19
November
2015

The Final Frontier: Best Practices for Organics Recycling in Multistory Residential Buildings, Part 2

TOS39_Main


EPISODE SUMMARY

In part one of our Best Practices episode, we took a look at strategies for building strong partnerships and for a successful roll-out. In this final episode, we’re picking up where we left off. We explore San Francisco’s best practices in gaining trust with their outreach strategies; go in-depth with Seattle’s excellent education program; demonstrate the hands-on tracking system in Los Angeles; and discuss key policy measures that can impact a program’s success.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

 

MADE POSSIBLE BY STREAMSORT

Streamsort is a data collection tool designed for quick, easy and accurate material characterisation studies and analysis in the waste management sector. The use of data today is still based on archaic methods of collection and analysis. Streamsort brings data collection technology to the next level, by removing the cost of data entry, reducing the risk for mistakes, and making compelling and analysing data much easier. Request a free demo on www.streamsort.com.

 

FEATURED EVENTS

The International Compost Roundtable, a side-event of the COP21 Climate Conference. December 4th, 2015. 14:45-18:30. Le Bourget, Paris.

This event will bring together leading practitioners, cutting-edge researchers, and Global South representatives of local farming and cooperatives of waste pickers to look into the climate solutions around organic waste, particularly exploring the intersection between zero waste and agroecology. In cities around the world, practice is showing that tackling organic waste is key; while being part of the problem, its proper management in composting can turn it into a real solution for soil depletion, emission reduction from landfills and use of chemical fertilizers.

 

COMPOST 2016. January 25th to 28th, 2016. Hyatt Regency – Jacksonville, Florida, USA. Organised by the United States Composting Council.

Join the USCC at the world’s largest composting conference and exhibition for the organics management industry. Hear the latest from industry leaders about solving challenges in collecting organics, manufacturing and using compost, and producing renewable energy from organics. Visit their composting tradeshow to see the latest in equipment and tools for effective programs.  of particular interest to listeners of this program will be the Session on Measuring Diversion Improvements from Enhanced Tenant Engagement at Multi-Family Dwellings, presented by Lily Kelly of Global Green.

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

 

Main picture by Stefan Oh. Some rights reserved.

Transcript:

CHAPTER 5: DOOR-TO-DOOR OUTREACH STRATEGIES AND LOBBY EVENTS

 

THE ORGANIC STREAM: We left off episode three discussing Milan’s outreach campaign as part of their roll-out strategy. One of the key ingredients of their campaign was meeting tenants face-to-face in the apartment buildings, or at community meetings. This is the cornerstone of any outreach campaign.

I want to look at this in a little more detail, because engaging tenants is not always as simple as just heading over to the building and knocking on the door. It’s about gaining trust.

In episode two, we discussed in detail the importance of understanding the demographics you’re working with – reaching people where they are – either online or offline, at community gatherings, social media spaces, television, on the street at local festivals, and so on. Also making sure to have native speakers of the different languages on staff is crucial. This can go a long way to getting people to engage and to trust you. But there is more to it than that. Program coordinators have a few extra tricks up their sleeves to get people in apartment buildings interested, engaged, and willing to attend meetings.

Remember Alexa Kielty, member of the residential zero waste team at the San Francisco Department of Environment?

Well, Alexa told me a lot about their outreach work, and I was really impressed. We covered San Francisco in great detail in episode one and two, and as we know their zero waste strategy is one of the most impressive zero waste initiatives. In terms of organics recycling in multi story buildings – all residential buildings with less than six units separate their organics, and eighty percent of large-scale residential buildings do the same. Right now, San Francisco is focusing on the remaining twenty percent to close the gap, and because of this they have started to really hone-in their outreach strategy.

Alexa told me that in San Francisco, staff work directly with building managers to create individualised outreach program for the building – again, this means working with different demographics, customising the outreach materials, and so on. They also go door-to-door to deliver kitchen caddies and outreach materials year in, year out. Because of this, they have some great experience in knowing what to do to gain people’s trust and make it work…

 

ALEXA KEITLY: After we set up the programs, we have a whole outreach team called Environment Now, which is a green careers program – so, somewhat of a job training program. We hire from the community so we get a lot of native Spanish speakers, native Chinese speakers; we have a native Russian speaker and a native Filipino speaker on staff. And those folks will do what we call a Green Apartments, which is essentially door-to-door outreach within apartment buildings, at about five to seven pm in the evening, so hopefully we’re getting people when they’re coming back from work. And we work with the property manager so the tenants know ahead of time that we’ll be there on the certain days; we find out what languages are needed; we send outreach materials to property managers to post within the building ahead of time and in the elevator, so it’s not a surprise visit.

What’s great is if the property manager can come with us when we do outreach, or the resident manager, which is even better because they typically know more tenants. If that person can actually conduct the door-to-door outreach with us that’s really helpful because more people are willing to open their doors if there’s somebody they know.

 

TOS: This is great information here. First off, it seems the most important thing is to make the outreach personal. Alexa says they hire people from within the community they’re reaching out to – people who understand the community and are native speakers of the language of that community. It’s easier to open your door to people familiar to you.

Another thing they do is work with the building manager to give people notice that they’ll be coming, of course.

And finally, and most importantly, the trick to getting people to open their doors is to have a building or resident manager come with them. When we spoke to Lily Kelly of Global Green in her office in San Francisco, she said a similar thing…

 

LILLY KELLY: Having a tenant or a property manager come with us when we were doing the door-to-door outreach initially, especially if it’s a tenant who knows other people in the building, I think we got a lot more people answering their doors because it was their neighbour who’s knocking and saying, “Hey I want to introduce you to this person who’s doing this composting project, we’re going to have this at our building and it’s going to be really great”. I think that really changed people’s perspectives on it right at the outset of, “Oh, this is something my neighbours are interested in.

 

TOS: Gaining trust is a big part of getting people involved and interested in the program. So if tenants can see there’s someone from their building that’s interested, they might be more inclined to listen.

Now, in a big city, with a lot of buildings it’s not always easy to manage or finance such initiatives – which is why it’s a good idea to find recycling champions in the building – either a tenant or building manager and support them in promoting the program. Seattle has a great volunteer program for building managers that does exactly that, the Friends of Recycling and Composting program – and I’ll get into it later in the episode.

Another great tactic is to work with people that have some social significance – popular figures within the community, or local celebrities. This can really boost a program’s image and make it more attractive.

So that’s door-to-door outreach. Now let’s look at open events, or what are often called lobby events.

Setting up an event in the building, where people can come along to get information and perhaps pick up equipment is a common strategy. Many programs do this, and it can work quite well. But to get people to take time out of their day to attend, that requires some strategic thinking.

There are two main tricks you can use that have been shown to give results. And to learn about them, I wanted to take a trip back down memory lane, to one of the first interviews I ever did here on The Organic Stream.

(Clip of old episode plays).

TOS: This is our second episode, when I interviewed Rokiah Yaman and Clare Brass, director of the SEED Foundation, about her food scrap recycling research program that aimed to discover the barriers to organics recycling in urban environments. Clare was working with an inner-city estate, the Maiden Lane estates, in a disadvantaged area in London. And she told me about her difficulties in engaging the residents, who had much more immediate problems to deal with.

But using some clever techniques, she was able to overcome these challenges and get people participating in the program anyway.

 

CLARE BRASS: Recruitment is still the most difficult thing with these projects and you need to get under the skin of the people, your primary stakeholders. Now, often the thing that is driving you, so in our case the environmental challenge of food waste, is not the thing at all which is maybe driving a resident of a housing estate.

The thing that works quite well, and I think this is a really good trick, is that we piggybacked on an event that was happening at the estate. Just when we started the project there was a barbeque event coming up on the estate. We went along to that event, and we set up a stall with a poster. All we did really was go along with a whole stall full of little tomato plants, a bucket of food waste and a bucket of compost, and just talked to people and say “did you know that your food waste can look like this one day, and then it turns into this?” And most people were quite surprised, but it was an opportunity for us to start a conversation with them.

And I think the key thing here is, if you’re recruiting, it’s to go to where people are already going to be going, and just give them a little, a little tiny reward. Just to have a first point of contact. After that we managed to get about 15 to come to our first workshop. So that was a really good way in.

 

TOS: So there we have two of the best strategies for getting people to attend – using existing meetings or events at a building for your own outreach event, and make sure to have rewards. Other programs, such as Seattle, often advertise their educational presentation sessions in buildings as the place where people can collect their free containers. Another really great idea is to provide refreshments, because as program managers have told me – people tend to come if there’s food. So these strategies work really well.

 

CHAPTER 6: FOOD SCRAP COLLECTION EDUCATION STRATEGIES – SEATTLE CASE STUDY

 

TOS: One of the most important goals of an organics recycling program is to change behaviour and to get people to understand the impact their actions will have. Without this, there is no will to carry out the action. And this is where education comes in.

We touched on education before in episode two – focusing strongly on the importance of multi-language education materials.

Today, we go further and focus on the excellent education strategy that Marcia Rutan, Recycling Program Manager at Seattle Public Utilities, employs for their organics program.

TOS: Marcia Rutan has been working in education for a long time and she’s been greatly supported in her work thanks to Seattle’s progressive recycling laws. We learned quite a bit about Seattle’s organics program in the last episode. In 2011 it became mandatory to provide organic carts in multistory buildings, and implemented a full composting mandate for the whole city in January this year. Fines for too much food waste in garbage containers will start to be issued in January 2016.

From researching their program, I was inspired by the work they do to educating people. When I got Marcia on the phone, I wanted her to tell me all about it. And the first thing I asked was to start from the beginning: just what were the basic building blocks of their educational program?

 

MARCIA RUTAN: In terms of education, what we find across the board is that property managers especially appreciate posters that can be placed above the carts. Then we also have labels for the carts, and all of these have pictures as well as wording. And then we have our basic flyers. We use two basic flyers for this program. One is called the Where Does It Go flyer, and it has colour coding for all three waste streams: the recycling, which is blue, the compostables, which are green, and the garbage, which is a grey/black colour. The other flyer then is basically a food plus compostables guideline, which is all green, and it’s just to make it clearer to people what goes into the compost cart since it’s a new program. The flyer also provides a few “why is this important” points, as well as tips for storing and carrying out materials – so it just gives some more information. Those are the two basic flyers that we use with this program.

These are foundational for the property managers. They really rely on those flyers, the labels, the posters and the carts – and they’re all colour coded. And that partly came from…in about 2007 or 2008, we held focus groups with community based organisations. They were primarily constituted of folks who were immigrants or who have English as another language (I won’t say second language, because we know some of these folks have several languages under their belts). But they said they wanted the colour coding, and they didn’t want a “yes” “no” type of poster, which was confusing to them, but just “where do things go” in all categories. So that’s where these informational flyers came out of, and the colour coding.

 

TOS: So flyers, labels and posters are foundational elements for property managers in Seattle. Using focus groups to understand what residents would prefer gave them a better idea of how to design their materials. Colour coding is a crucial element – many cities agree that this is key. It’s easy to understand and transcends any language barriers as well. Another important element that also overcomes language barriers, and for those with reading difficulties, is pictures. And it was Alexa that said to me at one point during our interview that a lot of people, no matter what language they speak, tend not to read the posters – so pictures can really help.

One important thing here I want to bring up is the design of the materials. We often see too many design mistakes – so materials are either overcrowded with information and pictures, the signage is unclear or hard to follow, colours and contrast is also something to take into account as well, because if there is too much going on, or it’s just plain black and white, people won’t want to look at it. The more well-designed, clear and pleasant to look at the materials are, the better it will be.

So – educational tools such as flyers, hand-outs and stickers can be classed as passive education tools. Other very popular passive education tools are promotional tools like door hangers or magnets, and of course websites, apps, and social media.

Now, Marcia mentioned websites and social media as tools they like to use for education and outreach – and this was the same for all the cities we interviewed. In this day and age, when so many of us rely on smartphones and the internet as a primary source of information, having an online presence can make a big difference. The benefits are great. They allow program managers to interact directly with residents, share information quickly and easily, and to answer questions.

There are an increasing amount of platforms online to use to get the message out. The key here is to choose the right platform for your target group – for example, younger generations don’t tend to use Facebook as much as they use Snapchat or Instagram. The DSNY in New York have currently started an Instagram account, to try and reach the younger audience – they also have twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr accounts. So there are a growing number of platforms, and when designing your outreach strategy, it is your responsibility to adapt your strategy.

So these are great passive tools to use in an educational campaign. But what about the more hands-on approach we discussed before?

What interested me greatly in Seattle city as a case study and Marcia’s approach was her use of a more active educational approach. At many of the properties, Marcia conducts one-to-one on-site presentations that seem to go down very well with the residents.

 

MR: And we use that Where Does It Go flyer and we take props with us so people get a hands-on experience with putting things into the right colour bin. So I take two big bags of stuff, I distribute it to folks, teach them how to use the flyer, and then they come and put it into the bin they think it goes in and we discuss it. And this is a very popular game, people really love it. I’m a real believer in multiple educational intelligences: rather than just looking at a printed form, that people get their hands on things, and are kinaesthetic as well – they like to get up and move. So I think all of those are really important.

 

TOS: This idea of providing a mix of different educational methods to help reach people is an interesting one. And practicing the physical act of putting organics in the right bin can definitely help make the lesson to stick in a person’s mind.

With on-site presentations like these, it’s easy to see how they can help build a positive relationship between tenants and the program. It also gives educators a chance to get feedback directly from people, address questions and so on.

Seattle has 5 thousand multistory properties…and half of the population of the city lives in mulitstory buildings. That is a lot of people to reach out to. I asked Marcia if they had the budget to be able to reach everyone this way, and she said no. But what they do have is the volunteer program that I mentioned before…

 

MR: We run a train the trainer program called Friends of Recycling and Composting, where property managers or their designanted representatives come and take a two-hour training to get motivated and educated on where does stuff go and best practices at the property, as well as how to motivate residents. And people provide really high marks on this training program. They say they basically came just to get the free buckets (which we use as a hook to get them there!), but they left actually profoundly motivated to back and work with their residents, so it’s been really effective.

 

TOS: While it’s important to educate tenants, many reports show that the most effective education is focused on property managers. This is why the Friends of Recycling and Composting Program is such a great tool.

But educating building managers and owners is not without challenges.

 

MR: There is quite a bit of turnover of property managers, so we’ll just get them educated and inspired, and then they’ll move on to another property…which sometimes can work in our favour, because then they go on to help that other property get going. But sometimes we just basically lose them. And then there’s also resistance by some property managers: they hide the cart, they don’t want the residents to use it because they don’t want to deal with the ick factor, or they perceive a mess is going to happen. So we have missing carts.

We don’t have a good way to deal with the turnover – we just train, train, train and then like I said, some go on to other properties and help out those other properties to get going. But in terms of resistance – the drivers do report missing carts and we can just sort those and find out what are the larger properties (because those are the ones we go after). And then we target them. We give them a call, we go on site and find out what the barrier is for them to participate. Then we work with them, trouble shoot and provide education – anything we can to help feel more confident to get going. And often it’s that they’re very busy, so it can be a time issue. Another issue is fear, and we just try to deal with those fears. So a lot of those have gotten up and going.

 

TOS: One thing about education is that it’s always on-going. There is no real end to the work that needs to be done. Especially for a city like Seattle – with a program that’s very comprehensive and can still cause confusion over what goes where. We gained a lot of insight into what tools work best for educating both tenants and property managers. But the most inspiring thing to take away from the Seattle case study is their commitment to constantly refining their strategy year after year to help clear up this confusion.

 

MR: We continually listen to our customers. We do have a wonderful “look it up” tool on our website, which is one of the most used links on our website, where hundreds of items are listed and the best disposal practices are provided for, and it’s just so many different materials. So that’s been a big help. And we are also continually listening when people give us feedback about what isn’t working with the flyers, or what might need revision, so each year when we go to revise the flyer, we try to make it more clear and useful for people. You know, it’s not always going to meet everybody’s personal style of education, but we just do our best. We really try to listen to the customer, rather than thinking we’re the experts. We are experts, but we also know that it’s incredibly important to listen to the customer. We learned a lot through the community-based social marketing, we really do employ those principles as much as we can. And so listening to our customers is very key.

