Organics Recycling Industry Proactively Addressed Florida’s HB 569

By Tom Kelley

On June 2, 2010, Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist demonstrated his commitment to recycling: he vetoed House Bill 569 that would have repealed a state-wide ban related to yard waste disposal in landfills.  The organics recycling industry, led by the United States Composting Council and supported by multiple state and national organizations and companies, took a proactive stance and wrote letters to Governor Crist.  He got the message: the ban on yard waste benefits the economy and the environment. Here’s how.

• Recycling yard waste helps Florida’s small businesses. Florida has 264 registered facilities that manufacture compost and mulch from yard trimmings.  The industry provides 1000’s of jobs.  These small businesses are for the most part owned and operated by Florida residents who sell their products to other Florida businesses, keep profits within the state and use the services of other small businesses.  The Institute for Local Self Reliance recently documented that composting creates four times as many jobs as land-filling the same material.
• Recycling yard waste contributes to energy independence. Yard trimmings, due to its high lignin content, decompose slowly and only partially in a landfill environment, contributing an insignificant amount to Florida’s energy needs.  These organic materials are put to better use through composting.
• Allowing yard waste in landfills hurts the environment. Only a fraction of the methane that is generated in landfills is captured by the collection system (estimates vary considerably: the EPA puts the capture rate at 75%, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that over the landfill’s entire life that rate may be as low as 20%).  The methane that escapes is 30 times more harmful to global climate change than the carbon dioxide that is generated when yard waste is composted instead of land-filled. That does not count the missed benefits to the environment from composting including improved water quality, reduced irrigation needs, water conservation, healthier plants and improved storm water management. As Florida State researchers have shown, compost’s benefits would help improve yields in a number of crops.
• Recycling yard waste is in line with laws and the US EPA. Title 29, Chapter 403, section 703 of the Florida Statutes, defines “Recycling” as “any process by which solid waste, or materials that would otherwise become solid waste, are collected, separated, or processed and reused or returned to use in the form of raw materials or products.” Burying yard waste in landfills, methane collection or not, is NOT recycling, because there is no return to use.
• Recycling yard waste affirms the position of Solid Waste Management Association of North America (SWANA), the national association representing the landfill industry. A joint position statement in 2006 by SWANA and the USCC states that advances in landfill technology “should be accomplished without encouraging more organics to be placed in landfills, and without reversing hard won and effective programs and regulatory efforts that have raised recycling rates for organic residuals. Energy recovery, in bioreactor or conventional landfills, must be pursued without relaxing recycling initiatives and without improperly creating incentives for more land disposal.”

In addition, of the 23 states that have bans in place on land-filling yard debris, NONE have been overturned. In 2003, Governor Vilsack of Iowa, set a precedent for a governor’s veto of a ban repeal passing the legislature when he stated that without his veto, “this action will be a major step backwards for integrated solid waste management.”

Floridians have a proud history of protecting the environment and looking for ways to recycle organic materials.  The Florida Legislature committed a huge error in passing this legislation, but the organics recycling industry joined together to communicate the environmental and economic impacts of yard waste bans.  The good news, Governor Crist did the right thing, —he vetoed this bill.

Thank you, Florida, for continuing to recycle yard waste.

Quest to Compost

by Elizabeth Lowell

As a kid growing up in a single-family home with a yard and a father who gardened, I was used to putting food scraps in the compost bin. Fruit and vegetable peelings, coffee grounds and egg shells always went into a bucket under the sink, right next to the trash can. The only thing that went into that other can, food-wise anyway, was meat, which couldn’t go in the backyard composter.  For as long as I can remember, the five members of my household filled our kitchen garbage can, a six-gallon, white plastic bin to be exact, up once a week with kitchen waste.

But, as it does for most young people, the day came when I found myself living in a cramped apartment in a multi-family building with a roommate. There was no “garbage day”, so we brought our garbage down to the building’s dumpsters whenever the bins were full. From the vantage point of the 5th floor, I began to notice just how often that was. Instead of filling our kitchen garbage can up once a week, we were filling it up every four or five days, and there were only two of us instead of my family of five! Needless to say, I was appalled, especially given the fact that I had to go up and down five flights of stairs every time I took out the trash.  We were still recycling all the same products, so what had turned my roommate and me into garbage-producing machines overnight? Food waste!

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, how much can two people really eat? But ask yourself this: If you take out food waste, (all those plate scrapings, fruit peels, and vegetable trimmings, not to mention that container of who-knows-what with the green tinge to it in the back of the fridge), AND you recycle everything your town allows, what’s left in the trash?

