“Playing
the Game to Meet the 50 percent Recycling Law”
by J. Winston Porter
(As published in The Sacramento Bee, 4/23/97)
In 1988, while an assistant administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, I set a national goal of recycling 25 percent of the nation's trash. That goal has been reached by California, as well as the United States as a whole. The question now is how much further can we - or should we - try to go. California law requires cities and counties to divert 50 percent of their solid waste from landfills by the year 2000 or face stiff financial penalties. Under the law, the state can fine a city or county $10,000 a day for failing either to prepare an approved diversion plan or to make a good faith effort to implement such a plan.
Unfortunately, trash and recycling measurements are such an inexact science and the 50 percent rate is so difficult to attain, that just preparing the plans is proving very costly. Several hundred state and local government employees are already at work on them - and those costs come on top of the costs that cities and counties are incurring to comply with the diversion mandate.
The big problem is that the 50 percent law treats all recycling as equal. The goal is simply to divert a lot of stuff, some quite benign, from landfills. A better approach would be to concentrate recycling on two types of waste: those items which are relatively easy to collect and have some value; and things that can cause real environmental problems, such as used oil, tires and lead batteries.
Some recycling advocates insist that 50 percent diversion is readily attainable and that some communities are already closing in on it. But let's look at how the system works. California's law sets 1990 as a base year for comparison with future diversion rates. In other words, each city and county must have 50 percent less trash going to landfills in the year 2000 than it was estimated to be sending in 1990.
The goal is to recycle, or divert, large amounts of trash. But for many communities, it's a lot cleverer and cheaper to concentrate on inflating those "estimated" 1990 trash-to-landfill figures. The larger the base year estimate, the less actual recycling has to occur to reach 50 percent diversion. In fact, if a community can push the 1990 estimate high enough, it may be possible to declare victory without doing much of anything.
The city of Riverside, for example, claims to have already reached the 50 percent diversion rate. Most of this diversion, however, is in the form of rubble, which the state doesn't normally count as trash. Riverside had to petition state authorities for a waiver from the standard rules for measuring diversions. It's good that Riverside has found a way of recycling some construction materials. But it's hard to see how taking asphalt and concrete someplace else is environmentally preferable to what's happening in Riverside's neighboring community of San Bernardino, where the diversion rate of about 25 percent is based on recycling real trash items such as cans, bottles, and newspapers.
The city of Covina increased its 1990 rate by asserting that a lot of trash used to be hauled to their landfill by do-it-yourselfers whose contributions hadn't previously been taken into account. There is nothing inherently dishonest about what Riverside, Covina and others are doing. But it would make more economic and environmental sense to improve recycling programs rather than to keep fine-tuning those 1990 estimates in order to meet a bureaucratic state formula.
This
preoccupation with 1990 numbers, however, does suggest how difficult many
communities think it will be to reach a "real" 50 percent recycling
rate. One reason it's so hard is that we're already recycling most of the
most valuable and accessible items: cardboard boxes, newspapers and various
cans and bottles. Most of the rest of trash - meat wraps, paper towels, kitty
litter and food scraps, for example - has one or more negatives. Either it's
hard to collect, difficult to process, or it has almost no value.
There are other problems. It is more difficult and expensive to recycle in rural areas than in urban areas. Within cities, the rate of compliance with a community's recycling goals varies widely, often in accordance with people's income. And since much recycling depends on voluntary activities, we can't force everyone to cooperate.
Finally, to make these programs at all cost-effective, we need to sell our recyclables. That's not always easy, since prices for these commodities tend to soften periodically. Moreover, negative environmental impacts increase as recovered materials are trucked greater distances for processing and more resources are needed to process even dirtier recyclables.
Some recycling enthusiasts nevertheless insist that even 50 percent recycling is not good enough. A group calling itself the Grassroots Recycling Network, for example, is preparing plans to promote a zero-waste concept.
Recycling of municipal trash has been a great American success story. There's no question that it's here to stay and that most of it has been good for the environment. But we don't need another set of costly and legalistic mandates. If 50 percent recycling is difficult to reach, the solution isn't to shoot for 100 percent.
©J. Winston Porter 2001