 

CHAPTER 7: TRACKING RESULTS IN YOUR PILOT PROGRAM – LOS ANGELES CASE STUDY

 

JASON SANDERS: We’re in the Old Bank District Buidling right now, we’re on the eight floor. And we’re walking into the refuse room…and they’re out of compost bags in this one…

 

TOS: We’re back with Ecosafe Zero Waste’s Jason Sanders and Jessica Aldridge of Athens Services in Los Angeles.

 

JS: So we have two compost bags in here, and…we do have one aluminium can.

 

TOS: Here, we’re following them as they conduct their monthly inspections of the trash rooms on every floor of the Old Bank District Building.

 

JS: We do monthly site visits here to check each floor, and we mark down the odour level, the cleanliness level, contamination level, participation, and what the bag count looks like in the dispenser system.

 

TOS: Tracking results. This is one of the most valuable tools to have in an organics recycling program – especially a pilot program. The types of information to track can be materials collected, contamination rate, challenges faced, key contacts, and the amount of outreach employed. Compiling a detailed history of all these factors will be invaluable in moving forward, and to give accurate information when presenting program results.

In LA, we were impressed by the strength of their tracking system and their hands-on approach.

 

JS: So what we’ve seen so far with this program is a high level of participation and a low contamination rate. To this date we’ve done three site visits, and on each of those three site visits we have one or two standard traditional poly bags in the compost bin, and that’s it.

TOS: As you can see, by tracking results in person, Jason and Jessica have a much clearer understanding of how successful their program is. By visiting the building in person, they have a chance to spot problem areas and recognise trends in the buildings.

Of course, one of the most important things to track is the contamination rate. Keeping an eye on how contaminated the stream is, and being able to react quickly to any issues is useful – especially for the processor who will be dealing with the materials on the back end.

 

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: From the hauler and the collector and processer’s standpoint, we have to make sure that the material we’re collecting is good material. And I would say one of the hardest programs to enact is a multi-family separation program, especially for organics. So through this process we want to keep a very watchful eye on that product to make sure it’s as clean as possible. Because if we’re processing this material and it’s making its way back to our sort line – so, when it comes back to materials recovery facility, we have a sort line that it goes up to and the material that’s not supposed to be in there is pulled off. Then it is shipped off to our compost facility in Victorville, it is screened once again, then it is composted and that compost is then screened once again.

So we want to make sure that we have as little an amount of contaminants as possible, or else we end up with a more strenuous process. And also, it gives us an idea of if we need to send out more education and outreach to the residents here, to the management or to the maintenance – whatever it may be. So that also directs how we’re going to move forward with the program.

 

TOS: So, tracking is not only is useful to help you to understand and optimise your program, but it can also help shape your program as well. Frequent site visits are an excellent way to keep a close eye on what’s going on and allow you to quickly react to any problems that come up.  This is extremely valuable – especially for pilot programs that are looking to expand in the future.

 

CHAPTER 8: HOW POLICY CAN SHAPE YOUR ORGANICS RECYCLING PROGRAM

 

TOS: Every organics program is shaped by the regulatory structure it exists within. It can be supported by this structure, or it can be hindered by it. Throughout the show, we’ve come across examples of how policy has impacted on the programs we’ve covered. And it is no coincidence that the cities we chose for our case studies have some of the most progressive laws and policies in place today.

Places that put in place ambitious recycling targets, landfill or incineration diversion goals, or bans on organics going to landfills or incinerators as part of a sustainable waste management strategy are really important. They can create the necessary leverage needed to push for organics recycling. When supported and enforced properly, they can be a critical driver for collection programs. Every city we spoke to has a zero waste vision, or a zero waste commitment, with ambitious recycling targets. Most notably San Francisco – which leads the way in terms of ambitious policy – with just five years to reach zero waste in 2020.

Financial tools used by policy makers to promote organics recycling are important. Pay-as-you-throw systems for waste have been shown to greatly increase participation in recycling schemes in municipalities all around the world. And it makes sense: If buildings are charged more for waste collection than food scrap collection, it gives managers direct financial incentive to participate in the program.

 

ENZO FAVOINO: Bring systems never work as effectively as kerbside systems do. The true springboard towards zero waste has always been the implementation of a kerbside scheme targeting also the organics. With such a system, you quite easily jump up to seventy or eighty percent separate collection. Then, after that, in order to move further towards one hundred percent, what we do next is the implementation of a pay-as-you-throw scheme. And this increases separate collection by a further ten percent, but also it remarkably decreases the overall waste arisings.

 

TOS: But in a city where buildings are serviced by private haulers, municipalities can’t always control the price of collection. In some cases, where landfills are publicly owned, they can control how expensive it is to send the waste to these public facilities. Municipalities may also be able to raise tipping fees for garbage, and tax rates for landfilling or incineration, so that recycling once again becomes the more desirable option. This in turn will mean buildings are charged more for garbage collection and give them a reason to start composting!

There are also policy measures that indirectly impact on programs – which we saw in the case of Milan with the ban on chutes and the plastic bag ban that led to biobags becoming more available.

But perhaps what had the greatest impact on the cities we covered are mandates that require composting, or that organics stay out of waste bins.

 

MARCIA RUTAN: Basically we mentioned the two policies that have been the most critical: one requiring properties to subscribe, which was September 2011 – and that definitely had some impact but it had no enforcement quality to it, so it was not as strong as the new law which started this January that says no food waste in the garbage. And with that associated fine, that has had a very big impact on the properties wanting to participate.

 

LILY KELLY: When there’s an ordinance, or when there’s a law that requires composting, it really makes a difference. Just listening to the property managers changing their narrative it from, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to compost, it seems gross and smelly,” to, “How do we make this work?”

 

TOS: While it’s not a fix-all solution, the financial incentives that come with mandatory measures can make a huge difference – nobody wants to pay a penalty for not recycling properly. In multistory buildings, fines that are shared equally among tenants can help combat the anonymity factor. Enforcing these fines work best with a kerbside system.

Those are some of the key policy measures we’ve come across in the cities we’ve covered that have had a direct positive impact on programs. Having a strong policy framework will help steer everyone in the right direction, but it also has another great effect. It leaves program coordinators free to concentrate on doing their job, as opposed to spending their time fighting to change things for the better:

 

MARCIA RUTAN: Seattle is just a really leading-edge city in this. The agency I worked at previously had a pretty good program, but I always felt like in some ways I had to fight for recycling and composting to continue. Whereas when I’m working with Seattle, I basically feel like I’m swimming as fast as I can to catch up. And it’s wonderful! I can go as fast as I can to do as much as possible and there’s still room for opportunity. It’s really great!

 

FINAL CONCLUSION

 

So we’ve come to the end of our show, and it’s been a great journey. We’ve covered a lot of ground on this topic and there is a lot to take in.

But what we’ve seen through this show is that while multi-residential organics programs have their challenges, it is very possible to roll out a well-running, successful scheme.

The success of the programs we covered is a result of careful planning of the system, building strong relationships with key partners, working with building managers to find solutions, spending time with focus-groups to craft a successful outreach campaign, investing in communication, and taking a step-by-step approach to implementation.

They each use a combination of different strategies – all tailored to suit the needs of the specific building, or area, that they’re targeting. Your program’s success is predicated on your ability to execute consistently all the strategies we discussed, and to continually measure and improve your approach as you go along.

And in the case of Milan especially, we can see that with the right system and approach, and a supportive policy to back it up, organics recycling programs in multi-residental buildings can be rolled out with no more difficulty than any other organic recycling scheme.

So while multi story residential buildings can be a challenge for many cities, combining the wealth of experiences and best practices from the leading cities, we have a great roadmap to guide us on our journey.

27
October
2015

The Final Frontier: Best Practices for Organics Recycling in Multistory Residential Buildings, Part 1

MAIN IMAGE_TOS_38

 

EPISODE SUMMARY

On our journey through the planning stages of multi-residential organics programs, we’ve come across many challenges. But as more and more cities start tackling food waste in their apartment buildings, we’re creating a whole library of experiences, best practices, and successful strategies to learn from. In Episode 3, we begin to take a closer look at the cities leading the way (focusing on Milan and Los Angeles), and explore the key strategies they use that makes them so successful.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4 

 

MADE POSSIBLE BY ecovio® FROM BASF

ecovio® is a high-quality and versatile bioplastic of BASF. It is certified compostable and contains biobased contentThe main areas of use are plastic films such as organic waste bags, dual-use bags or agricultural films. Furthermore, compostable packaging solutions such as paper-coating and injection molding products can be produced with ecovio®. To find more information, visit their website.

AND ECOSAFE® ZERO WASTE

EcoSafe® Zero Waste designs and implements cradle to cradle solutions for source separation of organics and recyclables with a focus on diverting organic waste from landfill to commercial compost facilities. We provide our customers with the products and services they need in order to build SUSTAINABLE, SOURCE SEPARATION and DIVERSION programs designed to achieve ZERO WASTE in communities, institutions, businesses, events and at home and in public. For more, visit their website.

 

FEATURED EVENT

Ecomondo 2015. November 3rd to 6th, 2015. Rimini, Italy.

The largest technology platform for the Green and Circular Economy in the Euro-Mediterranean area – and for advanced and sustainable technology for processing and recycling all kinds of waste; treating and reclaiming water, waste water and polluted marine sites; efficient use and transformation of raw and processed materials and the promotion of renewable raw materials.

Eco-KEY_1080x720_GB

 

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

 

Title photo by johnwilliamsphd. Some rights reserved.

 

INTRODUCTION

 

THE ORGANIC STREAM: On our journey through the planning stages of multi-residential organics programs, we’ve come across many challenges. Some easy to deal with, others still difficult to solve – like the problem with chutes in San Francisco.

It’s clear that just like buildings, no two cities are alike – each have their own history, culture, unique demographics and structure – And all of this will impact how an organics recycling system should be designed. But what connects all the cities we’ve talked to is their determination to succeed, their skill in navigating problems, and their drive to improve.

And as more and more cities like these start tackling food waste in their apartment buildings, we’re creating a whole library of experiences, best practices, and successful strategies to learn from.

In the final two episodes, we take a closer look the cities leading the way – and explore just what are the key strategies they use that makes them so successful.

Let’s jump right in!

 

CHAPTER 1: PILOTING AND PARTNERSHIPS – LOS ANGELES CASE STUDY

 

TOS: On this show, we’ve talked a lot about building relationships. With tenants, with building managers…and we’re going to kick-start this episode by exploring another essential relationship for any organics program to work: the relationship between the key partners.

Because without communication and collaboration between program coordinators, haulers and processors, outreach teams and building managers too, collecting and recycling organics would become an impossible task. It really takes a team effort to make it work.

And over the course of producing this show, there was one program that really stood out to us showed…us just how beneficial this team building is.

I’m taking us back to Los Angeles.

 

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: Hi, my name is Jessica Aldridge, I’m the sustainability manager for Athens Services, I’ve been there for three years.

 

JASON SANDERS: Hello, my name is Jason Sanders with EcoSafe Zero Waste.

 

TOS: Here we are, standing outside the Old Bank District multistory building with Jason Sanders and Jessica Aldridge as we get ready to take a tour and learn all about their pilot program.

 

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: And so I and my crew at Athens wanted to do something ahead of time to figure out how this was going to work. What things are going to work well, what road bumps are we going to come up against. We wanted to try to pick apartment complexes with varying demographics and situations with how their waste is collected, and set up different types of infrastructure to see what works best, and what type of outreach works best. Because what works here may not work for somewhere else. And so in 2017, when the franchise agreement comes into play in the city of Los Angeles, we will already have the experience and the resources available to us to say “now we know”, when I have ten apartment complexes coming to me wanting to do this, I and my crew, and the staff at Athens are not going to feel overwhelmed and say “I’ve never done this before”.

 

TOS: So Jessica gives us an insight into their thinking in starting up the program. From here, Jessica and her team started looking for the right partners to work with – and those partners were Global Green USA and EcoSafe ZeroWaste.

Together they make an effective team – Jason and Jessica work closely together, visiting the properties every month and address any issues together. And it is clear that all three partners share the same goal for the program.

 

JASON SANDERS: Well it’s just really important for all partners to have a good understanding of what’s working and what’s not before a mass roll-out. So we’ve really got to dial in the success factors and those factors that aren’t working, and be able to address those. And that’s really what this pilot program is doing right now.

 

JESSICA ALDRIDGE: We work with the apartment managers, we tell them exactly what’s going to be happening. And then from there you have to get the buy-in from the managers as well, that this is something that they want to take on, and knowing that this most likely be a long-term pilot until we can get the right feet underneath it. And we knew from the beginning –  we never thought we were going to kick this thing off and it was going to be perfect from the beginning. I don’t want it to be perfect. Well, I want it to be perfect in the end, but I don’t want it to be perfect in the beginning, because if it is you learn very little to be able to move forward and create these types of programs more so down the road.

 

TOS: So the pilot acts as a learning experience for all partners – instead of looking for perfection, you’re looking for the challenges. This is how a program grows strong. And overcoming those challenges can only happen when all partners understand and share this same purpose.

When we sat down to chat in the café on the first floor of the Old Bank District Building, we took the time to ask  about their partnership, and what they considered important when selecting partners and building a strong program.

 

JASON SANDERS: Three crucial partners are always needed: hauler and processer being one, building manager is number two, and then we have us as a partner that has the tools for the program. And if you have communication outreach partner as well that always comes in handy, and in this case Global Green was that partner. And those partnerships have to be valued from the very beginning of designing the program, to the program launch, to long-term viability of the program. So those partners are together through that entire process.

 

TOS: So for a program to work, all key partners need to stick together from the very beginning, and all through the process. If there is a lack of communication or a lack of support from any of these partners, the program will suffer. As we saw in LA, all three key partners of the pilot program can keep communication channels open, learn from each other’s experiences and build a strong foundation for the future when the program expands.

 

CHAPTER 2: SUCCESSFUL ROLL-OUT STRATEGIES – MILAN CASE STUDY

TOS: Milan – a city of 1.4 million people at the northern Lombardy region of Italy. Milan began roll-out of its city-wide organics recycling system in November 2012 and is currently the largest city in the world running a formal separate collection scheme for organic materials. It’s also the city with the highest capture rates in Europe: with an average of 95 kg, or just over 200 pounds, of food waste being collected per inhabitant a year.

On top of this, almost 90 percent of the population in Milan lives in multistory residences – and still the contamination rate stays below 5 percent.

So how does the system operate?

In multistory buildings, it’s quite standardised: tenants collect their food scraps in kitchen caddies, and bring these down to the common waste room to throw into wheelie bins. Even tenants living in very high buildings, like skyscrapers, are expected to bring their scraps to the waste rooms on the ground floor – since there are no chutes in the city.

Then, the bins are brought to the curb on certain days for pickup. It’s important to note here that Milan operates a kerbside collection scheme, or door-to-door collection scheme. This is the system used in all the cities we’ve talked to – and for good reason.

By collecting from each household or building, haulers and program coordinators can track who is participating and who isn’t. They can more easily reward those who are doing it right, and can target those who are doing it wrong. In Milan, this means a fine for contamination – and for multistory buildings, the fine is shared among tenants – giving them a reason to recycle properly. And, by performing well, neighbourhoods can also compete for prize money for local schools – as a sort of reward.

Let’s compare this with the more traditional bring system – where people put their organics in a roadside container or fixed spot outside their building. There is no control over how well sorted the materials are. Because it’s impossible to know who puts what inside, it means people can contaminate the stream without fear of consequences. For example, the bring system for organics in Barcelona, Spain, experiences a contamination rate between 15 to 30 percent – much higher than Milan. Because of this anonymity, cities lose the ability to target offenders, and also to reward those who do well.

So while kerbside collection systems are relatively new to cities, they are proving to be a great way to ensure success for organics recycling programs.

And this is the case in Milan. The scheme is also known for being quite popular with residents, and this popularity is the result of a very smooth and well-coordinated roll-out strategy.

But how did a city with so many multistory residential buildings manage to roll-out so smoothly?

 

ENZO FAVOINO: We did a customer satisfaction analysis last year, and we came up with very intriguing results…

 

TOS: This is Enzo Faviono – researcher and advisor at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy, coordinator of the Working Group on Composting and Sustainable Waste Management.

 

EF: Seventy nine percent of the population declared support of the system, with a critical area of those showing to be unhappy only totalling seven percent of the population.

 

TOS: Enzo and his team played an instrumental role in helping the city of Milan implement their organics recycling scheme. During our call in the summer, I asked Enzo to tell us all about their strategy, and the critical factors for their success…

 

EF: So we did a couple of campaigns in order to test the contamination rate, and the outcomes were very, very satisfactory because we found more than ninety five percent purity of collected food waste, which puts Milan in line with the outcomes of the border municipalities. So, it’s not a matter of a densely populated area relative to a small village; it’s a matter for the type of the scheme.

