Chapter 7
Waste
The statistics on the amount of waste we produce are truly mind-boggling. The electronic revolution alone has produced incredible quantities of waste – according to The World Counts, forty million tons of e-waste per year, The equivalent of throwing away eight hundred laptops per second. And that’s just the beginning. We throw away 4.5 trillion cigarette butts, 25 billion Styrofoam coffee cups – in the US alone. What’s more, 480 billion plastic bottles of water are sold each year, and “fast fashion” – clothes designed to be worn only a few times and then discarded – has developed as a trend the past few years. Then there are plastic bags. Straws. And much, much more. We live in a society that produces staggering amounts of waste, all of which has to be disposed of somewhere.
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It wasn’t always this way.
In the English village where I grew up in the 1960s, almost nothing was thrown away, because in the post-war economy people had very little money and so were careful to fix what was broken. If they could not fix it, a local service (the rag-and-bone man) would buy it and fix it for resale. Products were built to last – the classic example is the telephone. When telephone companies were owned by the government, or were privately owned but publicly regulated, they typically owned the telephones and leased them to their customers. In this context, it made economic sense to build telephones to last – according to one article, for up to twenty-five years. Today, across the entire range of things people buy, it is very different. Whether this is caused by built-in obsolescence (deliberately making products not to last so that we have to buy new ones relatively quickly) or a change in attitudes can be debated, but the result is clear – ever-increasing mountains of waste. Just look at the iPhone: in the thirteen years since it was introduced, there have been eleven models. And all of the used phones need to be disposed. The waste keeps piling up.
Cities Manage the Disposal of Waste
New York City produces more than fourteen million tons of waste each year, Toronto nearly a million from residential sources only – and Accra, Ghana, more than five hundred thousand tons. In Accra and many cities in the developing world, waste management is a critical public health and safety issue, as overflowing waste from informal waste disposal often blocks storm sewers. After a bad storm, nearby beaches are covered in trash – plastic bags, bottles, and other litter. There are huge blobs of plastic in the ocean, growing larger and larger. These blobs are becoming dead zones in the middle of the ocean. Located halfway between Hawaii and California, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spans 1.6 million square kilometers, an area twice the size of Texas. An estimated 1.6 trillion pieces of plastic float in the patch – equivalent to 250 pieces for every person in the world. Because it does not biodegrade, the plastic simply gets smaller and smaller – eventually becoming potential feed for fish and other sea creatures, ultimately creating health hazards for people. Like these giant blobs in the ocean, the amount of garbage we produce seems uncontrollable.
The impact of this waste on wildlife is shocking. Fish frequently are found to have ingested significant amounts of microscopic (and toxic) plastic; seabirds are found with plastic straws stuck in their throats; and whales, turtles, dolphins, and other sea creatures become ensnared in fishing nets. Source: Yamtono_Sardi/iStockphoto.com.
Proliferating waste from a society with ever-higher demands for disposable items is a huge problem for nature. It is also a problem for cities, because almost every city in the world is responsible for the administration of its waste. Our economic system treats more and more things as disposable, and that creates massive challenges for cities – including waste’s impact on climate. If waste isn’t disposed of carefully, it can be a significant source of methane gas. Rotting food combined with other materials produces methane, and in a traditional waste system where all “trash” is collected and sent to landfills, the methane escapes to the atmosphere. The best modern systems separate the compostable waste, then capture and treat the methane.
Methane: A Powerful Problem
Methane is a potent greenhouse gas. It is far more powerful in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (twenty to ninety times more powerful, depending on the timeframe). Methane degrades to CO2 over time – about twelve years – and remains in the atmosphere, contributing to long-term warming of the earth’s atmosphere. Although less than 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions came from methane in 2017, the fact that those emissions are so powerful means that actions to address them are significant. As with CO2 emissions, methane emissions have been dramatically increasing (see Figure 7.1).
Figure 7.1: Global Atmospheric Concentration of Methane, 1750 – 2018
Source: Based on data from the European Environmental Agency (EEA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Much of that methane comes from agricultural sources: livestock, rice cultivation, synthetic fertilizers, manures. And the energy sector is responsible for methane emissions from coal mining and natural-gas systems.
