with no dis­charges to land, water, or air that threat­en the envi­ron­ment or human health.” It’s not a utopic idea, but a set of poli­cies and prac­tices intend­ed to elim­i­nate incin­er­a­tion and reduce waste as much as pos­si­ble, ulti­mate­ly achiev­ing at least 90% reduc­tion of waste going to disposal.

Link to Flyer.

Zero Waste Hierarchy:

Redesign
Reduce
Source Sep­a­rate: (reusables, recy­cling, com­post­ing and trash)

• Reuse / Repair
• Recy­cle (mul­ti-stream) ⇒ Mate­r­i­al Recov­ery Facil­i­ty (MRF)
• Com­post ⇒ aer­o­bi­cal­ly com­post clean organ­ic mate­ri­als like food scraps and yard waste to return to soils
• Waste:
  • Waste Com­po­si­tion Research (exam­ine trash to see how the sys­tem can be improved upstream)
  • Mate­r­i­al Recov­ery (mechan­i­cal­ly remove addi­tion­al recy­clables that peo­ple failed to separate)
  • Bio­log­i­cal Treat­ment (aer­o­bic com­post­ing — or, bet­ter yet, anaer­o­bic diges­tion fol­lowed by aer­o­bic com­post­ing — of organ­ic resid­u­als to sta­bi­lize them)
  • Sta­bi­lized Land­fill­ing (bio­log­i­cal treat­ment reduces vol­ume and avoids gas and odor problems)

The offi­cial Zero Waste def­i­n­i­tion and Zero Waste Hier­ar­chy are poli­cies we helped the Zero Waste Inter­na­tion­al Alliance devel­op. See our more detailed zero waste hier­ar­chy.

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Sto­ry of Stuff (excel­lent short, fun film on how mate­ri­als move through our econ­o­my, from extrac­tion to pro­duc­tion to dis­tri­b­u­tion to con­sump­tion to waste):

Get­ting the back end of the zero waste hier­ar­chy right:

• Eco-Cycle’s What is the best dis­pos­al option for the “Left­overs” on the way to Zero Waste? (Full Report in PDF)
• Mechan­i­cal and
  
  Bio­log­i­cal Treat­ment (MBT) (2008 brief­ing by Friends of the Earth UK) — excel­lent overview of the pit­falls of MBT

The Zero Waste Solu­tion — Untrash­ing the Plan­et One Com­mu­ni­ty at a Time, by Paul Connett

Resources on the prob­lems with incin­er­a­tors and landfills:

• Incin­er­a­tion
• Land­fills
• Beyond Land­fill­ing
• Land­fill gas

Zero Waste Plans:

• Austin, TX: In Decem­ber 2011, Austin adopt­ed an excel­lent Zero Waste mas­ter plan to put them on the same path that cities like San Fran­cis­co have been pur­su­ing. They found this plan to make eco­nom­ic sense even though land­fill­ing in the area is dirty cheap, at $20/ton! If Austin can do it, any city can.The Austin Zero Waste plan aims for divert­ing the fol­low­ing per­cent­ages of dis­card­ed mate­ri­als from incin­er­a­tors and land­fills:
  
  50% in 2015
  
  75% in 2020
  
  85% in 2025
  
  90% in 2030
  
  95%+ in 2040
  

  Austin’s Zero Waste mas­ter plan: main web­page, Mas­ter Plan (321 pages — 37 MB PDF), Sum­ma­ry (25 pages — 28 MB PDF)

• San Fran­cis­co Zero Waste plan
• Alame­da Coun­ty, CA: Pol­i­cy Tools & Mod­el Ordi­nances for Local Governments
• Oak­land, CA zero waste plan
• Mary­land is work­ing on a statewide zero waste plan, but seems to think that incin­er­a­tion is a need­ed step along the way, as they’ve con­coct­ed a non-exis­tent land­fill space cri­sis. See their draft plan and our com­ments.