 

TOS: I wanted to start with this clip, because it straightaway hones-in on the key element for success. Milan is a big and very dense city. But even with these challenges and with so many high rises, Milan was able to match the border municipalities’ low contamination rates and keep the system running smoothly.

Enzo is saying that size does not matter, but the type of scheme does. So what type of scheme do we need to be successful?

 

EF: If it generates comfortability for the people they will participate, and they will adopt the proper care for the system to be run. We tend to believe that we can’t ask people to provide excess effort. We don’t want it to be made painful for them to participate in separate collection, so it has to be made as user friendly as possible.

 

TOS: This brings us back to that old mantra: Convenience is king. So what was it that Milan did to make their scheme as convenient as possible for residents?

 

EF: First of all, let me mention that Milan was divided into four quarters, each of which totalled a population of three hundred and fifty thousand people. So the scheme was implemented by steps. The first step covering the first quarter of three hundred and fifty thousand people in November 2012, then the second in June 2013, the third quarter in December 2013, and the fourth in June 2014. So in slightly more than one and a half years we could cover one hundred percent of the population.

Whenever we implemented the system in a new area, we gave a starter kit to the households which included the kitchen caddies, to have a good, clean management of the organics in the kitchen, and a starting role of fifty biobags. Fifty biobags may cover the needs for half a year. In Milan we have two collection rounds per week, so we would normally need one hundred bags a year per household. But we gave them only fifty for the first six months, because now the system in Italy is fundamentally supported by the fact that Italy was the first country in Europe to adopt a full ban on polyethylene shopping bags. So now in all the supermarkets you can get a shopping bag that is biodegradable, so you can use it once as a shopping bag, and a second time as a lining for the kitchen caddie during the collection of biowaste.

 

TOS: Enzo gives us a few points here to think about. The polyethylene shopping bag ban in Milan increased the level of convenience for tenants, Enzo tells us. We know from episode two the problems that New York are facing – when people can’t afford or find biobags, they can end up using polyethylene plastic bags instead.

Another point of interest is the delivery of biobags and kitchen caddies before roll-out. This is very convenient for tenants first of all, but both biobags and kitchen caddies are also great tools to tackle the infamous “yuck” factor – which can often make people squeamish about an organics program. Using these tools, Enzo reported that the “yuck” factor was not much of an issue for residents.

 

EF: Yuck was not a main issue for disappointment. That’s basically because the use of the biobags is incredibly helpful in this respect. We also used vented kitchen caddies, because by using the transferability of the biobags and the vents in the kitchen caddies, we tend to lose up to twenty percent of the whole weight of food waste in terms of water vapour. So we tend to have only small amounts, if any, of leakage at the bottom of the biobags. But in any case, it’s fully kept by the biobags, so this keeps the system tidy.

 

TOS: Now, we can’t finish talking about convenience factors in Milan without mentioning one of the biggest contributors. The closing of chutes by the city. In episode one we dived into the problem with chutes, and how they impact programs like San Francisco’s and New York’s…

 

EF: We used to have the chutes in the past. Of course the chutes would kill any effort on separate collection, because the take responsibility away from the households, unfortunately. Now, no new building may have any chutes, and they were fully closed in the old buildings.

 

TOS: Enzo’s words really drive-home how big an impact chutes can have – it can kill an organics collection program. Inadvertently, Milan’s health and safety policy had a positive knock-on effect for their organics system. While San Francisco is currently trying to support building owners in closing their chutes, they face a certain level of resistance from the tenants board . Closing chutes can be a politically challenging, but nevertheless, it has to be said that policies like Milan’s can really help to level the playing field.

 

CHAPTER 3: COLLECTING ORGANICS – FREQUENCY AND WHAT TO COLLECT

 

TOS: Now, Enzo had some interesting things to say about what goes on in the back end as well. How the material is collected can have an impact on convenience for residents. In general, weekly collections of organics are recommended. According to a 2009 Organics Working Group report, published by the Recycling Council of British Colombia, the Canadian city of Ottawa conducted of collection frequencies of organics programs across North America. And it was found that those that have a bi-weekly garbage collection and weekly organics collection have a significantly higher diversion rate than those that collect organics bi-weekly instead. The frequency will of course depend on climate and time of year as well. In some places, like Milan, it’s better to collect food scraps twice a week to keep it convenient for residents. But collections can be expensive, and for this reason it can sometimes be a challenge to collect so frequently. And Enzo gave some great information on how Milan, and many other cities, tackle this issue.

 

EF: We consider what is the operational tradition, which has by now been consolidated in Italy and other European countries, which considers the different nature of the two main types of organics: food waste and garden waste. It’s worth considering collecting them separately, because on the one hand with food waste, we have a material that shows high fermentability and therefore needs to be collected quite frequently, but it’s also very heavy. Therefore it makes little if any sense to use a packer truck. On the other hand, we have got a material which is very bulky, such as garden waste, and therefore we should be using a compactor in order to collect garden waste at the kerb. But it is much less fermentable than food waste, so it doesn’t make much sense to collect them together.

One of the critical operational points for cost optimisation of the system is the use of dedicated trucks to collect food waste. It makes little if any sense to use the compactors to collect food waste. The compactor is one of the traditional trucks, as long as you collect mixed garbage, because mixed garbage tends to have a much lower bulk density than food waste itself. So one of the key issues is to consider a different composition of the fleet of vehicles. And in this respect we know that in many cities in past years, the investment costs were only focused on the purchase of big packer trucks. So, my recommendation would be to please start considering changing the composition of your fleet at the next procuring procedure for your fleet. That’s the most important thing.

 

CHAPTER 4: COMMUNICATION STRATEGY IN MILAN

 

TOS: So we’ve gained a lot of insight into best practices for roll-out from Milan. But we’re not finished yet.

The next important part of the roll-out strategy is communication of the program.

People need to be prepared for the changes to come. They need to understand why the changes are happening, when they will come into force, and how exactly the scheme will run.

In Milan, it’s thought that communication works best roughly two months in advance – just enough time for tenants to get familiar with it.

They began their campaign with street advertising, mailing brochures, launching a website and a free app as well – both of which allowed people to learn more and ask questions about the scheme.

Door-to-door delivery of the starter kits began 10 weeks before roll-out. This delivery process gave the outreach team an excellent chance to reach residents one-on-one to discuss the changes in person, addressing any concerns straight away. In a multistory building, where it’s often hard to reach people, this is a really effective strategy.

And it worked – roll-out was quite smooth and the residents behaved correctly straight away. This is one of the most important points to take away from the Milan study – if implemented correctly, you can achieve high participation rates right from the beginning. The trick, it seems, is to maintain that high rate.

Now, I know we played this in episode two, but for the final part of this case study, I’d like to take a listen once more to Enzo emphasising this point because it’s so important:

 

EF: One thing I would like to stress is that it may seem a paradox, but normally we tend to have the best results the very first week we start the system. You know, it’s what we call the “shocking effect”: we literally flood them with information and awareness campaigns. So the very first week we have always got the best results, which goes against the so-called received wisdom, because normally they tell us it will take ages to have people educated. No! They because right away.

Then, we have to keep the good level of results, because if you don’t provide the feedback to people telling them the way it is working, what the critical issues are, how to improve, and so on, then there will be some relaxation from the commitment. But if they get targeted every so often with messages saying “Hey you’re doing well, and we have saved such an amount of money” and so on and so forth, this helps keep the good levels both from the quantitative and qualitative angle.

 

CONCLUSION

 

TOS: Throughout this series we’ve often defined multistory buildings as the final frontier of organics recycling. But Milan demonstrates that this is not always the case.

In Milan, the program ran smoothly right from the beginning.  “People behave right away”.

Why do they behave right away, when in other cases it’s not so easy?

Perhaps it’s because it was a city-wide roll-out – backed by a system of fines and rewards to encourage people to comply. In the piloting stage it’s much more difficult because people aren’t compelled to behave.

And as we’ve seen, both San Francisco and Seattle are finding it much easier to get people to comply thanks to their government’s mandatory policies.

But we also cannot forget the impact that both the chute ban and the polyethylene plastic bag ban had in Milan. This made participation more convenient and helped reduce contamination in the stream.

But is that all there is to it? Is there not also a cultural component to this question? Perhaps programs in America are considered harder to enact compared to somewhere like Milan because where the culture and history is quite different. It has been said that the mood was right for citizens in Milan to change, since the garbage crisis of the 90s – when trash was piled on the streets – was still in people’s memory.

These are interesting questions we’re asking ourselves right now. We’re compiling all these thoughts and we may come back with a follow-up episode in the future.

8
July
2015

Winning the Gold Medal: A Recycling Vision for the Olympic Games

TOS36_Olympics_MainImage

EPISODE SUMMARY

Where people gather, there will be waste. An event the size of the Olympic Games generates about four-hundred kilograms of waste per minute – and half of that is organic. This week, we travel to Rio De Janeiro and speak with the Head of Cleaning and Waste at the 2016 Olympic Games about their sustainability plans, and take a retrospective look at London 2012 – the very first Olympics to include a Zero Waste to landfill program – in order to ask:  just what does a sustainable, zero waste Olympics look like? And is it even possible? What are the lessons learned from London 2012, and what challenges do Rio face as they prepare for hosting the games next year?

Interview guests: Edison Sanromã, Head of Cleaning & Waste, Rio 2016 and Shaun McCarthy (OBE), Former Chair of the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012.

In part two of the show, we bring you highlights from the recent Save Our Soils event in Malmö, Sweden, that gathered international experts in soil science to share with us their knowledge and discuss today’s challenges to soil health. You can find video briefings and material from this event on our Events Page.


MADE POSSIBLE BY BIOBIN®

BiobiN® is a mobile, on-site organic/wet material management solution that starts the composting process and effectively manages odour from putrescible waste. BiobiN® can be used in a variety of outlets, including food manufacturing, restaurants, shopping centres, supermarkets…it’s endless. Wherever organic or wet materials are generated, BiobiN® is THE solution. For more, visit their website.

 

EPISODE LINKS

London 2012 Learning Legacy website.

Commission for a Sustainable London 2012 website.

Rio 2016 Sustainability website.

 

FEATURED EVENT

Save Our Soils. May 20th, 2015. Malmö, Sweden. Organised by Swedish International Agriculture Network Initiative (SIANI).

As world population grows and food production demand rises, it is of increasing importance to keep soils healthy, productive and capable of sequestering carbon. So how do we protect global soils from eroding? How do we keep them healthy? This seminar seeks to address these and other soil related questions by creating a space for discussion between scientists and practitioners, who battle with soil degradation every day.

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

 

Photo by Alexander Kachkaev. Some rights reserved.

Transcript coming soon.

2
July
2015

The Final Frontier: Challenges For Organics Recycling in Multistory Residential Buildings, Part 2

TOS_35_Main

EPISODE SUMMARY

Multistory buildings are often considered the final frontier of organics recycling – and it’s easy to see why. Densely populated with little space, there are a number of challenges to tackle when setting up a program. In episode two, we pick off where we left off in episode one and continue to explore these challenges, and the factors that will impact your program. With guests from cities around the world, we discuss tenant participation, reaching out to the different demographics, the differences between voluntary and mandatory programs, and bin lining strategies.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4 

 

MADE POSSIBLE BY ecovio® FROM BASF

ecovio® is a high-quality and versatile bioplastic of BASF. It is certified compostable and contains biobased contentThe main areas of use are plastic films such as organic waste bags, dual-use bags or agricultural films. Furthermore, compostable packaging solutions such as paper-coating and injection molding products can be produced with ecovio®. To find more information, visit their website.

AND ECOSAFE® ZERO WASTE

EcoSafe® Zero Waste designs and implements cradle to cradle solutions for source separation of organics and recyclables with a focus on diverting organic waste from landfill to commercial compost facilities. We provide our customers with the products and services they need in order to build SUSTAINABLE, SOURCE SEPARATION and DIVERSION programs designed to achieve ZERO WASTE in communities, institutions, businesses, events and at home and in public. For more, visit their website.

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

Transcript:

CHAPTER 5: COMMITMENT FROM TENANTS

 

THE ORGANIC STREAM: As I said in the first episode, successful organics recycling is all about building relationships. Once you have established a relationship with the building manager or owner, the focus is going to be on getting the tenants on board and participating.

And this is not always easy.

Introducing an organics recycling program anywhere requires a commitment of time and resources into education, face-to-face engagement, tailoring your outreach strategies to specific demographics…and sustaining relationships.

In general: engagement strategies will consist of targeted outreach efforts well in advance of the program roll-out. Then, after roll-out, the focus is on increasing participation with continuous on-site education, gathering feedback, reworking flyers and messaging – and so on.

With multistory buildings, there are a few extra challenges you can face in terms of tenant engagement.

Firstly, the turnover of tenants – which can be quite high depending on the property – will mean you need to ensure that every new person moving into the building is educated and aware of the program. This is often taken on by the building managers.

As well as the transient nature of the populations, there is sometimes a lack of a community feeling in a multistory building – which can lead to lack of interest in attending building meetings, for example, or just a lack of interest in how well the building is performing. As I said many times in the first episode, every building is different and your outreach strategies will have to be tailored to meet the building’s unique challenges – which includes getting tenants invested in the program.

We won’t be delving too deep into the engagement and education strategies here, because we’re focusing heavily on this in our upcoming case-study episode. But it’s important to get an overview of kind of work it involves. And for this I want to take us back to New York.

Last episode, we heard from Jessica Schreiber of the DSNY about their voluntary organics recycling pilot program. When we spoke about getting tenants involved and engaged, Jessica summed up the basic strategy they employ.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: Whenever you’re working with the public you should know your audience. So, we do a lot of work with community boards, because they’re a good window into what’s important in that community and how they’re accessing information.  So sometimes we start at the community board level and then work down. We do try to have the whole range of ways for people to become engaged. So, we always have flyers and paper brochures, we always have the website; we’ve launched social media, so we have Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – hopefully to reach everybody. It’s a challenge: eight million people who are all very different. So it’s always a challenge to try and reach everybody.

 

TOS: So as you can hear, New York, like many other cities I’ve talked to, are using a lot of different avenues to reach the tenants – including flyers, website, and social media. But key to every strategy, it seems, is face-to-face communication.

This brings me back to an episode we did last year with director of the Recycling Unit of the DSNY’s Bureau of Waste Prevention, Bridget Anderson.

At the time, I quizzed Bridget about their outreach campaigns, and she stressed the importance of taking a hands-on approach.

 

BRIDGET ANDERSON: Once an area becomes a pilot area where people are receiving the program itself, the on the ground outreach has been extremely useful. Not everybody reads the mailers: if you receive a mailing from the city, it might end up directly in your recycling bin – hopefully your recycling bin! And so, having people out there on the ground during bin deliveries to really make sure people understand the program is important. The elected officials and community boards have also often hosted meetings where people can come and ask questions.

During those periods, we’ve encountered people who are just so excited about the program, and we’ve also encountered people who say, “this really isn’t for me”. So we really try to change hearts and minds, and having people on the ground, and face-to-face communication, has been critical to getting people to even try the program.

 

TOS: Now, this is primarily focused on engaging tenants at the beginning. But what about keeping up the level of commitment after program roll out?

I put this question to Enzo Favoino when I called him a couple of weeks ago, looking for insights into Milan’s multistory strategies. Enzo is a researcher and advisor at the Scuola Agraria del Parco di Monza in Italy and the scientific coordinator of Zero Waste Europe and we’ll be hearing more from him on Milan’s success in the next episode – but I wanted to include his answer to my question here because what he had to say was very interesting…

 

ENZO FAVOINO: One thing I would like to stress is that it may seem a paradox, but normally we tend to have the best results the very first week we start the system, both from the quantitative and qualitative angles. It’s what we call the “shocking” effect: we literally flood them with information and awareness campaigns. So the very first week we always have the best results, which goes against the so-called received wisdom, because normally they tell us, “No, it will take ages to have people educated”. No! They behave right away. Then, we have to keep the good level of results, because if you don’t provide the feedback to people telling them the way it is working, what are the critical issues, how to improve, and so on, then there will be some relaxation from the commitment. Because maybe they think the local authorities aren’t focused so much on the system, and then they wonder why they should care about it either. But if they get targeted every so often with messages saying, “Hey, you’re doing well, we have saved such an amount of money”, and so on and so forth, this helps keep up the good levels both from the quantitative and qualitative angles.