In cities, most methane emissions come from waste: organic food and yard waste, and from wastewater treatment. As food and yard waste break down in the absence of oxygen, much of their carbon is converted to methane.
According to Project Drawdown (a project founded in 2014 by environmentalist Paul Hawken to research solutions to climate change), over the course of a century, methane has thirty-four times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. Landfills are a top source of methane emissions, releasing 12 per cent of the world’s total. Landfill methane can be tapped, captured, and used as a fairly clean energy source for generating electricity or heat, rather than leaking into the air or being dispersed as waste. The climate benefit from this is twofold: it prevents landfill emissions and displaces the coal, oil, or natural gas that might otherwise be used.
Cities have three main options to reduce methane emissions from waste: capturing the methane at a traditional landfill or collecting organic matter separately and using aerobic or anaerobic digestion facilities to compost the waste that will either use the methane as a fuel (thereby significantly reducing its climate impact) or turn the methane into carbon dioxide.
Incineration of waste is not considered a viable option by climate advocates and scientists. When garbage is burned, toxic substances such as heavy metals may be released into the environment. Furthermore, plastics and other materials in the waste generate carbon dioxide. Since plastics are generally made from fossil fuels, incineration has an impact similar to burning fossil fuels.
Cities Committed to Zero Waste
In addition to emissions from waste disposal, our cycle of consumption leads to emissions throughout the creation and consumption of goods. Some cities are aiming for a zero-waste system. It isn’t just a question of managing our resources sustainably: it is also a question of reducing the climate impact of our waste. It takes energy to extract resources, process them into usable goods, and transport them to their destinations. When we rethink how we consume, reduce the goods we waste, reuse goods, and recycle materials, we are also reducing the associated emissions (see Figure 7.2). Take aluminum: recycling an aluminum can into a new one takes as little as 5 per cent of the energy it takes to make a can from virgin material (i.e., bauxite), and that energy might come from burning fossil fuels. Cities committing to zero waste are therefore undertaking an important climate strategy.
Figure 7.2: Hierarchy of Action
This chart shows clearly the environmental hierarchy of action – recycling is important, but redesigning and reducing are far more important. Source: Adapted from Zero Waste Europe, A Zero Waste Hierarchy , www.zerowasteeurope.eu/2019/05/a-zero-waste-hierarchy-for-europe/.
San Francisco Takes the Lead
San Francisco is a city with steep hills, a vibrant waterfront, and a strong and growing economy. Like other cities mentioned in this book, San Francisco has a clear plan to have net-zero emissions by 2050. It has already made impressive gains. The city’s first climate-action plan was released in 2004 under the leadership of then mayor Gavin Newsom (although work began under the previous mayor, Willie Brown). At that time, it was one of the first community climate-action plans in the United States. By 2017, San Francisco had surpassed its original goals: emission reductions had exceeded the intermediate target, at 36 per cent below 1990 levels. This was despite a large increase in population and a huge increase in GDP. (San Francisco has clearly demonstrated that carbon emissions can be dissociated from GDP and population growth.) As part of this work, San Francisco has become a world leader in waste management.
Waste represented 6 per cent of the city’s total emissions in 2017, and the goal is to reduce that number to zero – meaning 100 per cent diversion of discarded materials to recycling and composting. Recent changes to global recycling systems may extend the time it takes to reach that goal, but San Francisco’s strategy has been so successful that it is being widely adopted elsewhere.
There were multiple motivations for the zero-waste program: to conserve resources, to reduce waste’s environmental impact, to create jobs, to save money (waste disposal is a significant drain on a city’s resources), and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. San Francisco also made the case that going to zero waste would improve the air quality from energy conservation and reduced manufacturing, and that their approach to waste could potentially mean the creation of community waste/recycling facilities and the associated employment.
San Francisco has an unusual history for waste collection and processing. In 1932, a refuse ordinance was passed that created permit areas where waste collection companies could get exclusive rights for waste collection. The bylaw gave the city authority to set the rates for waste collection. Over time, one company, now named Recology, bought all the permits in the city and became the city’s sole waste collector.