Oth­er major resources on zero waste:

• Zero Waste Inter­na­tion­al Alliance
• Grass­roots Recy­cling Network
• Insti­tute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR is great at help­ing put togeth­er alter­na­tive eco­nom­ic plans based on recy­cling and composting)

Job cre­ation:
A zero waste pro­gram should include a num­ber of tac­tics that increase mate­r­i­al reuse, recy­cling and com­post­ing. Doing so has great job cre­ation poten­tial: about 5 to 10 times more jobs than land­fill­ing or incineration.

• Pay Dirt: Com­post­ing in Mary­land to Reduce Waste, Cre­ate Jobs, & Pro­tect the Bay (2013 ILSR report)
• A nation­al 75% recy­cling goal would cre­ate 1.5 mil­lion new jobs, accord­ing to the Novem­ber 2011 Tel­lus report (in con­junc­tion with the Team­sters union, SEIU, Blue Green Alliance, and envi­ron­men­tal groups): 
  • Recy­cling Works Campaign
  • More Jobs, Less Pol­lu­tion: Grow­ing the Recy­cling Econ­o­my in the U.S.
• Recy­cling pro­duces 10 times more jobs than incin­er­a­tion or land­fill­ing:
  
  http://www.ilsr.org/recycling-means-business/
  
  That chart, and anoth­er more visu­al­ly appeal­ing one of the same, are in this Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion on incin­er­a­tion: http://www.ejnet.org/files/incineration/incineration.pdf Slides 33 and 34 came from GAIA reports Waste Incin­er­a­tion: A Dying Tech­nol­o­gy Report (p30) and An Indus­try Blow­ing Smoke: 10 Rea­sons Why Gasi­fi­ca­tion, Pyrol­y­sis & Plas­ma Incin­er­a­tion are Not “Green Solu­tions” (p27)
• As You Sow’s 2012 report “Unfin­ished Busi­ness: The Case for Extend­ed Pro­duc­er Respon­si­bil­i­ty” found that $11.4 bil­lion worth of recy­clable pack­ag­ing wast­ed (sent to land­fills and incin­er­a­tors) in 2010. (short video sum­ma­ry, full report, exec­u­tive summary) 
• And, odd­ly… card­board theft: 
  • The lucra­tive crime of card­board theft (8/6/2012 Mar­ket­place interview)
  • Inside the Sur­pris­ing­ly Lucra­tive World of Card­board Theft (7/31/2012 arti­cle in The Atlantic)From the “Atlantic” arti­cle:
    
    “It may sound like a tedious way to earn a liv­ing, but it’s quite suit­able for folks who like a good work­out and fast pay­outs. “You rent a van and dri­ve down Sec­ond Avenue [in Man­hat­tan] or Atlantic in Brook­lyn, you pick up a ton and a half of card­board and get paid 150 bucks for it,” says Bider­man. “Do that twice a night and you’re doing OK.“
    

    You could burn that one-and-a-half ton of card­board (in a $500 mil­lion plant) to gen­er­ate 2.8 megawatt hours of elec­tric­i­ty with a mar­ket val­ue of about $98.

    
    

    Inter­est­ing­ly, in the inter­view, the author says this:

    
    

    “Met­calfe: Any­one basi­cal­ly who wants to rent a van or a truck can just do that and then dri­ve down, say, Atlantic Ave. in Brook­lyn at night and just throw in card­board in the back of their truck. You can make $1,000 that way in one night.”

    
    

    That’s quite dif­fer­ent from the oth­er quote in the writ­ten arti­cle. Both may be cor­rect depend­ing on how many trips they do in a night, and where the fluc­tu­at­ing price of card­board is at the moment.

• Con­tain­er-deposit pro­grams (bot­tle bills) pro­duce 8 jobs per 1,000 tons recycled.
• Wash­ing­ton State and Ore­gon’s elec­tron­ic-waste pro­duc­er take-back recy­cling pro­grams have result­ed in 360 new jobs to the region.
• British Colum­bia, a Cana­di­an province of 4.4 mil­lion peo­ple, reports that eight of their pro­duc­er take-back pro­grams have cre­at­ed more than 2,100 new jobs.
• Ger­many’s pack­ag­ing pro­duc­er take-back law gen­er­ates more than 17,000 jobs.