 

TOS: This is an important point that Enzo brings up. Without consistent communication right from the beginning, it may seem to tenants that the program is not much of a priority to the city, and people will start putting it lower on their priority list as well.

 

CHAPTER 6: MULTISTORY BUILDING DEMOGRAPHICS

 

TOS: Populations in high-density urban areas are extremely diverse. People from different countries, backgrounds, family situations, cultures and life experiences all make the city their home. And multistory residential buildings encapsulate this aspect of city life quite well.

Reaching out to tenants will require an understanding of the demographics in each building you work with. And from speaking to many program managers, it seems that the demographics that gain the most focus are language and ethnicity, and to a certain extent, age as well.

 

JASON SANDERS: We’re here today in Los Angeles, California, in the downtown region off of four hundred South Main street…

 

TOS: At a busy café just outside the Old Bank District Building sunny in Los Angeles, we spent time with Jason Sanders – national Zero Waste manager for EcoSafe Zero Waste who helped implement the organics recycling pilot program in the building – an eight floor multistory building with all but the first floor being residential.

 

JS: So there’re seventy total units at this building, and each floor has a refuse room that has a compost bin inside, and then a chute for their landfill and recyclables as well.

 

TOS: We spent the afternoon speaking to both him and Jessica Aldridge of waste hauler Athens Services about their experiences in working together to roll out and tracking the performance of their organics collection pilot program in LA. We also discussed the challenges they faced rolling out the program – and here, Jason shared with us their experiences in tailoring their program to the different demographics.

 

JS: One of the challenges that we’ve seen with setting up these multifamily food scrap programs is adopting the program to meet the specific building’s demographic needs. We have language barriers so we always have to adapt our education and outreach materials to work with that particular language, whether that’s Mandarin or Spanish or English. We have found that certain demographics, such as a more progressive and environmentally focused age group – from your Millennials to Generation X – adopt these programs more rapidly, than some of your older demographics. So it’s always a challenge trying to adapt the program to meet the specific building’s demographics. Here at this Old Bank District Building, we actually have a very progressive demographic that easily adopted the program. So we have demographics that really understand the full cycle of the organics here, where others might not have that knowledge.

 

TOS: Understanding the full cycle of organics.

This is something I want to focus on for a moment because it proves just how important it is to highlight the connection between the organics we throw in the bin, soil health, and the food we produce.

Jason suggests that it is the younger, more progressive demographics that have a ready understanding of this cycle, which makes implementing a program much easier. And showing tenants the connection between our food waste and the soil can be a great strategy for education or promotion of the program.

 

JS: We brought some of the finished compost that this material turns into, and we showed the residents the finished compost. So we educated them on what their food scraps turns into, which I believe was a really key component because a lot of the people that live in cities don’t quite understand that their food scraps actually turns into good-looking soil amendment. So that then clicked in their heads and of why it was important for them to separate their food scraps.

 

TOS: Environmentally aware tenants can be a great asset for a program. Even though this can often be a small demographic within a building – it only takes a few to make a difference. This is something I learned from Jessica Schreiber, when I asked her how many people were environmentally aware in the buildings she works with.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: From the tenant meetings that I’ve attended, I would say there was maybe ten to twenty percent who would ask questions like that, and then the other eight to ninety percent are much more concerned about whether it’s convenient, do they have to do it, and is it going to smell or bring rodents. So there’s that small group that is very interested in where this goes and why we’re doing it, if it stays local and how it’s composted. And I think because those people exist and ask those questions, it’s a greater educational moment for the whole building. Because everyone has those logistic questions and convenience questions, and then it’s that one step further – the “why” question – that I think is where it really becomes internalised.

 

TOS: But what about the main demographics to factor in your program? How do cities work with the different languages and ethnicities to reach everyone equally?

A few weeks back, I contacted Marcia Rutan to speak about the very recent mandatory composting program in Seattle, USA, and her work with education and outreach in the multistory residential buildings there.

 

MARCIA RUTAN: My name is Marcia Rutan and I work with Seattle Public Utilities in Seattle, Washington. And I work on multi-family food waste and recycling programs. My official title is Community Recycling Program Manager, and I’ve been here eight years this June.

 

TOS: Now, Seattle has a diverse population of six hundred and sixty thousand and over five thousand apartment buildings, and Marcia shared with me some of their valuable experience in working with the various demographics in the city.

 

MR: So we provide these two basic flyers for this program – Where Does It Go and the Food Waste flyer – in eighteen different languages. Now, these have all been translated, but the next step that we’re learning more about in the last year or so is something called Trans-creation. And that is something where the materials are actually made culturally relevant, as well as the wording being correctly translated, so it doesn’t mean something odd in the other language. So that will be the next step – going through these different languages and making them as pertinent and relevant as possible to the folks who are using them.

Also, when I go out to do presentations, I always ask if there are people speaking other languages who will be there, and we always bring interpreters if needed. We are also expanding our engagement of community liaisons, either through community-based organisations or individuals who are good educators: people who look like the people in that particular community.

 

TOS: And do you focus on reaching out to any other demographics? I’ve heard age mentioned as well as an important demographic for example…

 

MR: Sure. Yes, we do have some focus on that, thought I would say not as much as on the ethnic diversity. Now for instance, I am an older person at this point, and I go out to a lot of the senior properties, and they really like that because I’m closer to them in age. They can relate to me and I can say, “I’m going to be retiring soon, and I know you’re on a limited budget, but stillwe want to consider buying recycled products because that’s what keeps recycling going”…so that sort of thing. They can related to me, so I cover the older group in a lot of ways. And we also go to a lot of different festivals and fairs, and so we really make an effort to reach a diversity of folks through those festivals – whether it’s a university district street fair that was just this last weekend, which was very much fosuced on younger people. So that’s another aspect. We do have Twitter, we do have Facebook. And that’s not just for the younger people: we know that a lot of people of ethnic diversity are on their smartphones, and that that’s a primary computer for them. So, it’s just a great way to reach a lot of folks.

 

TOS: So as you can hear, there are a lot of different ways to reach out and a lot to factor in. Again, you have to be prepared to invest a substantial amount time and resources into outreach if you are to be successful. And it’s a long-term thing – engaging the tenants is a never-ending process.

And having someone from within a specific community on your outreach team can be especially important for connecting to that community.

 

CHAPTER 7: NATURE OF ORGANICS PROGRAM – VOLUNTARY OR MANDATORY

 

TOS: Throughout this special edition, we’ve been discussing both mandatory and voluntary programs, and we touched on a few of the differences between them in episode one – particularly in relation to getting building managers on-board.

The nature of your program will have an impact on the people you’re trying to engage and on your approach, as we’ve seen.

With voluntary programs, it’s all about winning people’s hearts and minds as there is no mandate to put fire under people’s feet. While this may mean you have less buildings participating, I learned from Jessica Schreiber in New York that working with interested buildings only has some unique benefits.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: I think the benefit of voluntary is that we can work with buildings that we have relationships with, buildings who are eager and want to do this. So we may get less material with the voluntary group, because it’s not mandated, but because they’re very engaged and are really supportive, we’re hoping that material is cleaner than it would be had we just said everybody needs to do this. So at this point we’re sort of hoping for more clean material, and a very voluntary and very feel-good program, versus a mandatory where maybe we would get more tonnage but it might not be as high of quality.

 

TOS: Now, Jessica mentions the feel-good aspect of the program, and this made me wonder just how important that feel-good factor is for success. So I asked her – how important is the popularity of the program, and how much does it depend on creating a positive experience for buildings and tenants?

 

JS: I think the popularity is a key part of it. One is that we’re able to show that there’s interest. So, we’re hoping to add a fourth truck to Manhattan this summer and that’s just based off the fact that we’ve had so many inquiries, and we know that we should be able to create a full route just from the inquiries that we have. So the popularity of the program is a huge part of it. And the other half of that is that we want to make sure the service consistent, that the education up-front is good, and that we really take a special interest in these buildings so they feel supported. Because all that makes them more likely to tell the next building, or their friend who’s also a super, “I have this program, it’s easier than it looks. It’s really simple and you should do it”. So, we’re hoping the city support on our end – the work that we’re doing to bring the buildings on board – is part of it, and that the buildings spread word and that popularity grows.

 

TOS: Mandatory programs, in contrast, can be a lot more challenging, where the aim is to reach full compliance and at the same time keep the contamination rate as low as possible. This means increasing education and outreach efforts, dealing with difficult buildings and handing out fines – as we heard from Alexa Keitly in the last episode.

This can be daunting, and it’s generally considered best practice to work in steps: Beginning as a voluntary program, for example, and transitioning to mandatory once the system is rolling and the kinks have been ironed out. This can take many years.

In Seattle, they took this step-by-step approach – first making it mandatory to provide organic waste carts in apartment buildings in 2011 before moving to the composting mandate that is in place from this year. This was a very effective tactic, as Marcia Rutan explained to me.

 

MARCIA RUTAN: There was a lot of work already that went into building the foundation for this. Basically, in Setpember of 2011, Seattle city council made it mandatory that all multi-family properties would have food waste carts. So there was somebody I hired and who has worked with me for a number of years, who was doing technical outreach while I was handling the educational outreach and phone trouble-shooting. So we definitely got a certain flood of inquireies about this, and starting in 2009, really, we were working very hard to get all of the properties up and going with the food waste carts. And by December 2011, a few months after that law went into effect, we basically knew we were going to roll-out carts to anybody who was left over out of the five-thousand who hadn’t signed-up. And in fact there were only a few hundred left. So we really worked hard to get that subscription base established.

Now, just because a property had a cart, did not mean they were using it. There were definitely instances where they stashed it in the closet in a store room and they didn’t want to deal with it. They just thought, “I’ll just pay my monthly subscription and I’m not going to deal with the program”. So the next stage has been participation – and we’ve done a lot of work with on-site education and technical assistance to build the participation. And we could tell who wasn’t participating, because we would get reports from the drivers who knew which properties consistently didn’t have carts out or where there were carts missing continually. So we would get those reports and target those properties – especially the large ones, because there was more impact there.

So we definitely had built up some level of participation. And then this next stage has really caught the attention of a number of properties who are very concerned about the fine and want to either get their service going, or improve it substantially so they don’t get the fine.

 

TOS: So here you get a sense not only of the differences in challenges and benefits between the programs, but how much time it can take to build up participation and prepare for mandatory organics collection. As we heard from Marcia, Seattle have been working since 2009 on introducing collection in multistory buildings and this definitely helped smooth the transition.

Since there are so many facets involved in setting up programs in multistory buildings, this is no surprise. No matter the nature of the program, it’s important to be patient and keep a long-term perspective in mind.

 

CHAPTER 8: BIN LINING STRATEGIES & COMPOSTABLE PLASTICS

 

TOS: We’ve nearly come to the end of the episode and there is one last topic to discuss.

At all stages of the organics recycling process, the organic stream needs to be kept as clean as possible. Keeping contamination low is a constant battle, and how the organics are transported from household bins to recycling containers and then to the collection trucks can have a great impact.

What we’re talking about here is lining strategies.

With lining strategies we’re back in the same familiar situation of trying to balance tenant and building manager convenience with practicality for program managers. On one hand, tenants (and building staff as well) will be more comfortable using something like plastic bags for collecting food waste, and on the other, composting facilities want as clean a stream as possible so ideally it would be best to have no bin linings whatsoever.

So how can we balance these two sides?

Well, first of all, there is a general lining hierarchy that many cities adhere to – giving people a list of options for carrying their food waste from best to worst.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: So we give people a lining hierarchy. Always our first choice is no lining, and you can just rinse the bin out. The second choice would be paper – either lining it with a paper bag or newspaper, because that’s going to break down with the food. Third choice would be compostable bags, and last choice – which we really don’t want, but are willing to accept – is clear plastic bags.

 

TOS: Now, in terms of having no bin lining at all – this can be a bit too much for both tenants and building managers alike and increase the yuck factor, as they will be faced with having to clean out bins regularly – something Marcia Rutan pointed out to me.

 

MARCIA RUTAN: We did a test project in about 2007-2008, to test how this would work or can it even work in multi-family properties, and one of the results of that project was that the property managers really want a compostable liner in the cart. It was not quite a deal-breaker, but it was close – like a “give us that liner or else”, kind of feeling. So that’s been one thing that has helped with the “ick” factor.

 

TOS: Now, Jessica mentioned that New York accepts, as a last resort, polyethylene plastic bags for those who would not participate otherwise.

While this is not an ideal situation, and contributes to higher contamination levels, it does highlight the fact that many people are so used to the practicality and cleanliness of using plastic – particularly for wet materials like organics – that they may shy away from participating without having that level of comfort.

This is where compostable plastic bags can sometimes be a great benefit.

 

MARCIA RUTAN: We have just done a test project with some compostable bag dispensers. This is something that properties can hang up right near the compost cart, and then residents can pull out a little green approved-compostable bag, take it back up to their apartment home and use it, and bring it back down and take another bag. And that also reduces odours, and keeps the flies down. I was quite resistant to these bags at first, because it just seemed like one more thing to have to buy and use, and was not in-line with my waste prevention ethic. But I have become quite sold on them for at least certain situations. I think they definitely work, and where people can afford these dispensers I think it makes a lot of sense.

 

TOS: While they can be a great solution – there are some challenges to be aware of. Not all compostable bags are alike – some composting facilities may not be able to give them the time needed for them to break down and others may not accept compostable plastics at all. So finding a facility that will accept the bags being used will be essential.

And New York has had extra challenges in terms of compostable plastic bags – availability. Here’s DSNY’s Bridget Anderson from last year once again, sharing their experiences.

 

BRIDGET ANDERSON: The availability of those compostable bags has been a problem. It’s taken us a while to get the bags into retail stores – there are also online outlets for the bags. The price of the bags has been a problem; some people say the bags are to expensive and they won’t use them, or that they would participate in the program if they could use the bags, but the bags are too expensive – that’s an example of something that’s been a challenge…Our hope is that eventually the compostable bags will maybe become cheaper and be more available, and then we can switch out the regular plastic bags.

 

TOS: Lining strategy will have a big impact on your program’s success – and there are pros and cons to each of the possible solutions you can choose. Availability, affordability, convenience and contamination are key elements to pay attention to, as well as giving people a range of options to suit their situation.

EPISODE END

 

TOS: And here we leave the topic of challenges and factors to take into account when setting up a program.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here on the show in this episode – hopefully it’s helped you get a solid understanding of the main factors and challenges faced with implementing an organics program in multistory buildings. And hopefully we’ve helped answer at least some of your questions too.  But if not, never fear, because we are only getting started.

Stay tuned for the next episode, where we invite more program managers and recycling specialists to discuss case studies and explore the most successful strategies for the all the issues we’ve addressed so far.

 

29
May
2015

The Final Frontier: Challenges For Organics Recycling in Multistory Residential Buildings

TOS_34_Proper

EPISODE SUMMARY

In urban areas all around the world, we are stretching towards the sky – to save space on the ground, and make room for our growing populations. In this Multistory Special, we explore the major challenges and factors we need to pay attention to when planning an organics program in a multistory residential building, and we invite guests from cities around the world who are leading the way with their programs to share their experiences. This week, we’re taking a look at the main challenges we face today and the major factors we need to address when we start recycling organics in any type of multi-story building. This will lay the foundation for the episodes to come.

Links to other episodes in the Series:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4 

 

 

MADE POSSIBLE BY ecovio® FROM BASF

ecovio® is a high-quality and versatile bioplastic of BASF. It is certified compostable and contains biobased contentThe main areas of use are plastic films such as organic waste bags, dual-use bags or agricultural films. Furthermore, compostable packaging solutions such as paper-coating and injection molding products can be produced with ecovio®. To find more information, visit their website.

AND ECOSAFE® ZERO WASTE

EcoSafe® Zero Waste designs and implements cradle to cradle solutions for source separation of organics and recyclables with a focus on diverting organic waste from landfill to commercial compost facilities. We provide our customers with the products and services they need in order to build SUSTAINABLE, SOURCE SEPARATION and DIVERSION programs designed to achieve ZERO WASTE in communities, institutions, businesses, events and at home and in public. For more, visit their website.

 

EPISODE SLIDESHOW

 

RESOURCES:

Sorting It Out: The State of Multifamily Recycling in Washington State. Washington State Recycling Association. July 3, 2014.

