By John Trotti

John Trotti

Rarely will you stumble on more-entertaining accounting practices than those devised by people and institutions desiring a choice place at the public trough. A good case in point is how political things can get when jurisdictions with waste diversion goals sit down to decide what does and doesn’t count. Pork barrel politics, you think? Yep, and I’ll leave it to you to consider how much money is at stake.

Normally I’m content to let local and state matters go without comment, but now and again something comes up that is just too tempting to pass up. The object of my immediate interest is California’s practice of allowing credit for waste diversion of organic materials that are processed as landfill alternative daily cover, while at the same time withholding similar credit to those same materials if they are to be used as feedstock for what have come to be known as transformation technologies.

Now you might wonder what’s going on here or just how it came to pass that stuff bound for the landfill (bad) ended up in the landfill with a diversion credit (good). Perhaps you might believe that someone sprinkled fairy dust on it as it was separated, transported, processed, and transported again at what has to be a fairly substantial cost to the ratepayers. Perhaps you believe that its excesses notwithstanding its price can be charged off to an environmental good. OK?

A Trip Down Memory Lane
In its ability to make some people feel they’re doing good without actually providing any environmental benefit, this credit allowance is the modern-day equivalent of the smog pump, a miraculous little contraption that back in the 1970s promised to clean the air. The way anti-pollution laws of the time were written, auto manufacturers were required to reduce the percentage rather than the total amount of pollutants coming out the exhaust. “Piece of cake,” said the boys of Detroit … and it was. The simple solution was the addition of an air pump driven by a car’s engine that forced sufficient air through the exhaust to meet the regulation. Cute. Never mind that it took additional power to accomplish the thoroughly useless task. The regulators were pleased as punch, the auto manufacturers had an additional profit item “forced” on them, and an entire new business—smog check stations—sprang up overnight. You get the connection?

Nearly as exciting to me as the opportunity to lay bare a ridiculous policy is the chance to be on the same side of the fence with the zero-waste community for a few seconds. They oppose credits for waste going to the landfill as ADC as much as I, but I suspect that that’s about as far as our companionship will take us on this issue. It appears that their challenge stems from a desire to plug a leak in the flow of organic material in the wastestream, a potentially laudable stance were it at all clear that they knew what to do with it.

Given outspoken opposition of such organizations as Californians Against Waste, the Sierra Club, and GAIA to the granting of more than token diversion credit to transformation technologies for fear that these might have a negative impact on their traditional recycling schemes—a stance that runs counter to the findings and subsequent adoption of recommendations contained in a study conducted by the California Integrated Waste Management Board—I am stumped as to what they intend to do with this material, which as I see it would be in addition to the more than 60% of waste that already goes into landfills in spite of the existence of mature recycling programs. This opposition was so strong that the waste board was forced to backtrack as a result of political pressure.

How Close to Zero Is Zero Waste?
Actually it can be amazingly close. That is, of course, if you have the same raw nerve NASA does as it gets down and dirty with the realities of sending astronauts to Mars. For them, the accounting is pretty simple: Every extra ounce that goes into space has a price tag in lost payload far beyond the dollars needed to put it there. (Click here for more on the subject.)

So let’s say that it’s possible for NASA to return 90% of what goes into space on each of a succession of missions. That’s phenomenal, but then you have to consider the limited range of materials exposed to the process, as well as the cost both in terms of money and applicability beyond the very narrow confines of utility the capability offers. Then when you look at the far larger, infinitely more complex, and fiscally constrained arena in which MSW practitioners have to operate, you begin to see the impracticality they face in pursuing a zero-waste agenda.

Earthbound Accounting
We don’t often think of it this way, but in today’s hydrocarbon-driven economy, every dollar, euro, yen, ruble, or peso carries with it an environmental penalty if for nothing else than the fuel consumed and residuals left in the creation of its presumed worth. How much is this environmental penalty? I don’t know … perhaps 20%. The point I’d like to make here is that relative costs provide a very good index of environmental value, another way of saying that if you are spending twice as much as someone else to accomplish a given task, whether that task is making Hula Hoops or dealing with discarded glass bottles, you are (relatively speaking) a polluter.

From the standpoint of waste management, it seems to me that where we have the opportunity to add value to materials in the wastestream it is both proper and prudent to do so. The advocates of zero waste don’t appear to see it this way, focusing instead on their perceived ends rather than the means of waste diversion. Regardless of how one goes about trying to achieve it, zero waste is a societal rather than a waste issue, but waste and the people who deal with it are much easier targets than society.

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MSW - Elements 2006