At about the same time I was completing my metamorphosis from average, American 20-something into full-fledged evil garbage monster, the city I was living in began to allow residents to place food scraps, including meat and dairy products, in their yard waste bins if they lived in single-family homes.

Recognizing my last chance at salvation, save starvation that is, I immediately went out and found a nice, 3-gallon bucket with a lid and a handle and started filling it with all our food scraps. I emptied it at my friends’ and family’s homes, in their yard waste bins, so the scraps would be taken to a composter instead of the landfill. Admittedly, they thought I was little nuts, but it worked. Almost immediately, I was no longer making my bi-weekly journey to the dumpsters at our apartment unit. Instead, I found myself making that familiar trip maybe every two weeks because, at some point, you just have to empty that can, even if it’s not full, right?

But not every city offers collection of food scraps to its residents. Recently, I made the move to a new city, albeit to an all-too-familiar cramped apartment in a multi-family building. I can’t unload my food scraps in friends’ yard waste bins because the city doesn’t collect food scraps with yard trimmings (for a number of reasons), and I don’t have the option of setting up my own home composter. I have watched in despair as the volume of waste my roommate and I generate has shot back up due to the food scraps that have nowhere else to go but the garbage. What has made it all the more painful is that working for Harvest has taught me so much about the benefits of composting those food scraps.

Millions of apartment-dwellers like me find themselves in the same situation. They want to reduce the amount of waste that goes to the landfill, but they have no options.
Or do they?

A few months ago, I decided I had had enough. I started a little research project and discovered that my local health food/organics store allows customers to bring in their food scraps and dump them in collection carts specifically for organic waste. The store then pays for a hauler to collect the organic waste and transport it to a nearby industrial composter. I’ve been at it for a few months and have, not surprisingly, seen my trips to my apartment’s dumpsters (along with my trips up and down four flights of stairs carrying a garbage bag) decline dramatically. And the local health food/organics store is on the way to my roommate’s job, so we’re not going out of our way to recycle our food scraps.

Until we can get collection of organics in multi-family units across the country, I encourage you to do a little research. Check your local health food and organics stores, and your city’s Public Works Department webpage for an organic waste depot. There may an option. And trust me, it beats the stairs.

Renewable Energy from The Big Apple

By: Sameer Rashid

Did you read the Op-Ed the other day called ‘Power from Trash‘ in the New York Times?  Using our waste in a more productive way seems to be a popular theme in the news and editorial pages this year.

New York City has been my home since 2001 and I’ve also been working hard on developing an organics recycling and biogas plant in the area, so I wanted to highlight a few important points from the ‘Power from Trash’ article:

“…As New York City’s garbage decomposes, it releases some 1.2 million metric tons a year of carbon dioxide and its equivalents — primarily methane — into the atmosphere. On top of that, the fuel it takes to haul 11,000 tons of waste hundreds of miles six days a week releases an additional 55,000 tons of greenhouse gas per year…”

“…Since New York began exporting its garbage, the Sanitation Department’s budget has more than doubled, to $1.3 billion in the current fiscal year from less than $600 million in 1997. And in the past seven years, the costs of the city’s landfill contracts have gone up more than $90 million, enough to pay 1,000 full-time firefighters, nurses or teachers….”

“…If all of the city’s nonrecycled waste were sent to local energy recovery facilities instead of distant landfills, the city would save diesel fuel and generate enough energy to supply 145,000 homes — thus avoiding the combustion of nearly three million barrels of oil to generate electricity….”

“…Newer kinds of facilities — like those that use anaerobic digestion to make methane — could be built on smaller sites…”

There were a lot of good points in the article and I couldn’t agree more with the last two quotes highlighted above.  Local facilities that utilize commercialized high solids anaerobic digestion (HSAD) technology to produce renewable energy and compost is in some ways a no-brainer for New York City and other major metropolitan areas in the country.  In addition to maintaining Harvest’s high standards, we can address issues like siting and community support by co-locating with existing transfer stations, water treatment plants, and/or compost facilities in the City and improving those facilities’ environmental footprints.  With the amount of food waste generating by New York’s restaurants, markets, and food processors, HSAD represents a tremendous opportunity to save thousands of small businesses money and simultaneously make them more sustainable.

Sameer Rashid, an avid fan of all things New York (especially the Mets), develops projects throughout the East Coast, and loves to talk food waste.

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