Multifamily Recycling: Case Studies on Innovative Practices from around the World. Washington State Recycling Association. June 20, 2013.

Best Practices for Multi-Family Food Scraps Collection. Recycling Council of British Columbia. February 2011.

New York City Organics Collection Pilot Program Program Report, through March 2014. New York City Department of Sanitation. 2014. (Page 20).

 

TRANSCRIPT

 

CHAPTER 1: BUILDING TYPES & CATEGORIES

 

THE ORGANIC STREAM: There is no unified classification of multi-story buildings. Usually they are categorised in terms of height. A typical description would be low-rise, mid-rise and high-rise buildings.

Low rise buildings have very few floors. Again, there are no unified rules here, but they usually are no more than 3 stories high. These are quite easy to work with and usually have a centralised collection point.

Mid-rise would generally be anything above 3 floors but below 8 floors. And high rises, then, are anything above 8 floors. These are typically the buildings we’re talking about in this episode – as they are the most challenging of the three categories.

It might also be useful to categorise the buildings by the type of waste and recycling facilities they have – since this will have a big bearing on how you approach the building. Buildings usually have either a chute system (single or multi chute), waste rooms on every floor, or a single collection area on the ground floor, garage, or in the courtyard.

No matter how you categorise them – it’s important to remember that each individual building will have its own challenges and advantages. For this reason, it could be useful to categorise them in terms of level of difficulty. This can take into account a range of issues that will effect your program like for example – whether there’s high turnover of tenants…. a lack of space or perhaps ventilation issues in the building…or if the building manager uninterested.

 

CHAPTER 2: LOGISTICS: WASTE ROOMS, CHUTES

 

TOS: So…where exactly are you going to put your bins, and how will the hauler access them? Are you working in a building with limited space and maybe ventilation issues? Is there a chute system in the building? Do you want to use it for organics?

These are some of the key logistical question you’ll ask yourself in the beginning. And your decisions and how you implement them will have a great impact on success.

 

(Introduction to Linda Corso)

 

TOS: This is Linda Corso, manager of Cathedral Hill Plaza on 1333 Gough Street, San Francisco.

We took a trip to California last month to get a first-person view of the organics recycling program in the state and some of the buildings involved that have been successful. And we met with Linda, who was kind enough to show us around and tell us how the system works in her building. Cathedral Hill Plaza was built in the 1960s, so it’s an older building – it has 169 units, with 14 stories altogether. And Linda began a composting program at the building before it was even mandatory.

 

LINDA CORSO: When I first read about it in the paper that Recology was starting composting, I started looking into it and talked to them about getting composting bins, which we initially put in the garage, and then just sent a memo to our tenants that composting was available. It didn’t work so well!

 

TOS: Linda told us that nobody wanted to carry their icky compost bags all the way down to the garage when it was easier just to keep dumping it in the trash bin on their floor.

 

LINDA CORSO: Then I contacted SF Environment and they came out, walked through with me, got the slim-jim bins for both recycling and composting for our trash rooms – we have trash rooms on every floor, which makes it easier for the tenants. And they also came with Recology and set up in our lobby and brought bins and bags for tenants, and had an education thing one evening. They gave people a comfort level that there weren’t going to be bugs crawling all over – we empty the bins in the hallways every day. And it really took off.

 

TOS: So in terms of logistics….to make the program work, bins were placed where tenants were already going to leave their waste. Instead of having them in the basement where they were less convenient.

Linda showed us the waste rooms and they were spacious, thanks to the slim bins – and clean – thanks to the waste being collected every day. All in all, this is an excellent set-up. And after talking to Linda, here was me thinking that this system was probably the most ideal for buildings with waste rooms.

But actually the truth is that using waste rooms in this way is not all that common or straight forward.

 

(Trying to reach Alexa Keilty and getting voicemail).

 

TOS: This is me trying to reach Alexa Keilty zero waste specialist at the department of Environment in San Francisco, who designed and implemented the multistory building food scrap collection & composting program. San Francisco has 8500 multistory buildings they work with, and their composting and recycling mandate has been in place since 2009. Just how has San Francisco navigated the waste room situation – and what do they do when a system like Linda’s doesn’t work?

 

ALEXA KEILTY: So when we’re setting up a building, we look at if there’s an opportunity to collect on each floor; and if they have a trash room we look at that and we do provide bins at no cost for apartment buildings to collect on each floor – as long as they have maintenance staff in the building willing to collect it. And I have set up composting on each floor in buildings and it doesn’t always work if you don’t have proper ventilation and if you don’t have maintenance staff on Saturday and Sunday – because those typically are the days that people take their trash out, on the weekends. And you don’t want to have fish that someone cooked the night before in a non-vented trash room for fourty-eight hours, because that’s going to create a real problem. And typically for the residents who live in close vicinity to the trash room – they’re the ones who complain first – so it doesn’t always work.

So when we’re setting up programs, I think that’s the main thing we look at: how do we equal the playing field? Most of the time, because of space constraints and we’re dealing with an older building stock, we’re talking about requesting the tenants to walk it down into basement areas to dispose of their recycling and composting, and then the trash chute is still there.

 

TOS: Trash chutes. Here we come to one of the biggest challenges for programs in multistory buildings.

I have here a 2011 report by the Recycling Council of British Colombia, that says that in Toronto city, high-rise buildings with garbage chutes had significantly lower levels of participation and higher levels of contamination than buildings without chutes. And this seems to confirm what I’ve been hearing from our guests. Chutes are convenient, and easy to use. So for a mandatory program like San Francisco, where there is pressure to increase participation – what can we do about waste chutes?

So it’s all about levelling the playing field – and here Alexa told me about a pretty interesting strategy they’re trying out to do just that…

 

ALEXA KEILTY: On every floor within a high rise building there’ll be a chute where people can just throw their trash, and it’s prioritising trash over all the other streams. So something to keep in mind is how can we stop prioritising trash, and how do we design and set up buildings from the get-go – and we have new ordinances requiring new construction to keep this in mind, but – when we’re talking about older buildings, how do we level the playing field?

And we also encourage property managers to close their chutes and force the tenants to walk everything down into the basement area. They usually love that idea, because chutes typically can attract pests and all it takes is somebody to put one pizza box down there and then you have a jammed chute. So, they love to close chutes, but the problem is that the tenants board in San Francisco is very strong, and some tenants may consider this a reduction in services – and if they see it as a reduction in services, then they can apply to the rent board for a rent reduction. So because of that, property managers are very fearful, they don’t want to deal with lawsuits…it’s just a very tenuous situation for them.

 

TOS: So that’s San Francisco’s waste chute strategy. But what about New York?

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: I’m Jessica Schreiber, I work at the Department of Sanitation and the Bureau of Recycling and Sustainability. I oversee all apartment programs, so any recycling programs that have to do with high rise buildings fall under my group.

 

TOS: So New York’s organics recycling program is a voluntary program that has been up and running since 2013 and has been spreading through the City every since – with 148 high rise buildings involved in the program.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: Chutes are definitely our biggest issue when working with buildings – particularly some of the newer buildings in the city that have a chute room on every floor and residents are very used to just bringing everything to the chute room and separating it there. By far what we think is the best option for organics is a single collection point, usually it’s in the basement. We want everything brought one spot. For residents who aren’t used to having to go to the basement for anything, bringing a separate food stream to the basement is daunting. So we have a lot of conversations about chutes with the building management.

There are pros – if we were to make the chutes just for organics, and trash for the (hopefully) non-smelly items that can be separated on the side with the recyclables, that’s one option. There are not a lot of buildings in the city that have chosen to do that. Other cities, though, have reported that that option tends to create more of a smell and more of a maintenance issue, because this is loose food now going down the chute and getting stuck, and not always being bagged correctly. So we try to avoid chutes when we can and do a single collection area where possible. Usually that’s in the basement. There are buildings where they’ve tasked the super with collecting food scraps from a bin on each floor in the chute room – so where they have that sort of building help, that’s also possible.

 

TOS: So here we see more problems… It seems that avoiding chutes and focusing on a central collection point is a common strategy.

And this brought me on to talk about one of the first participants of their program – the Morningside Heights Housing Corporation. Morningside Heights is an impressive residential cooperative apartment complex comprised of 6 high-rise buildings in the borough of Manhattan – close to Columbia University. The buildings are each 21 stories high, with a total of 980 apartments. How they decided to introduce organics collection here I think is worth bringing up. They decided on a simple approach at the beginning – using a centralised system not for each building – but for the complex itself.

This had some unique benefits – not just in terms of reducing maintenance costs and equipment costs – which led to the program’s success in the building.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: Morningside Heights started as a drop-off point for the whole complex. So they have multiple buildings, and instead of every building having its own collection spot in the basement, there was a drop-off point for the whole complex. The benefit of that is that it’s convenient for the building staff, it’s convenient for us to collect becayse we’re just taking it right from that point to the curb and it’s all centralised. The other benefit of that is that when it’s a drop-off point, it makes it very easy to educate tenants about how to participate. It’s a very clear message, and it’s also a point of education, so people walking buy who aren’t aware that this is an option will see it and become more engage.

So I think it’s supportive of buildings who want to get their feet wet before they jump all the way in, and it’s also a good way to test it out. And you can see that when the bins are closed, they don’t smell because you’re getting service three times a week, so it doesn’t sit long enough to become a problem, and these solid plastic bins are not going to attract rodents. So it’s the best way to ease a building in and as residents become more used to bringing this stuff to this drop-off point, they’re going to actually want it to be in their basement because that’s even more convenient – like an added level of convenience to have it inside their own building, versus somewhere else in the complex.

 

TOS: So centralised systems have a lot of benefits, especially if you can overcome the tricky chute issue. And just like the waste rooms, you’ll have to make sure the area is convenient, has adequate space, is well lit and clean. And remember – no matter what system you chose, you need to factor in convenient access for the hauler as well.

 

LOGISTICS ROUND-UP

 

Now, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground in terms of logistics. Keeping in mind space constraints, how waste will be collected in the building and by the hauler, costs – so weather you can afford maintenance staff or the extra bins, convenience for tenants, odours and pests, and the problems with chutes.

In every aspect there’s a balance to be struck between convenience for the tenants, and practicality. And it can be tricky to do.

What really struck me, and what my guests have all pointed out, is that no two buildings are alike. – Like snowflakes, or like people, they have their own characteristics, challenges and personalities. And the strategy you employ will have to be completely tailored to each building’s needs.

 

CHAPTER 3: NEW BUILDINGS AND THE PROBLEM WITH OLDER BUILDINGS

 

TOS: In any given urban area, the age of the multistory buildings will factor into your organics recycling program.

What are the issues with older buildings? Well mainly that most of them have single-chute systems with tiny waste rooms – or no waste rooms at all. Putting composting on a level playing field in this situation is very hard.

Retrofitting is one solution – but an expensive one. San Francisco is encouraging people to close their chutes altogether – but there are some issues here too.

So let’s look at the bigger steps we can take. The City of Milan in Italy, for example, where the majority of people live in apartment buildings, decided to close all chutes in the city in order to level the playing field. And it’s working – chutes are closed and all organics are collected in waste rooms or central locations. We’ll get deeper into this during our Milan case study in a later episode.

Not all cities can take this approach. But they can make an impact in new buildings by requiring them to have adequate recycling facilities. Often, buildings are allowed to choose between a number of systems.

For example – Alexa mentioned the new building code in San Francisco that says all new construction has to have recycling, composting and trash on an equal playing field. So new buildings, she told me, often have decent sized waste rooms on every floor, which as a fan of waste room systems I think is great. New chute systems are an option as well – either with multiple chutes for each stream, or just one for organics. We already heard from Jessica about the possible issues with these.

Another interesting option that Alexa told me about are diverter systems for chutes – how do they hold up?

 

ALEXA KEILTY: So they’re now putting in diverter systems. Basically, it’s one chute with a button that you push and then there’s a baffle at the bottom of the chute which pushes the recycling, composting or trash into the right bin. The problem with those is that they never seem to work properly, or the tenants in the building haven’t been trained properly to use it, so I haven’t actually found one that’s been working well unfortunately.

 

TOS: “Okay so that’s a bit tricky then. I guess then the waste rooms are probably the best option at the moment”.

 

ALEXA KEILTY: Yeah, I think so. I mean, the problem is just labour – you have to have labour seven days a week and not all buildings have that.

 

CHAPTER 4: COMMITMENT OF BUILDING OWNERS & MANAGERS

 

TOS: Buildings are made up of people, and recycling systems are made up of people too. So successful organics recycling, then, is all about building relationships. With the tenants yes, but first of all with the building owner or manager.

In a 2014 report by the Washington State Recycling Association called Sorting It Out – The state of Multifamily Recycling in Washington State, it asked recycling professionals about the top challenges they face in program implementation. And it’s quite telling that lack of support from building managers is number three on the list of challenges, just behind space and contamination.

During our trip through California – we met with building managers…like Linda Corso…and saw just how valuable it is that they are fully on-board with the program and make it their own. But this isn’t always the case. There are factors that can influence their level of enthusiasm or commitment to the program. A building owner or manager may not know much about organics recycling – why it’s important, and whether it will cause odours and pests.

This is where education and outreach is essential.

 

JESSICA SCHREIBER: We do a lot of outreach, we go to a lot of building events and speak to a lot of management companies, and I always introduce organics and give a brief explination of how it works and why it’s important. When people hear that food waste is a third of our waste stream, that’s a pretty staggering statistic. So we always introduce it as part of the apartment program package. For buildings who express an interest, we will follow up enthusiastically – we’ll do a site visit and work with tenants to educate them along and bring them on board.

We do definitely encounter buildings that say “no thank you” and are not interested. They basically say “not until I have to am I even going to consider this”. I think there’s still some stigma around it – smell and rodents and stuff.

 

TOS: Now New York’s program is voluntary – which means they are dependent on building managers who are interested. Jessica told me that fortunately, they have their hands full with building owners who are – so they have no need to engage uninterested managers. But for a mandatory program – it’s a different story.

 

LILY KELLY: I’m Lily Kelly. I’m senior Program Associate for Global Green USA’s coalition for resource recovery. We’re based in Santa Monica, California and we have offices around the country in New York, New Orleans, Washington DC, and here in beautiful San Francisco.

 

TOS: We met with Lily Kelly of Global Green in her office during our trip last month. As part of Global Green’s goal to promote smart solutions for climate change, Lily has been exploring different solutions for organics recovery and working with cities [here you say ’systems’ instead of ‘cities, but it’s no big deal] on pilot projects in multistory residential buildings.

Lily told us how a mandatory program can affect the way building managers interact with the program…

 

LILY KELLY: When there’s an ordinance, or when there’s a law that requires composting, it really makes a difference and of course it does. It seems like a very obvious point to make, but just listening to the property managers changing their narrative about it from, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to compost, it seems gross and smelly” to, “How do we make this work? How do I make it not gross and smelly – by using bags or training my tenants better. How do I avoid any kind of fines for contamination – by teaching people how to do it and making signage really clear.” It really helps bring their minds to work on solving the problem, as opposed to just giving up on it and deciding it’s too hard. But then there are many other places where it’s still voluntary and that’s going to place a limit on it, if it’s more expensive.

 

TOS: Even though the mandatory aspect can bring more people along – there will still be hesitant building managers. And one of the biggest barriers to their commitment is a worry over cost. This is an area you will need to address for mandatory programs, but even more so for voluntary programs.

 

LILY KELLY: I think it is really important. In particular it shouldn’t be an extra cost for them to add a composting service. And there’s typically a transition period where they’re not going to reduce their trash service right away just because they’ve added a composting service. Down the line it may be possible, and ideally that what will happen is that there will be less trash volume so that service will go down and it’ll become less costly to the property manager. But as a safety precaution for preventing any overflow of trash, they should always try adding compost first, and then – as needed – reducing trash systems. So unless it’s mandated, getting that buy-in from them means there has to be at least a cost neutral option for them.

TOS: Now with a mandatory program, you have one more tool at your disposal: enforcement and the threat of fines. Let’s take a listen to Alexa and San Francisco’s strategy on this front…

 

ALEXA KEILTY: San Francisco has taken a very mild approach when it comes to enforcement. We have implemented some processing fees on buildings, so if we find over fifty percent compostables or recycling in the trash we can put a fifty percent processing charge on those accounts, and we have been doing that. That usually does get the attention of the property managers and they do eventually call and ask for assistance on how they can improve their setup and motivate their tenants.
When we approach these property managers, we don’t start talking about the law and requirements right out of the gate because people don’t well respond to that, so what we try to say is that we’re offering this service, it can greatly help your building. It will also help maintain your building so it’s cleaner, if you get people thinking about how they sort their trash properly – they typically will manage it better so we talk about that. And if they’re still resistant and don’t want to work with us, then we start talking about the law.

