Getting Rid of Trash

Aired January 21, 2000

Reduce, re-use, recycle. Most of us now spend a few minutes every week separating our recyclable materials from our trash and blue-bagging them for collection by municipal recycling programs. But what impact has recycling really had on reducing the amount of trash going into our landfills? Just how costly is recycling? And how can we further reduce our waste in the future? 90.3's Karen Schaefer has this report on getting rid of trash.

William McDonough: There used to be a place we called away. Remember how we used to throw things away? Well, away - as Gertrude Stein might say - has gone away.

As early as the 1970's Americans interested in preserving the environment began to consider new ways of reducing the trash rapidly filling up our city dumps and landfills. By the early 1990's most communities had instituted municipal recycling programs that sorted glass, metals, plastics, cardboard, and newspaper out of the landfill waste stream and sent them to businesses that specialize in recycling. Today, Ohio EPA spokesperson Heidi Griesmer says recycling has made a real impact on the amount of trash we send to the dump.

Heidi Griesmer: Ohio EPA has a goal, an overall goal, to recycle, reduce or recycle, at least 50% of all the waste by the year 2000. And the last time we actually looked and counted how much we were recycling, it was in 1996. At that point, we were recycling 42% of the waste.

But landfills continue to be the final resting place for much of our household and commercial waste. Ten years ago, many of our landfills were reaching capacity. Today we have fewer, but larger landfills. The EPA estimates that Ohio can handle its waste for another 20 years. But now we have farther to transport our trash. Patrick Holland, manager of the Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District, says the economics of landfill sprawl - not environmentalism - is what's driving many recycling programs today.

Patrick Holland: We are clearly running out of in-county landfills that are located in Cuyahoga County and today waste generators export over 95% of the waste that we produce and dispose. So while there are more than an adequate number of places to put the waste, it's further and further away from where the waste is being generated. That has an economic impact.

And if the costs of hauling garbage are high, the costs of recycling are even higher. Jeff Baumann is coordinator of the recycling program in Oberlin. The city is just three miles down the road from the Lorain County landfill, which receives a large portion of western Cuyahoga County's trash.

Jeff Baumann: The year 2000 budget for the city of Oberlin for recycling collection is about $85,000...I think it's unlikely that we'll be able to pay the full costs of recycling through avoided costs and revenues.

Avoided costs include $30 to $35-dollars a ton for landfill fees, while revenues for recyclables vary widely according to fluctuations in supply and market demand. Nonetheless, Baumann says Oberlin's recycling program - which includes curbside pickup, yard waste composting, and a rare city-run commercial recycling program tailored to each customer's needs - is strongly supported by residents. He says residents have even accepted a two-bag weekly limit on landfilled trash.

Jeff Baumann: Oberlin's had a voluntary recycling program through much of the 1980's and maybe going back even further than that...Between 70 and 80% of our residents participate in the recycling program.

But only a handful of other Northeast Ohio communities share Oberlin's commitment to recycling. And nationally, most recycling programs are voluntary. That means the EPA, which licenses states' landfill operations, has no authority to enforce recycling, even in rare cases like that of a Stark County landfill operator, who buried recyclables he couldn't sell for a profit.

But the EPA strongly supports new projects like the reclamation of recyclables from older landfills and the harnessing of landfill gases for generating electricity. The Lorain County landfill - managed by Browning Ferris Industries, which was recently bought out by the world's second-largest trash-hauler, Allied Waste Management - will start up such a project this year. Bruce Brotherton, Northeast Ohio District Manager for BFI, says reducing the waste stream in the future will depend in part on new technologies.

Bruce Brotherton: A lot of what we dispose of in our landfills is packaging...At this point in time, it's too costly to try to separate for recycling purposes...I think the technology will drive a lot of how we manage our waste in the future.

William McDonough: Eliminate the concept of waste. Notice this does not say minimize waste. It says eliminate the concept of waste.

New Sustainable Design concepts have produced even more innovative solutions for reducing waste. In Chattenooga, a new eco-industrial park allows the waste stream of a poultry producer to become the fertilizer for a local organic farm. And at Nike, a new concept called products of service will one day allow customers to return worn-out sneakers for recycling, in exchange for a new pair of shoes. But environmentalists agree that the biggest gains will come from changing the way the think about trash. For 90.3, I'm Karen Schaefer in Cleveland.