Recology is 100 per cent employee owned and cooperates with the city in its ambitious goals for waste management. It collects and processes all of San Francisco’s waste, and is an interesting example of a business working with a city to accomplish important public policy goals. (Note: Concerns about Recology’s monopoly led to a citywide referendum in 2012 on a proposition to separate waste collection into multiple competitive bid contracts. The proposition was defeated, and Recology continues to be San Francisco’s sole operator for solid waste collection and processing.)
San Francisco and Recology are taking a simple approach in working toward zero waste, one that is considered state of the art by most progressive city governments. In order of priority, the first goal is waste prevention, then reducing and reusing waste. What remains is targeted for recycling and composting.
To prevent waste generation, the city has instituted several bans on packaging. Over time, some forms of plastic bags, takeout containers, water bottles, and other single-use packaging have been banned.
In 2007, large grocery stores and retailers were prohibited from using single-use plastic bags. Only certified compostable plastic bags or paper bags with post-consumer content were allowed as checkout bags, and these had to be sold, not given away. Reusable bags were also encouraged, but to qualify for use by a retailer, these had to be washable and able to withstand more than 125 uses. By 2013, this ordinance applied to all retail stores and food establishments. It is estimated that San Francisco has reduced its disposable checkout-bag usage by 70 to 90 per cent as a consequence of this city law. Plastic bags are a common source of litter, a common contaminant in recycling and composting systems, and take time to break down in landfills. More than seventy-five other cities and counties in California have followed San Francisco’s lead in banning plastic bags.
The city has also led efforts to hold producers of waste responsible for it – rather than the purchasers of their product. In 2006, it passed the Extended Producer Responsibility Resolution to lobby for state legislation to increase producer responsibility for a product’s full lifecycle. The city believes in creating incentives for product redesign to minimize waste, as well as measures to make producers and distributors responsible for product recycling and disposal. San Francisco’s efforts particularly target producers of hazardous waste. The net effect is to shift the cost of recycling and disposal away from municipalities toward the producers and distributors of the materials – giving them an economic incentive to avoid creating the waste in the first place.
One successful example of extended producer responsibility is the 2015 Safe Drug Disposal Stewardship Ordinance. With this city law, drug manufacturers are required to provide San Francisco residents with a safe and convenient way to dispose of their unwanted prescription and over-the-counter medication. The goal was to prevent pharmaceutical products from polluting aquatic ecosystems, to help combat prescription drug abuse, and to address a category of products that are not served by conventional waste collection. More than forty-four medicine-collection kiosks are located throughout the city where residents can drop off unwanted medications. Alternatively, prepaid mail-back envelopes are available. In 2018, a total of 23,474 pounds (10,648 kilograms) of medicines were collected as a result of this ordinance.
In 2009, San Francisco introduced a mandatory recycling and composting program that built on the food-waste composting program that’s been operational since the 1990s. Residents are required to separate their waste into three bins: recycling (blue bin), compostable waste (green bin), and trash (black bin). Note that unlike programs in many other cities, separating waste is a requirement. When waste is incorrectly sorted, educational material is provided to residents in a variety of languages. However, repeat offenders can be fined.
To encourage greater separation of waste, the size of the black trash bin is shrinking, while the size of the recycling and compost bins remains large. Residents who are unable to fit their trash into the smaller black bins must pay extra to use a larger one, and they may be subject to a waste audit. Waste audits are also performed regularly at sites that consistently generate large volumes of waste. (In some cities, this can be controversial, particularly at inception, but in San Francisco, Toronto, and elsewhere the practice has become widely accepted.) The compost program is highly successful and effective in reducing methane emissions and therefore minimizing the impact on climate change. Compost is used to fertilize California vineyards, and the city has facilities that use anaerobic digestion of compostable products to generate biogas for collection fleets and buildings.
Apartment buildings remain a significant challenge in San Francisco, as in all cities. More than half of San Francisco’s residents live in apartment buildings, the majority of which are outfitted with only one garbage chute (except for newer buildings, which have multiple waste chutes for separated collection). Typically, in the older buildings, trash is deposited in the chute, but recyclables and compost must be carried down to basement-storage areas, a disincentive to recycling and composting. As it is very expensive to retrofit buildings to have a multi-chute system, this practice tends to be the norm.