 

EPISODE END

 

I’m afraid we will have to leave it here for this first episode of our special on organics recycling in multi-story buildings. I hope you enjoyed our journey so far, and the new format.  We’ve covered some critical challenges and key factors that come into play today – and for episode two we continue in this vein to discuss tenant participation, bin lining strategies, dealing with demographics and more.

If you have any questions or comments – you can contact us on organicstream.org website, or on twitter – our twitter handle is theorgstream.

 

 

13
November
2014

Strategic Outlook: What Direction for Waste Collection Technologies?

TOS_28_Waste_Collection_Vehicles

This episode corresponds to Lesson 4 of our online course.

In this week’s episode, we explore the process of selecting waste collection vehicles and technologies for a city’s collection system – where narrow streets, traffic and noise are some of the key factors to influence the decision making process. Our guest this week is project manager of Waste and Recycling at Copenhagen City in Denmark, Björn Appelqvist, who discusses with us the main challenges for cities for collection services, and the advantages and disadvantages of various types of technologies, with a focus on smaller collection vehicles especially. Björn also gives us an insight into their procurement process – where a lack of industry standards make it difficult to navigate.

Thank you to If You Care for making this episode possible.

If You Care Certified Compostable Bags are made from potato starch from starch potatoes, blended with a fully compostable polymer, and are polyethylene and plasticizer free. Their potatoes are grown for starch only unlike corn which is grown for food. Their potatoes require forty percent less land than corn and no irrigation. For more, visit their website.

Events on our radar this week:

European Biosolids & Organic Resrouces Conferece 2014.

Pollutec 2014.

Save The Planet 2015.

Photo by Chmee2. Some rights reserved.

(more…)

 TRANSCRIPT 

Inner City Challenges for Waste Collection Vehicles 

 

Q: Björn can you start by give us some information on Copenhagen city – the layout of the city; what are the main challenges Copenhagen faces for collecting organic materials, and other kinds of materials as well?

Björn Appelqvist: Copenhagen municipality has about five hundred thousand inhabitants, so it’s a quite small municipality, compared with bigger cities around the world. It’s a very small area, and we have a population density of about six hundred inhabitants per square kilometre, and we have three hundred and fifty thousand workplaces within the city borders. So, despite being quite small in international measures, it very much has inner-city characteristics. And, around ninety percent of our inhabitants live in apartment buildings, or high-rise buildings, and we have about twenty thousand single family houses on top of that.

But altogether the Copenhagen metropolitan area has very much inner city characteristics, with all that that means – traffic congestion, narrow streets, historical buildings, commercial and tourism activities combined with residential areas – so, in that way we have all the challenges that inner city areas have, I would say.

One thing that I think is important to point out is that the Scandinavian waste management model is based on emptying most of the bins from in the backyards of the residential buildings. Our bin men actually go in and collect the bin in the yard. It’s not the landowner putting the bins on the street on collection day, which also means that  the waste management companies that we are contracting do have to walk into most of the properties in Copenhagen. This of course calls for more space for bins within the yards; it calls for good access routes, and also means that the collection holds a little bit longer at each address that would be the case if they should empty from the pavement outside the buildings.

Q: And in relation to the trucks being parked outside for longer, and the collection crews having to bring carts outside – could this create a bit of a noise issue with residents?

BA: Of course a collection truck is noisy in some kind of way, but there are basically three types of noise that can be annoying or disturbing for these citizens. First of all, the noise from moving the bins, from where they are placed in the yards out to the vehicle and back again – the wheels are hitting the pavement and the cobblestones and there is noise from the transportation of the bin. That’s hard, and it’s hard also because when you are in the backyards, you’re closer to people’s bedrooms, and that’s most annoying (laugh).

In addition to this, there’s a noise when you are emptying the bin on the compactor trucks – hitting the back of the truck to get the waste out. And the third source of noise is generally when compacting. So, those three factors are more important, I would say, than just having a truck holding still outside the property. Of course as well, you always have the acceleration and breaking of the truck, but that’s quite small compared to the noise level from the other activities.

 

What Should You Look For In Vehicles?

 

Q: And what then are you looking for in a vehicle? Can you tell me about the specifications and so on?

BA: We have a couple of main targets put up. Copenhagen has an ambitious climate plan for becoming Co2 neutral, so of course the reduction of Co2 emissions are important for Copenhagen. We also look at noise reduction, and we look at NOx and particulate matter emissions. Those are the three environmental factors we’re looking at optimising. On top of that, we’d like to see if we can get as working environmentally friendly vehicles as possible, and it’s very much about getting in and out of the vehicle, and if things can be done to make it easier to work around the vehicle, that’s good as well.

And our last factor is that we want our vehicles as traffic, bicyclists and pedestrian friendly as possible. There are talks – and luckily enough waste collection vehicles aren’t involved here – that there are some incidents of right-turning heavy vehicles and accidents with bicyclists. They are of course incidents that are very grave for the unprotected bicyclist in that situation, so that’s something we want to avoid. So in the basic form, that’s what we’re looking for.

 

Does size matter? Pros and Cons

 

Q: A lot of cities are looking to use new generation vehicles – usually smaller vehicles for organics collection especially – but can you tell us about the type of vehicles you use, and the issues you may have with them?

BA: Yes, so most of our vehicles today are standard sized, two or three axle collection trucks (the larger ones), which works pretty well for collections in the city, I would say. But of course you have congestion problems when entering narrow streets. And what you can have as a problem is, if the street is narrow and you have a lot of parked cars, there actually could be trouble getting in our out of the vehicle because you can’t really open the doors (laugh). Then bus doors that can be seen on some types of vehicles could be useful in some situations. But still if a street is within the norm values, it can be very difficult on narrow streets to collect. And in that case narrow vehicles especially are important.

Q: So smaller vehicles do have advantages here: they can access smaller streets quicker, and can therefore be suitable for increased collection times. Regarding noise reduction – if they are electric vehicles and don’t use compaction, this cuts down on noise. But then, there are some disadvantages to smaller vehicles as well. Can you tell us about these disadvantages?

BA: Of course as you say, a smaller vehicle has the advantage that it can get access to more places than a larger one, and you can have noise reduction and so on, but the disadvantages are interesting to approach as well, as you say. Of course inner cities are dense, which can make it hard to go in a big vehicle, but on the other hand, in a densely populated city, you fill up a vehicle quite fast because you have a lot of waste producers in a small area. So, smaller vehicles means a lot more transportation time to transit stations. So the amount of collection work you get out of it in comparison to the transportation work is smaller on a smaller vehicle.

And that of course is also connected to what kind of salary levels you have. Scandinavia and western Europe has high salary levels in general, and the more your man-hour costs you have compared to the investment of the vehicle, the more disadvantageous it is to go for smaller vehicles, I would say.

Q: Okay, so essentially the lower payload capacity – or amount of material that can be placed in a vehicle – is a crucial factor here. And labour costs factor in here too if there is an increase of hours needed to collect the material. These are all important to keep in mind when planning a system – the collection routes, the efficiency of the service and the type of technologies, and listeners can connect with Lesson 4 of our online course to learn more about how to plan an efficient collection system in relation to this.  So, in summary, you have to be careful how you plan…

BA: Yeah. And there is another factor for small vehicles here in Copenhagen and Scandinavia. You have to remember that from an international perspective, Scandinavia is a small market for vehicles in general, so I know there’s not that many suppliers of small vehicles on the market, and that’s something we struggle with when looking for alternatives. There’s not an optimal market competition there, and adapting vehicles for our market aren’t that attractive, it seems – especially for the small ones.

 

Procuring Collection Vehicles: Key Things To Look Out For

 

Q: And for other cities who are looking at contracting or procuring vehicles for collection – what, in your opinion, would be the key criteria or things to pay attention to when choosing a collection vehicle for your city?

BA: I would once again say, go for Co2 reduction. If it’s fuel efficiency, if it’s about vehicles improving or helping to support the driver to drive in a fuel efficient way; if it’s going for reduction of  – especially for cities once again – NOx and particulate matter are some of the tolls on human health and some of the main challenges for an inner city environment. All that should be focused on.

With noise reduction, I see very little on noise reduction on compactor trucks right now. You have noise reduction technologies on the driving lorry, but on the equipment you put on for compacting, that hasn’t been very much done. It’s still a noisy steel cupboard, where you empty waste into, and that has to be improved. Of course it depends on how noise sensitive your city is, but if you could have an environmentally friendly, noise free waste collection vehicle, then you can actually collect waste twenty-four seven. You’ll have good capital use, you’ll have less traffic problems and so on. So noise reduction, I see, is directly connected to the capital use efficiency of your vehicle parts. For me that’s a key issue.

And of course, traffic security and working environment are the third ones. Easy access of the vehicles, and good vision all around the vehicle. To be able to spot pedestrians and bicyclists especially, but also in order for the waste collectors to travel safely around their vehicles. That’s the focus point.

 

Influencing Markets Through The Procurement Process

 

Q: The city of Copenhagen does not own its own trucks, but is a contract-driven organisation: you procure the trucks and waste management services for the city. As a procurer, there are certain ways you can influence the type of vehicles on the market, and encourage certain types of technologies over others. Can you tell me about your procurement process, and how you do this yourselves?

BA: Well, we do our procurement processes in a way that we actually make competition for environmentally friendly vehicles. We are right now mandatorily  specifying the use of electricity for waste compacting so that you can have less noise and less waste emissions from the compacting parts of the trucks. We are putting up competition on the fuel for the lorry. Of course, diesel is  awarded on the lowest level, and then there is either natural gas or compressed gas; and on the top level of course, in the long run, we would like to see more fully  electrical vehicles, which we realise needs new business models and leasing contracts – especially within a procurement situation where we procure for five to seven year contracts.

So here the business has to adapt if we are going to be able to absorb the larger capital costs for having a more economically and financially efficient procuring operation period – but that’s the timeframe that sets the criteria for that. But that’s what we’re doing on the Co2 and noise side right now.

We are specifying norms on the visibility and the height from the road up to the floor in the driver cabins of the lorries to ensure both that they are easily accessible for the waste collectors, but also to make it easier to see pedestrians and bicyclists around your truck. So that’s how we try to do it. We say that there are maximum measures that have to be fulfilled for height from the street to the lower level of the front screen, as well as from street-level to the floor of the driver cabin.

That’s the kind of things we try to do as procurers and a contract-driven organisation.

 

Lack of Industry Standards Makes Tendering Tricky

 

Q: Are there any challenges or issues you’ve face during the tendering process, or any issues you’d like to address when it comes to tendering – maybe in relation to specifying vehicles, for example?

BA: In a way, it is hard as a tendering organisation to find out how to do this, because you havet o do your own market screening on certain technologies or producers. And in the long run, what we really would like to see would be industry standards, or industry norms for waste collection vehicles for use in inner cities. It’s much easier for u sto be able to refer to a standard; it’s much easier for our contractors to know what they should ask for; and it’s much easier in the long run – I hope – for the producers of the vehicles to know what’s expected from them. Because that could be really useful, and that’s something that I would urge the vehicle producers to look into, and see if we can get some standards and norms here. Because that would be a great step forward for efficiency and environmentally friendly waste collection in inner cities. 

 

Final Words 

 

Q: One more question before we go: what would you like to see happen in the future with collection vehicles  or how the city uses them? Any final words you’d like to leave with our listeners?

BA: Well, it would be nice to see more inventions; more untraditional thinking in the field of waste collection. What can be done? What kind of different vehicles could be bought, built and utilised within city borders? I said earlier that we don’t have many small vehicles, but on the other hand, is the ”the bigger the better” philosophy – which is very much driven by the idea of capital per usage – is that the right philosophy? Or could we think differently on this? That would be interesting to see – where the innovation and where the new thinking is in that field.

20
October
2014

Lessons Learned from San Jose, CA: Building Anaerobic Digestion Facilities for Municipal Organics

San Jose City

This episode corresponds to Lesson 5 and Lesson 7 (coming soon) of our online course.

This week we speak with Jo Zientek, Deputy Director of the Environmental Services Department at the City of San Jose, California, about their new high solids anaerobic digestion/composting and biogas facility. We take a retrospective look at the city’s achievement in order to learn about their experiences, their challenges and successes in the development and operation of the facility. We discuss the permitting process, feedstock contract awards, the advantages of public/private partnerships, and the request for proposal process in order to highlight typical key success factors and pitfalls to expect with such a project.

Thank you to Zero Waste Energy Development Company LLC, and Republic Services for making this episode possible.

In December 2013, Zero Waste Energy Development Company LLC (ZWEDC) opened the first large-scale commercial dry fermentation anaerobic digestion facility in the United States. With the goal of taking organics recovery to the next level, ZWEDC desired not only to compost organics but also to extract its energy value. For more information, visit their website.

Republic Services provides innovative Wet/Dry collection services to all businesses in the City of San José. The Wet/Dry system has nearly tripled the business recycling rate from 25 to over 70 percent since July 2012! All businesses receive wet collection service which includes organics collection such as food waste and food contaminated paper products. Dry waste includes recyclables and everything else. The materials are processed at the Newby Island Resource Recovery Park’s Recyclery. For more information, visit their website.

In the show, we mention two upcoming events that are on our radar this week:

Ecomondo – the 18th International Trade Fair of Material & Energy Recovery and Sustainable Development which takes place 5th and 8th of November.

and

The Venice 2014 5th International Symposium on Energy from Biomass and Waste, between the 17th and 20th of November.

 

(more…)

 TRANSCRIPT

 

History & Project Journey of the Anaerobic Digestion Facility

 

Q: Tell me about the facility in San Jose and how it’s operating at the moment?

Jo Zientek: The facility, which we just commissioned in November 2013, takes the organic waste from our businesses in San Jose. San Jose is a big city; we’re the third largest in California and the tenth largest in the United States, and we have about eight thousand businesses in San Jose. In 2012, we implemented a brand new business recycling program, and all our businesses are required to participate. Prior to that, businesses could select their own hauler and their own recycling service, but we weren’t getting a lot of good recycling out of our business community. So we went to a new system that all businesses are required to participate in, but that new system allowed us to have sufficient feedstock to open two big, high-tech waste processing facilities to process the waste, and one is this zero waste, dry anaerobic digestion facility.

The facility takes organic waste – some is direct hauled from businesses, and others is first processed by another recycling facility, and the organic waste comes out of it. The facility, which is phase-one, can accept about ninety thousand tons a year, and it’s permitted to add two more ninety thousand tons phases for a total of two hundred and seventy thousand tons a year. And we’re working on the owner of the facility on ways we can help jump-start that expansion now.

The facility has sixteen digester tunnels now and each is capable of generating about 1.6 megawatts of energy. The facility is interesting, because there’s a lot of anaerobic digestion facilities in the world – almost all are wet systems, and this facility is unique because it’s dry. We don’t need that much water in, and we don’t need to deal with pumping the water out to make a more usable product. And it’s fully enclosed, so that allows it to be next to highly populated urban  areas, because there are obviously odours associated with anaerobic digestion. Also, in-vessel composting tunnels (after the organic waste is inoculated with the digestate and goes through the twenty-one day process), then the material is moved to composting tunnels to continue curing, and that’s also inside.

So, this initial ninety thousand tons phase is commercial waste, but we are looking at potentially moving residential organics to that facility – a lot of which we’re not collecting now. And then also other jurisdictions in Silicone valley can also bring their material here.

Q: For our audience who’d like to learn more about positioning/choosing this type of technology in the AD sphere, please refer to Lesson 7 of our online course (which will be released soon). And can you talk us through the beginning of the project, in terms of the Request For Proposal process especially: how did you get it off the ground? 

JZ: It was actually a couple of different efforts that came together. It was an opportunistic project, I’m not sure if everything hadn’t come together quite as it did, we would have been able to get this first project off the ground, but certainly subsequent projects and the expansion will be much easier than the first project. But it began at the end of the year 2007 when our Mayor adopted a Green Vision that was the city’s economic development strategy. And certainly several cities in North America and I assume Europe too had a green technology spin to their economic development strategies as we were all grappling with recession and the economic downturn taking place.

