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[yes-- Neil Seldman, Pres. of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (
http://www.ILSR.org
) will once again be a guest on my live webcast
http://www.WHVW.com
950 AM show tomorrow 11 am-- don't miss-- Seldman/ILSR work in Baltimore needs to be replicated here in Dutchess (our county still unfortunately owns/controls incinerator, run by Wheelabrator, just like Baltimore-- no excuse for us locally to not follow their example-- for cleaner air, more jobs too:
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In the Shadow of Baltimore’s Incinerator, a Pilot Program Shows How to Increase Recycling Rates
A pilot project in inner-city Baltimore demonstrated that, “above all else low-income residents will recycle when provided the means, education and incentive to do so.” The project was coordinated by Dante Swinton,
Energy Justice Network (EJN)
in cooperation with the Westport Neighborhood Association.
The pilot project was carried out in the shadows of the Baltimore garbage incinerator in downtown Baltimore, one of the leading sources of air pollution in the city.
Using a grant from the Abell Foundation 95 households were given new recycling bins, and 5 block captains were recruited and special public awareness meetings were held for residents. Recycling rates jumped to 25% along the pilot routes, which is higher than the 20% overall city recycling rate. Furthermore, for households whose members attended meetings the recycling rate was even higher. They reached 30% according to Jessica Wynter Martin, an EJN staffer.
“Efforts will continue to expand recycling,” according to Keisha Allen, President of Westport Neighborhood Association. The Divert Westport Challenge will, she stated, “continue to inspire other neighbors to recycle as much as possible so that we can eliminate trash incineration in Baltimore and repurpose our waste into other uses.”
Interesting features of the project included:
- $2,500 fees paid to Block Captains
- Awards of between $400-$1,200 to participating households
By increasing recycling the project saved the city money as recycling costs $20 per ton as compared to incineration which costs $50 per ton.
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Report: Why Should Baltimore Recycle More?
[download full report here:
The report was prepared to inform city agencies, City Council and Mayor’s Office about the immediate opportunities for increased recycling and its potential economic impact on the city. The Office of Sustainability, Department of Planning and the Department of Public Works were all generous with their data and insights in helping prepare the report. ILSR also relied on input from environmental organizations and recycling and composting businesses. What follows is the introduction of the report.
There are two primary reasons why Baltimore should invest in more recycling. Establishing high recycling levels will position the city’s residents and businesses for the future, when the costs of incineration and landfill will be more expensive. The city could save citizens and businesses hundreds of millions of dollars by shrinking its waste stream for the next generation.
More immediately, increased recycling means more jobs. Within three years, based on the experiences of other cities, Baltimore could have 500 new direct jobs in this sector of the city’s economy. In general, for every 10,000 tons of materials incinerated, one job is created. For every 10,000 tons of materials processed for recycling and composting, five to 10 jobs are created. Hundreds more jobs are created when processed materials are used in industry and agriculture. Oakland, CA created 1,000 jobs in the recycling sector in the last 10 years. Based on the results of a recent business report on recycling and jobs in South Carolina, if just one percent of Baltimore residents recycled eight more newspapers per month, it would add $304,000 to the local economy.
Mayor Pugh’s Transition Report identifies solid waste and recycling management as a top priority, calling for the doubling of the city’s recycling rate within one year as a primary strategy to eliminate the use of the downtown garbage incinerator and landfills.
The net cost to the city for incineration at the Wheelabrator Baltimore incinerator is $50 per ton. The net cost to the city for recycling as of March 2017 was $18 per ton. For every ton the city recycles, it saves $32. At current prices, the 25,000 tons per year that the city recycles saves $800,000. Mayor Pugh’s goal is to double the recycling rate within a few years; if that goal is met, the city will save $1.6 million annually at current prices.
While the markets for recycled materials fluctuate, the costs of upgrading the aging incinerator and expanding the ash landfill can be expected to rise in the next few years. Replacement incineration and landfill capacity will steadily increase over time. For example, the installation of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology to reduce pollution at Wheelabrator was estimated by air quality officials to cost somewhere around $70 million, with $10 or $11 million in yearly operating costs. The Harford County, MD, garbage incinerator closed after 28 years instead of its projected useful service life of 30 years, because “complete upgrades [would have been] uneconomical and unsuccessful at achieving an increase in operational efficiency.”
Baltimore City’s contract with Wheelabrator Baltimore expires at the end of 2021 with a city option through 2026. If the incinerator continues to operate beyond 2021, the city will have to expand the capacity of Quarantine Road Landfill.
Baltimore’s business institutions and residences generate about 970,000 tons of solid waste a year, including 286,000 tons of construction & demolition debris.