To address this challenge, San Francisco plans to improve the extraction of recyclables and compost from the collected waste stream from multi-residential buildings, develop the market for recyclables and compost, and introduce more material bans.
The city also provides oversight and carries out research and outreach activities. City departments must have well-designed recycling, composting, and trash areas, and events organized or authorized by the city require event organizers to attend zero-waste training and offer recycling and composting. The city has banned the sale and distribution of plastic water bottles on city property and has increased the availability of drinking water in public spaces.
San Francisco is advanced in dealing with construction waste. Current rules require a minimum of 65 per cent of construction, demolition, and remodeling waste material to be diverted from landfill, and large new commercial and residential buildings must divert a minimum of 75 per cent of construction waste and meet LEED Materials and Resources credit 2 requirements (targets for recovering, reusing, recycling materials). This is part of a significant series of measures, some internal – demonstrating leadership and what’s possible – and some external.
Internally, the city has an active plan to address the reduction of waste and the purchase of more sustainable products. The approved product list emphasizes recycled content – for example, 100 per cent post-consumer-content recycled paper. City departments must appoint a recycling coordinator, assess their waste, submit a resource-conservation plan, submit an annual recycling survey, and report on solid-waste diversion. They are required to reuse office furniture, computers, and supplies using a virtual-warehouse exchange system, and even print two-sided on paper.
The city has taken the lessons it’s learned and worked to assist residents and businesses. It created an online database of local businesses that divert 75 per cent or more of their waste; it offers waste audits and consultations to businesses; has programs for pickup of specialized, toxic, or large waste items (such as scrap metal, electronics, motor oil, batteries, fluorescent bulbs); and has a team (“the Environment Now” team) that conducts extensive outreach and education for residents and businesses, and checks curbside bins for compliance.
The city is planning to add a zero-waste facility to improve processing efficiencies and recover compostable and recyclable goods that have not been source separated. To assist in moving toward zero waste, the city is considering the introduction of more material bans and waste-prevention campaigns, and continues to encourage producer-responsibility initiatives, some of which are also being considered by the State Government of California.
Waste Transformation in Global Cities
Ljubljana
The ideas used in San Francisco can work almost everywhere. Ljubljana, Slovenia, is an excellent case study of what can be done, moving rapidly from recently starting separated waste collection to building a foundation for an economy that effectively reuses products rather than throwing them out – an idea known as a circular economy.
Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia and has overseen a transformational change in the way it deals with waste. Separated waste collection began only in 2002, but by 2014, the city was diverting more than 60 per cent of its waste to recycling and composting facilities. Even its total per capita waste generation is impressive: the annual per person output of waste in 2014 was a mere 167 kilograms (368 pounds), while the European average was 475 kilograms (1,047 pounds) and the US average an astonishing 743 kilograms (1,638 pounds). Waste reduction and diversion was so effective that in 2014 the city scrapped its plans to build the country’s first waste-incineration plant.
Ljubljana has worked closely with the public waste-management company Snaga to develop strategies to achieve zero waste. Once curbside pickup of separated recycling and compost was established in 2013, Snaga began to reduce the frequency of garbage pickup. Across the city, recycling and compost is picked up two to three times more frequently than garbage. This initially led to complaints, opposition, and packed garbage containers. Through education campaigns on sorting, open discussions of the reasons for the changes, and videos showing how those packed garbage containers were full of recyclable and compostable substances, the public mood eased, and the changes were accepted.
In Ljubljana, hazardous waste, large items, metals, textiles, e-waste, and other materials are collected in collection centers scattered across the city. Recognizing that these centers may not be convenient or accessible to all residents, mobile collection units are sent out to the neighborhoods twice a year to pick up these items. Free pickup of bulky items can be arranged. A recent measure in densely populated centers is pay-per-use pricing for disposal of garbage and compostable materials. Access to recycling bins remains free.