But in San Jose, ours was called the Green Vision, and it included some really aggressive goals to reduce water and increase renewable energy, increase energy efficiency, clean vehicles, trees, trails – those kinds of stretch goals to get our city more sustainable by the year 2022, and two of those goals came into play for this project were adopted by our council at the end of 2007 were increasing renewable energy in San Jose, and getting to zero waste. They were the two goals in that ten-goal Green Vision.

So, we immediately had interest from one of our local haulers. The Bay Area is a little unique than other cities because we tend to have a lot of very independent, very creative local recyclers and haulers – not as many large, corporate, multinational haulers that are in other cities in the United States. And one of them said that they were interested in doing a renewable energy park. They wanted to do it on city land, and we have about two-thousand acres in the southern tip of San Francisco Bay that’s been our buffer lands, because we operate a large, regional wastewater treatment facility that serves San Jose and other cities in Silicone Valley, and we were looking at ways – concurrent with this project – that we can dry our biosolids that would help mitigate odour and get the process done faster and liberate some of that land that we’ve been holding as buffer land.

So this proposal that came unsolicited after the Mayor’s Green Vision was adopted, was to use the buffer land for this project and potentially some other renewable energy projects. One challenge we had with this buffer land was that it was on an old, closed landfill that we knew very little about. I joke that the city probably bought it in a bar in the nineteen hundreds, and there wasn’t a lot of history on it, no one knew exactly what was in the landfill. The benefit, though, was the landfill was old so there’d been a lot of settling already done and it hadn’t been used for several decades. The other odd thing about this land is that although it was in the middle of Silicone Valley, it had no utility infrastructure to it. So although it was across the street from our wastewater plant, it had no sewer infrastructure, no power, no water, and no run-off system set up on it.

Q: So you had to start from scratch here…

JZ: Yes. It was almost a green field in the middle of Silicone Valley, and it was a very difficult site to develop just from the issue of the environmental sensitivity, plus it was on a closed landfill. In order to make sure anyone who was interested in looking at that site as projects for the green vision, we actually ended up doing a request for information to open up the opportunity, but we didn’t get any other project interest except this project from one of our current, privately owned recycling haulers.

So that was going on, and we ended up taking their official request for interest, and ended up a due diligent process to see if we could begin this project. And then concurrent to that, we had been planning for several years to do a complete, evolutionary change to our commercial solid waste system. As I’ve mentioned before, anyone could pick their own hauler, but the problem with that is that they could lose a customer in thirty days – the city ordinance allowed them to get out of an existing hauler contract with thirty days notice. And the challenge with that is that haulers can’t finance infrastructure development to recycle without a guaranteed customer base and revenue stream, because as you know these facilities are very expensive.

So, unlike our residential system where we had three big recycling facilities in San Jose set up to serve our residential customers, there was no infrastructure investment to serve our commercial customers in the last twenty years. So we decided to start the process of looking at making the system exclusive. It was a very, very long process; in the state of California, if you make a system or hauling contract exclusive, you have to give all the current haulers a seven year notice. So we did that. We did extensive stakeholder outreach, both with the hauling community and the customers. We had customers from everything from mom and pop restaurants and small service shops to Adobe and EBay and Cisco – so just a huge range of customers here in San Jose.

 

Success in Changing The Waste Hauling System

 

Q: And when you were interviewing all the commercial businesses, what kind of things were you asking?

JZ: We asked how was their existing service; if we were to make the system exclusive, what things did they want to see, what things did they not want to see. And then we also provided some information on how the current system is really inefficient – not only was it not recycling that much, all the haulers that collected from commercial businesses would basically go to every street every day because there was no routing efficiency, so it was creating a lot of issues.

And in some respects (especially for small or medium sized businesses), they really weren’t getting rates that were that inexpensive because there was no efficiencies captured in the system, and the small businesses didn’t really have  as much leverage when it came to bargaining for their rates as larger businesses did. So, it was really small and medium sized probably received the largest benefit. And then the larger businesses – because especially high tech firms, they have such a strong sustainability component and that’s important to their customers.

So we got enough support to move forward, and that was a big step for us, because other cities have tried to go from a non-exclusive to exclusive system for the very same reasons, and had more of a challenge. I think in the pacific north-west, including Portland, as of yet hasn’t been able to convince communities to be willing to give up that kind of decision making power to do an exclusive system.

Q: That’s a shame, but perhaps what happened in San Jose has been a bit of an inspiration or an example.

JZ: Yeah, and it has been. Los Angeles was able to use ours as an example and I think just four months ago was able to get their council to approve a district system. New York City and San Diego is also looking at our system, so we’ve definitely been able to show we can get the high diversion, and I think we’re one of the – if not the highest diverting commercial system in the country right now, because all the waste no longer goes to landfill: it’s either direct hauled to the Zero Waste facility if it’s clean enough, or it goes first to a recycling facility near the Zero Waste facility for pre-processing and then the organic stream goes to Zero Waste.

So, concurrently to that, we developed this whole request for proposals process for our commercial system. Zero Waste was already doing their due diligence on the site to build the facility, which they could use for residential or commercial organics. But they did end up bidding on the project to take commercial waste. So, the opportunity of being able to submit a bid for our commercial organics – as they were looking at doing their du diligence on the side and economics – obviously was a huge lift for the project, because it meant they had the possibility of having a guaranteed feedstock if they were to build the facility. So even though they were happening on parallel tracks, that helped.

So we ended up awarding the collection and non-organics processing contract to republic services, which used to be Allied and VFI. And the organic portion went to Zero Waste (the Zero Waste Energy Development Company), so that gave them the feedstock to build the facility.

 

Developing The Anaerobic Digestion Facility: The City’s Role

 

Q: How did the partnership with San Jose city shape the process, and in what ways did it speed the development of the facility along?

JZ: So to bring that closed landfill site up to being able to be built upon (which was an extremely expensive proposition for Zero Waste), what the city did to help share the risk a little bit (and also benefit from this) is that we gave them credit. I think it’s a thirty year lease with a ten year extension option, and they don’t have to pay rent; they get credit each year against the cost they had to spend just to bring this site up to a developal condition, which is about eleven million dollars. So, bringing the power and the sewer and the water; officially closing the state of California ; doing the storm water run off system…those costs were roughly eleven million dollars, and so they have a rent they have to pay to us, but they get to the eleven million dollars and don’t have to start paying us until that eleven million dollars is paid off.

And we benefitted from that, because we up-sized some of the infrastructure that Zero Waste put in, so if we wanted to do additional development in the area, the city could do that. So, we paid for that differential and that was a benefit – plus, if they ever leave, we get a site that’s much easier to develop that it would have been prior to that.

And the other thing we did, which was very unusual for the city (and I worked on this lease with our economic development department – is that the lease they have to the city means that instead of them just paying us a flat rate, once that eleven million dollars is paid off, Zero Waste is going to pay us four dollars in change for every ton of organics that goes into the facility. And that’s  unique for us: it helps the city organisation have some skin in the game in their success. So, completing that expansion of an addition two ninety-thousand tons means the city has an opportunity to make more money. So it kind of helps get my own organisation managing up and, if you will, have some skin in that game to want Zero Waste to be successful and expand.

Q: Very good approach!

JZ: Yeah, and now, to fund the expansion, California is using some cap-and-trade funds to help AD facilities, and we are looking at that expansion as maybe one of the first projects to use California’s new funding source for these types of projects. And the benefit, obviously, of the Zero Waste project is that it’s shovel-ready, so it makes it hopefully very competitive for this round of state financing because we have the permits, and we have the plans, and it’s very, very difficult to be in that position unless you started four years ago!

So, we’re hoping phase two and phase three are just much simpler projects.

Q: When it comes to financing for the facility itself – it is quite a unique project – was it easier for it to get capital financing at the start due to the secured feedstocks and the partnership with the city?

JZ: That helped. Some of the funding sources, (i.e. the California Pollution Control Financing Authority), I don’t think they’re quite as designed for emerging technology. And because this first phase was so new, I think the partners of the Zero Waste Energy Development Company really had to bring their unique financing relationships that they already had to the table. They were also able to get some Federal money – I think it’s the Department of Treasury 1605 fund tax credit money. But I don’t think they could count on typical financing that’s available for tried and true technology.

Because of their position – they have done a lot of innovative recycling facilities. Another one in San Jose that processes all our waste from our multi-family housing apartments. They were able to leverage some relationships that they already had, but I’m not sure it would be as easy for a company that didn’t have their relationship to start this one. That being said, we built the first on in California, so the second one – now that banks and regulators can tough and feel and hug this one – is going to be infinitely easier than this first one.

So, I think the next one – wherever it is – is just going to be easier and maybe would have an easier time getting access to typical financing vehicles that these companies use.

 

Struggles With Permitting

 

Q: Let’s talk more about the permitting process itself and the city’s role – what was it like, and was there any struggles you faced?

JZ: The onus was on the developers, Zero Waste, to get the two permits, but there were some issues the city had to work through. And the thing that made this project tricky was that it was on a closed landfill in an environmentally sensitive area, so that in and of itself took a long time to resolve. And we had to come up with the monitoring plans; so we have testing wells to make sure there’s no contamination in the groundwater, and the whole site is at sea level next to the sea, so infiltration underground is an issue. So, Zero Waste now does that on behalf of us. And that required a solid waste facility permit from the state.

Because the state had never seen or touched a dry AD facility like this, it was complicated. I think the state ended up subcontracting with a firm on the east coast to evaluate the permit. Some of the designs we got, because it was a German technology, came to us in German and I think they had translating issues. Even the facility now, some of the software that monitors the environment for the microbes still reports in German and  know they have to use Google Translate to translate it! But everything is to keep those microbes happy.

So that was challenging, and there were a lot of questions, and a lot of them had to be answered by the German technology firm and then translated back to English. So that was challenging and that process ended up taking two years to get the permits done. And then the building permit itself, which the city issues…so, the state issues the solid waste permit, and the building permit is issued by the city. But I know we had extensive back and forth which required hands-on meeting with a lot of city officials, Zero Waste, and the contractor to figure out whether those composting cells, where the anaerobic digestion was actually taking place for twenty-one days, had to be fit for human habitation or not, and that had a significant difference on how they were constructed. So that took months and months to work through.

So again, the second facility will just be so much easier than this one. It was a lot of work and a lot of educating everybody on what this was, and what it wasn’t, and it was big effort.

Q: Would you have any words of advice on this whole topic for those our there who are now thinking of starting the next one?

JZ: I think definitely being able to do a demonstration phase. If your permitting agency is just not familiar with it, getting a demonstration project is probably simpler than starting off with a commercial scale facility like we did. It just requires a lot of determination, and getting your organisation, especially your government organisation comfortable with taking thoughtful risk I think is just a shift that you have to make.

You know, we’re working on another demonstration project with a different German technology on biosolids. And the first technology provider went bankrupt so we had to find another one who also ended up being a German company. But getting your organisation comfortable and just that that’s normal – if you’re looking at doing cutting edge things, these companies will go bankrupt, they will take a year or two to permit even a demonstration project. So just make that part of the culture, because that’s just how it is when you try to do new things in this space.

 

Californian Policy: How Can It Help Other Organics Recycling Facilities?

 

Q: In terms on policy, is there anything you would like to see changed or brought in to help make the development and running of similar MSW AD and composting facilities easier?

JZ: Certainly at the regulatory level, getting a unified approach to how to permit these facilities, so each jurisdiction isn’t stuck starting from scratch with each similar facility. So, we had been working with the state of California on a standard EIR process for different organic technology types, like anaerobic digestion, and this is very helpful because it’s just too difficult for cities and jurisdiction’s that want to build these things from scratch.

Getting really clear permitting direction from the regulatory agency including, you know – in California the water and the solid waste aren’t in the same organisation on the state level, but the facility needs permits from both those arms, and getting them to work together and come up with a more uniform approach will help. If it’s known what the path is to get the permits, it’s just easier and more likely that both the private sector partner and the government agency will take the risk. But it’s the unknown – where you don’t know if you’re just going to be spinning for years and years trying to figure out what the permitting path is, it just doesn’t make the risk worth it.

So being able to have a uniform approach for the different types of facilities throughout the state I think would really help mitigate the risk. I think California is trying to do that with anaerobic digestion facilities, and we’ve been part of that process on the state level.

Q: It can be very tricky dealing with all the regulatory bodies and the permitting process of different agencies – we get stuck into this topic in Lesson 5 of our course, and talk about the best strategies you can use to get your project off the ground. So those who might be interested, head on over to the course section of our site and take a look.

 

Words of Advice: Demonstration Projects and Face-To-Face Meetings Essential

 

Q: And we’re running out of time now, so the last section, I’d like to get your words of advice for other cities out there looking into doing something similar – maybe some tips on strategy?

JZ: Yeah, I think it’s very important for the public-private partnerships for to get private sector partners to approach you, is to have some well-publicised successes that show your city is wiling to stick it out and be successful. So even if it’s a demonstration project, just taking that first step on a smaller project and then publicising the success of it, because it’s just such a big investment for a private sector partner, and they want to make sure that you have a track record. So, doing some smaller projects and then getting the word out that you mean business, that you’re in it for the long haul, and you’ve successfully implemented both private sector and granting agencies.

Because a lot of times these projects, including the gasification project that I’m talking about, we actually get funding for that through the state or federal grants, so it just really helps to do some smaller projects and being successful – both marketing yourself to a granting agency and a private sector partner.

We’ve really found it helpful to have on-hand meetings and getting everyone in a room when we discuss the permitting issues. Especially with the new project: a regulatory agency or a staff person in some permitting agency hears one thing, and then maybe comes out with a ruling that was based on a conclusion they decided that wasn’t accurate. Like, this issue we had with having to make the cells where the organic material spent twenty-one days with the microbes fit for human habitation, even though the only time people were in them was to put material in them – and then they sealed them up. And it really helped talking through it – face-to-face talking through, because the conclusions that were instantly or immediately drawn about what it was lead to an extremely difficult permitting hurdle to overcome. So just sitting them down and walking them through it really helped. And it was just a lot of that type of meetings we had to do to walk people through and get them over the conclusions they initially drew, which weren’t accurate.

 

 

3
March
2014

Recycling Heroes: The Zabbaleen of Cairo

TOS_8_Recycling_Heroes_Zabbaleen_Cairo

This episode corresponds to Lesson 4 of our online course.

In this eighth episode, we talk to Malcolm Williams about his recent trip to Egypt to meet the Zabbaleen community, who are now recognised as the official waste collectors of Cairo. The Zabbaleen have been recycling for over sixty years, and Malcolm gives us an insight into the incredible workflow of the Zabbaleen, the hardships they’ve endured, and the reasons for their success in maintaining such a great recycling system.

Thank you to Zero Waste Europe for making this episode possible.

Zero Waste Europe is an European initiative bringing together 20 organisations and 300 municipalities committed to work to eliminate waste in Europe. Zero Waste Europe proposes to re-design our society in a way that all superfluous waste is eliminated and everything that is produced can be re-used, repaired, composted or recycled back into the system.

(more…)

TRANSCRIPT:

EM: Just for a little background information, the Zabbaleen were originally pig farmers who went to Cairo to collect food waste – food scraps – for their pigs way back in the 1940s is that correct?

MW: Yep, the Zabbaleen are absolutely – if I’d known this I’d probably taken a plaque or a Nobel prize or something or other because they are THE recyclers; the recyclers of my dreams. In about 1944-ish, so the story goes, some of the Zabbaleen, who were pig farmers in the south of Egypt, were suffering some minor droughts and having some problems with their farming, so they moved up to the outskirts of Cairo and started collecting food waste from people by knocking on their doors and saying “can we have your food waste, please” – you know, that’s not unreasonable is it? Anyway, they did that and for five or six years they were setting up their pig farms on the outskirts of Cairo and all the rest of it.

And then in 1949, there was a severe drought in that part of Egypt and the rest of the Zabbaleen moved up to Cairo in numbers – I’m not quite sure what numbers – but they now number a hundred and seventy-five thousand or thereabouts. And whereas they were in the outskirts of Cairo when they first moved up in 1949, and knocking on doors, now they’re sort of more integral because Cairo has grown two, three, four times the size as it was in those days, so they’re in…well I wouldn’t call it the centre of the city, but sort of, certainly inside the ring-road so to speak.

EM: And they were primarily pig farmers up until recently – I know that during the swine flu epidemic all of their pigs were culled?