Excluding C&D waste, Baltimore businesses, institutions and residences generate about 686,000 tons per year of solid waste. The Department of Public Works is responsible for collecting residential solid waste, which comprises a little less than a third of the waste. A few apartments and about 110 small businesses currently receive recycling services from the city. The vast majority of apartments and businesses hire private haulers to provide garbage and recycling services. Businesses and apartments in Baltimore are required by state mandate to recycle. Most recently, the Department has been reorganized into four quadrants, each of which will be responsible for garbage and recycling collection, street cleaning, litter control and bulky waste pick ups.
Baltimore’s official residential recycling rate is 28 percent, compared to a national recycling rate of 35 percent.
According to the Baltimore Office of Sustainability’s 2014 report, Waste to Wealth: Baltimore Waste Stream Analysis, 82 percent of Baltimore’s household materials could be recycled or composted. The DPW is responsible for collecting residential solid waste and recycling.
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Zero Waste Cities: At The Forefront Of The Sustainable Development Goals Agenda
A call to rethink our relationship with the stuff that we use and discard is fundamental to the sustainability agenda.
Making “cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” will prove to be one of the most critically important SDGs of this century. In particular, SDG 11.6 commits us all “by 2030, [to] reduce the adverse per capita environmental impact of cities, including by paying special attention to air quality, municipal and other waste management”.
Badly managed municipal solid waste contributes to resource depletion, economic lock-in, air pollution, and public health impacts such as diarrhoea, asthma, dengue fever, and other serious health effects such as cancer. Moreover,
cities account for 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions
if a consumption-based method is used (that is, accounting for all goods consumed by residents, irrespective from their origin), so a call to rethink our relationship with the stuff that we use and discard is, clearly, fundamental to the sustainability agenda.
Facing up to the waste challenge can hold the key to the transformation of our relationship with resources and provide practical, bottom-up and decentralised strategies for reducing climate pollution, conserving energy and natural resources, and present enormous opportunities for the development of local economies.
Fortunately, the transition towards a more resource-efficient society has already begun: Zero Waste strategies currently implemented around the world by visionary local leaders, recyclers cooperatives, and innovative practitioners, provide some of the necessary building blocks for a ‘sustainable city’.
In Europe, the
Zero Waste Municipalities network
has grown rapidly and it now counts on more than 350 members and municipalities in more than 7 EU countries. The keys for success have proven to be a combination of strong political will, community leadership and engagement, and a locally-adapted strategy.
Zero waste is both a goal and a plan of action. The goal is to ensure resource recovery and protect scarce natural resources by progressively minimising and ultimately ending waste disposal in incinerators, cement plants, dumps, and landfills. Experience shows that these costly end-of-pipe options do not address the underlying problems with the throw-away society, lead to the destruction of resources, and create issues regarding the disposal of the considerable and often highly toxic ash that remains, air pollution, and the destruction of livelihoods in local recycling economies.
The plan encompasses people-led programs for waste reduction, reuse and repair programs, composting, recycling, changes in consumption habits, redesign and toxic-free production. Being rooted in community participation, zero waste policies are both far-sighted and inclusive, they pave the way toward sustainable waste management systems that work for both communities and the environment. Ultimately, zero waste is a revolution in the relationship between waste and people, a new way of thinking that aims to safeguard the health and improve the lives of everyone who produces, handles, works with, or is affected by waste—in other words, all of us.
Cities engaging in raising their mark on sustainability can look at the innovative experiences around the world that today are already making real progress towards compliance with the SDGs for urban sustainability:
- In 2015 Ljubljana, Slovenia, became the first ‘Zero Waste Capital’ in Europe implementing a wide range of zero waste practices into the fabric of the city. Also in Slovenia, 5 other municipalities, among which the very touristic town of Bled have taken the path toward Zero Waste, with now 1 in 5 inhabitants of the country living in a Zero Waste city.
These experiences show that solving the waste problem in line with the creation of sustainable cities requires more than technical fixes: it is part of a larger web of decisions about health, equity, power, poverty, and development, including policy decisions and governance.
At its heart, how cities deal with the stuff its residents make, use and discard, will determine the effectiveness of strategies for climate mitigation, clean air, clean water, clean energy, healthy food, healthy people, healthy wildlife, and the availability of resources for future generations.
These are the kind of commitments that we need to be making for a truly sustainable city to be achieved. That is, zero waste strategies are essential if we are serious about the creation and development of sustainable cities.
This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post to mark the occasion of the one-year anniversary of the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, or, officially, “Transforming Our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”). The SDGs represent an historic agreement — a wide-ranging roadmap to sustainability covering 17 goals and 169 targets — but stakeholders must also be held accountable for their commitments. To see all the posts in the series, visit
here
.