The city’s focus has now shifted to waste reduction and the building of a circular economy. By promoting leasing instead of buying, services instead of products, and sharing instead of ownership, the city saw an opportunity to reduce waste and build a more livable city. A “Get Used to Reusing” campaign was launched and later adopted nationally. This was supported with the establishment of a reuse center, a clothing e-library, bike-sharing and electric car- sharing services, a library of things (for borrowing tools, sports equipment, etc.), exchange depots, a Repair Cafe, and a public company that makes paper towels and toilet paper from milk and juice packaging. Snaga, the waste-management company, even furnished its offices with upcycled and reused furniture. At the industrial level, they encourage symbiosis: where waste from one industry is used as raw material for another local company. Ljubljana is showing the world how a shift in thinking can lead to the elimination of nearly all waste.
As a result of these efforts, the city won the European Commission’s Green Capital Award in 2016 for waste management. The city is building on this success by focusing on ambitious goals: reducing the amount of residual waste to 60 kilograms (132 pounds) per person annually by 2025, and to 50 kilograms (110 pounds) by 2035. It plans to increase the diversion rate to 78 per cent by 2025 and 80 per cent by 2035, with an ultimate goal of zero waste – the first European capital to aim for zero waste.
Ljubljana makes an interesting study for a North American audience: we often seem to assume that we have all the answers and, implicitly, that other parts of the world – developing nations, Eastern Europe, Africa – must learn from us. As shown in this case, the learning is often a two-way process. Another case is Accra, Ghana, where the city has addressed multiple public policy goals by addressing waste management.
Accra
Accra is a large sprawling city with multiple challenges. As is often the case in Africa, large informal settlements lack basic services, and the residents lack decent work. The lack of basic services can lead to problems not just with the service gap, but also in public health and welfare in general.
Prior to 2016, waste management as a basic service did not exist in Accra’s informal settlements. As a result, garbage was left in informal (and illegal) garbage dumps, where it was burned in the open, creating air pollution and fire hazards in addition to public health challenges. Garbage was collected from residents by an informal system of waste pickers – individuals who, for a small fee, collected garbage and left it at the dumps, making very little money in the process. (More than three hundred tons of garbage was collected daily by the waste pickers, and, including other sources, more than six hundred tons made its way to the dumps.)
In 2016, Accra, under the leadership of Mayor Mohammed Adjei Sowah, began the process of closing these illegal dumps. The closures happened in 2017, and the dumps were replaced by three regular transfer stations. To maintain social equity, the city ensured that the informal waste pickers could still find work – recognizing them as legitimate and increasing opportunities for them to earn income (for example, from recycling and selling reusable products). More than six hundred such workers have been registered with the city, which has helped to dignify their work, stabilize their employment, and increase their incomes.
Stable employment has also helped increase collection and recycling rates in Accra. The initiative’s impact on climate is important too. The city’s carbon footprint has shrunk as waste is no longer burned, and methane no longer seeps from the informal landfills. In addition, the positioning of transfer stations in more central locations means fewer vehicle miles are being driven for waste-related matters. Some estimates by the city show significant greenhouse gas reductions from these efforts – and public health benefits too. Accra has not had an outbreak of cholera since 2017.
While informal waste collection and illegal dumping at this scale is not a problem in most cities in the developed world, addressing climate change in a way that is equitable and supports workers’ transition to more sustainable practices is a challenge that all cities face. Accra demonstrates that it is eminently feasible to have a just transition for workers while achieving critical environmental goals.
“The future we want recognizes the crucial role of the informal sector in sustainable city development. Combating climate change requires inclusive decision making which ensures all citizens are a part of the solution, to be acting local to impact positively on global challenges.”
– Mohammed Adjei Sowah (Accra), 2019
The Final Word
In virtually every country in the world, cities are responsible for managing waste. We face a huge collective challenge with the ever-increasing amount of things made with the expectation they will simply be thrown away. This increasing mountain of garbage poses a challenge for our environment on several fronts – including greenhouse gas emissions. Effective waste management – particularly separating compostable waste and capturing landfill gas – can lower a city’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5 to 6 per cent – possibly more in cities in the developing world with large informal settlements and informal dumps. The methods to do so are proven and adaptable to all cities globally. As part of a broader waste-management plan, a city can lower greenhouse gas emissions, stop pollution, and address economic challenges as well – all by using these proven and time-tested ideas. Even more can be done by finding ways to create a circular economy, ensuring that the waste is not produced to begin with – or that it can be repurposed for other uses rather than simply thrown out.