MW: Yes, this is…more than a sad tale. They came up and they were collecting mostly food waste to start with, as I said, but as time went on, and in the eighties – seventies/eighties – they started collecting other stuff, paper…and started selling that. In other words they became what we now know as dry recyclet collectors as well as collecting the organic, but the important thing is that they collected the organics first. And the other important thing is that they had a deal with the householder – not the local authorities, not with the government or anything – it was just: somebody came and collected your food waste every day at a certain time and they knocked on the door to get it. Because, if they hadn’t knocked on the door to get it – if, like we have here, the dry recyclet was put outside the door – then somebody else would take it, because it’s valuable.

So, that’s the situation and then when the pigs were killed three or four years back by the Mubarak government – without any compensation, you know, the government didn’t say “right, three hundred thousand pigs at so-many dollars a pig, distribute this amongst yourselves”, they just killed the pigs. And they more than halved the income of the Zabbaleen. We had various reports, up to ninety percent of incomes being lost. Because they used to actually eat about twenty percent, and then they would sell the other eighty percent into market.

EM: That’s absolutely horrendous treatment, and they…what are they doing now, are they still recycling?

MW: Yeah, it’s been a bit of a problem for the last three or four years, which is one of the reasons why I think anybody who lives in Cairo will say the situation is getting worse and worse, because since the pigs were slaughtered – before the pigs were slaughtered actually, the Cairo authorities actually called in some big, sort of, international waste companies to do the (inverted commas) “waste contract”. And those big companies, basically, found that they couldn’t actually access the fourteen thousand tonnes of material that arise in Cairo every day because the Zabbaleen have got it, they collected it. From five o’clock in the morning they’re out there until about midday collecting the stuff, and bringing it back to their homes where they sort it out, reprocess it, bulk it and sell it.

So, the figures vary a little bit, but before the pigs were slaughtered they were actually eleven of the fourteen thousand tonnes that were arising, and all of that was actually recycled or reprocessed because the pigs were eating all the food waste. And so that was eighty – that’s an eighty percent recycling rate going back three or four years. Now, that would have put them in the lead in the world as far as recycling rates were concerned. And they did it because they knocked on doors to get it, you know? So it’s the ultimate kerbside, you know, collection system with a sorting at the door, sort of thing.

EM: That’s amazing, and they’re not getting paid for their service at all?

MW: The stories vary slightly. It’s quite interesting when you talk to them. In some places, there is another process where the householder pays so much per month – it varied in our discussions between five and twelve Egyptian pounds (which is about one pound twenty in UK terms, what’s that…just a bit more than a dollar) a month, yeah – through their electricity bills. And the proceeds for that are paid to the municipalities to actually organise the collections – or the government collects that in some sort of way. And, I don’t know whether they use that to pay the big waste companies and also the middle men who actually sort of organise…almost organise the Zabbaleen into, sort of, districts. Middlemen seem to feature a lot in the conversations and we weren’t quite sure how they figured in terms of how they got paid. But they did definitely got paid, so I suspect they get paid a lot from those electricity bill profits. And anyway, the Zabbaleen, basically, get only the proceeds from the dry recyclet, and they’re starting to reintroduce ideas about using the organics.

EM: Right, so that’s what they get, and the government and the middlemen who organise them get the proceeds from the electricity bills?

MW: Yeah.

EM: Right okay. And I’ll like to move on a little bit now and talk about the Zabbaleen’s process – how do they go about recycling at all?

MW: Yeah, I mean, it was really interesting from my point of view, because really from the outside I’d seen from the films, you know, from Garbage Dreams and a few clips on YouTube, that they were reprocessing in pretty, sort of, strange circumstances. And I was sort of a little bit nervous about going, I think, you know, “God this is going to be, you know, a bit like wandering a landfill site”. It wasn’t smelly – it wasn’t brilliant, I’ve got to say. And health and safety certainly is probably not an issue for them: they’re survivors, they’re living of scraps, you know.

But the amazing thing is that after all that sort of manic chaos of very small scale workshops that are no bigger than, sort of, twice the size of your living room kind of thing, they end up producing pretty high-grade recyclet. The cardboard is cardboard, the paper is paper, the cans are cans and the plastics are plastics, sorted into all the grains.

And there’s some really, sort of, interesting technologies being used there. They make their own shredders and chippers and they actually go as far as extruding plastic into pellet, selling it onto the market at a very high price, so…. And yeah, again, the health and safety is not particularly good and the air conditioning and all the rest of it is not…it’s pretty, well, basic if at all. We are talking about what other people might call slum dwelling, and then there’s a lot of stuff, there’s a lot of product all over the place. But it all gets bailed up for market in a way in which I think UK reprocessors would be quite delighted to receive, they’d pay a good price for it. It’s a higher quality than we produce here in some of our “so-called” highly technological collection systems, especially using MRFs.

EM: Yeah, so they go out every day to collect it door-to-door?

MW: Yes. The men go out and collect it in the morning and bring it back, and then everybody scrambles over it and sorts it out, making it ready for market. There are four and a half million hereditaments – households, flats condominiums – all in, mostly, sort of, tower blocks and various…. And those houses are visited by the Zabbaleen collectors – four and a half million to five million estimate – at the very least every other day. In the posh areas they’re visited every single day. Every single day somebody knocks on your door and says “can I have your waste please”. I mean that’s just incredible! That’s just absolutely unbelievable. You know, I think you know – I didn’t know that. So for me they’re heroes – they’re total bloody heroes and they’re getting, I mean, they’re not getting paid much for what they’re doing.

EM: No, they really aren’t. And what are they doing now with the organic material?

MW: Yeah well we asked that question, we got some very sort of shifty looks and shaky eyes you know? Because, I think in reading between the lines that they do collect the organics but they realise that the most important thing for them is to keep that collection service going, they know that that’s their stake in society, if you like. So they keep that going absolutely. But what happens to the organics now varies. Now, it might be that it goes to their chickens and their goats and all the rest of it, but there’s a lot of organics lying around. So you rather suspect that – rather than pay two hundred Egyptian pounds to put it on a truck and send it up thirty-five kilometers to the landfill site, and then pay to have it put in there – then I rather suspect that what they do (and this is how they answered our questions on this one) is they said they put it into the government, in the contractors skips that were lying around the place. They’re not very good skips by the way, and they’re not very, they’re not emptied particularly well. So you get a lot of detritus around the skips, and there’s a lot of evidence of fly-tipping, burning rubbish everywhere. Which is one of the reasons why the government wanted Laila I think, to be the environment minister to actually sort out the “waste” problem – inverted commas – in and around Cairo.

EM: So really if the city just invested in the Zabbaleen, there wouldn’t be such a waste problem?

MW: Well yeah, I mean it stands out like a sore thumb, doesn’t it? If you actually paid the people to do the work, that’s a good idea for a start isn’t it? I mean I’m not, I don’t want to get involved in sort of guessing what the politics are, but you have to remember that the Zabbaleen are one hundred and seventy-five thousand Coptic Christians – and bearing in mind that Egypt used to be a Christian country before, not so long ago – and the predominant culture in Cairo at the moment is Muslim. So, I mean I don’t suppose having districts where there are people raising pigs and being a bit smelly and a bit slummy within your suburbs is actually, you know, good neighbour stuff, but if they had got paid properly for doing it, they could have invested and maybe moved out of the city, you know? They could have actually, you know, moved into the farming areas, which is what they as being – they started as pig farmers.

And when you ask them questions about what they wanted, they said two things: trucks – that was the interesting one, always something plus trucks, right? But the other things they said were: “well we want to be respected, we don’t want to be looked down on. We want to actually have a normal life as human beings in Cairo.” You know, it’s the old thing, isn’t it: what’s more valuable, a doctor or a waste collector? You know, it’s the old Marxist dilemma. And, I can tell you that if they stopped work tomorrow – which they will never do – if they stopped work tomorrow, it wouldn’t take…it would be a matter of days before Cairo would feel the pinch on that one.

EM: Yeah, definitely. And what did you and Gerry do over there to help them out?

MW: Well that was interesting because obviously we were – I mean, I said up front, Gerry and I both sent messages into Laila saying that the last thing we want to do is just be another two white guys coming from, you know, where we come from, you know, telling these guys what to do. I mean, these are the – they’re the experts I learned a hell of a lot more from them then they ever learnt from me in terms of recycling. They’ve been doing it for sixty years, you know? So it was humbling in that sense.

But on the other hand, by coincidence – and Gerry and I sort of came to this conclusion fairly quickly, really, within a couple of days – actually, we could actually help. That we had a bit of technology that I don’t thing they’d have heard of, or if they had, they hadn’t utilised, which would actually help them to actually make some use of that organic material. In other words, the Groundswell process, you know: no shred, no turned…basic equipment; it’s letting nature take its course, really. Basically – using inoculants to (muffled). So, we came to the conclusion fairly quickly that we could help them by asking them if they could use this system, which we then did and they said they could, and we did some workshops showing them how to make the stuff that they were going to use to inoculate their compost piles with.

Laila’s got some plans for doing some pilot trials in six districts – five or six districts – in Cairo. And before we’d got there, I mean, they’d already decided that they wanted to shake themselves up – I think they would call it formalisation. And they’ve some money from the Gates foundation to help them formalise their organisations into what other people would call recognisable companies, to actually be able to – within a few years – have a chance at being able to sign some contracts for delivering services into Cairo.

At the moment, they do it anyway. It’s an informal contract they’ve got with the householder. Nobody recognises that contract, except them. And I’m not sure that even they do, actually, that’s just something they’ve always done. But, I mean, that’s the best contract to have, when you actually think about, because the resources are in the hands of the householder. If the householder doesn’t make those resources available, as we have always said, you don’t get recycling done.

And, so they’ve got that. So I think, I’m quite optimistic that we planted a seed of technology, if you like, and you don’t get change without change in technology, really. But in addition to that, we wrote a report, which we thought Laila might be able to use in persuading her colleagues in the department of finance, or whatever, to think closely about the contractual arrangements in Cairo and to actually recognise the Zabbaleen a bit more. And it would actually make sense if they did that, because at the moment the government are in denial – they’re just denying that these guys do this stuff, you know? And the only people that know full well that they do it are: A. the householders – and that includes the people in the government of course, because they’re all householders presumably – and also the waste companies who just can’t get access to the stuff, so they have to pretend. They don’t mind pretending because they get paid zillions to do it! You know? I mean, it is topsy-turvy.

So I think it’s one of those rather, sort of, strange problems that could unravel itself, especially in the circumstances that Egypt now finds itself in, with its changes of governments and all the rest of it, and, you know, the calling for change is there. Everybody wants that change.

EM: That’s great to hear, and finally Mal, do you have any last words?

MW: Oh, I can’t actually let this opportunity pass: last night – I mean, Laila’s in London at the moment, and we’re meeting her on Thursday for a little bit of a celebration because her grandson Alexander was born last evening. And mother and child are doing well, but grandma is doing even better  (laughs).

EM: (Laughs) Well that’s lovely that’s wonderful news, that’s lovely!

MW: Yeah.

EM: But unfortunately, Mal, that’s all we have time for today. Thanks for joining us though!

MW: Okay! Bye now.

10
December
2013

Separate Collection: The San Francisco Story

TOS_1_Organic_Recycling_San_Francisco

This episode corresponds to Lesson 3 of our course.

In this first episode, we are talking to Robert Reed who represents Recology, a company specializing in resource recovery services in the San Francisco region.

Interview by Eleen Murphy

 

Thank you to BiobiN for making  this episode possible.

BiobiN® is a mobile, on-site organic/wet material management solution that starts the composting process and effectively manages odour from putrescible waste. BiobiN® can be used in a variety of outlets, including food manufacturing, restaurants, shopping centres, supermarkets…it’s endless. Whereever organic or wet materials are generated, BiobiN® is THE solution

 

(more…)


EM
: Robert you represent Recology, a company based in San Fransisco and specialising in resource recovery services. Could you briefly tell us a little bit more about the company and its activities?

RR: Yes. San Fransisico set a goal of achieving zero waste by 2020, maybe the most ambitious recycling goal that we’re aware of. So we’re doing everything we can to help the city achieve that goal. We’re also an employee-owned company, so the people driving the collection trucks, or working in the recycling plant, or working at the compost facilities all own the company.

EM: Very interesting. I’d like to talk about the so-called organic “waste” generated by our communities around the world. What do you think it takes to change the way these materials are perceived, so that they become valuable in people’s eyes?

RR: Food scraps and plant cuttings, in my mind, are the most important “garbage” there is. That’s where the nutrients are, and that’s where a lot of the carbon is. So we don’t want those materials going to an incinerator to be destroyed. We don’t want those materials going to a landfill where they’ll decompose in an airless or anaerobic environment and produce greenhouse gases – including methane which is a very potent greenhouse gas. You know, all those things came from the earth and they need to go back to the earth. Compost provides farmers a viable alternative to using liquid or chemical fertilisers. So we need to help people understand that, and that composting is a big part of a solution to our environmental challenges. And once people understand that, then they say, “give me a kitchen pale, I want to be part of the solution. I don’t want to send my coffee grounds and peelings to a landfill or incinerator, I want to send it back to the farm.” You know, even the most jaded person who says “why should I do this?” we say “Well geez, do you like fresh peaches? Do you like table grapes and all those good things that they sell at the farmers market?”

“Yes”

“Well you can’t just take away from the organic farm, you have to put something on the farm so they can continue to grow these healthy foods and continue to bring them back to the city, so that they can go onto your table and you can enjoy them and they can support your good health”.

EM: So your main ambition is to educate people?

RR: Yes!

EM: So in San Francisco, are people into recycling? Have people embraced the program?

RR: Yes, most people have embraced these programs. We’re collecting 600 tons a day of food scraps for composting. But you know, if you do a waste characterisation on materials San Francisco are still sending to landfill, you still find 25, 30, 35 percent could be composted. So that tells you we can do a better job and we need to do a better job.

EM: And in addition to improving the soil and our carbon footprint, which we talk about in the lessons on Compostory.org, we often mention that the recovery of organics can benefit local economies. What’s your take on this?

RR: We really need to look at the big picture when it comes to costs, and when you do that, and you’re responsible, you quickly realise that we have to do these things. And by the way, recycling and composting creates many, many jobs and there’s been lots of the reports in the United States in the last two months that we can create tens of thousands of jobs by recycling and composting. Not many people work at landfills, not many people work at incinerators.

EM: Yeah. So are you seeing any trends emerging in the US?

RR: Yes. I think a major development occurred this summer when Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, announced that New York City was going to establish a food scrap compost program and switch from sending food scraps to landfills and incinerators and instead compost them. And then, you know, Boston Massachusetts and other cities started to get on the bandwagon. We’re starting to get our legs, we’re starting to get momentum, we need more composting facilities. We need more places to take this material.

EM: Definitely. So this is going out to an international audience. Is there any piece of advice you can give to the other communities listening in?

RR: This isn’t rocket science, this isn’t putting a man on the moon. There’s not a tremendous amount of engineering, we have all the answers and we have all the techniques. Do we have the will?

EM: That’s an important question. Any other advice?

RR: It’s important to have face-time with the residents and the businesses in your communities. I mean, it’s very helpful to use all this technology but it’s very important to get in front of people, and one of the things we’re trying to do is have tenant meetings at apartment buildings. We’ve been going to community meetings for years, and talking about recycling and composting. And we tour thousands of people, particularly younger people, through our recycling and composting facilities.

EM: So I presume it gets pretty popular once people realise it’s not, like, the hardest thing to do in the world.

RR: Come on, hard? It’s one of the easiest things to do! I mean you put your bottles, your cans, your paper cups and molded plastic packaging and other things that can be recycled into your recycle bin. It’s just as easy to throw those things in a recycle bin as it is to throw them in the garbage can. You know, participating in urban compost collection program is also extremely easy – thousands and thousands and thousands of people do it every day in San Francisco. They do it at home, they do it at work, they do it when they’re in the coffee shop – you just need the infrastructure.

EM: It’s a no-brainer really.

RR: It’s more than that. We have to do it! It’s not going to be that long before we don’t have enough food to feed everybody. We’re really using our topsoil and we’re losing every year. We can’t continue to just take away, we have to give back to the soil. We have to protect the soil, we have to get it back to the farm.

EM: Exactly. Unfortunately though Robert that’s all we have time for today, but that you for sharing your insights with us. Best of luck with Recology, let’s hope San Francisco reaches its zero waste target by 2020.

RR: We’re going to do everything we can to try to make that happen.