By John Trotti

John Trotti

It’s gotten that I don’t need a calendar to mark the passing of another year. All it takes is to note that once again an initiative by the California Integrated Waste Management Board to give equal diversion credit to a variety of waste diversion practices known collectively as Conversion Technologies (CTs) has been shot down. What intrigues me even more as we sail off into a new year of hope and expectation is the seemingly undiminished passion of the opponents in preventing CTs from sitting at the same table with recycling, at the same time as many among them are mobilizing support for ratcheting up the State’s diversion goal from its current 50% mandate to 75%, despite the fact the recycling methods and processes they espouse have yet to prove themselves capable of dealing successfully with the broad spectrum of materials that continue to get buried, day after day. Bad enough that this constrains waste management options in one state, but the impact and the agenda that spawned it will have repercussions in other states as well.

At present, roughly two-thirds of what goes into landfills is organic matter, and while no doubt a portion of it might be recyclable, the majority is, insofar as those practices accorded full diversion credit are concerned, still beyond reclamation.

C. Mayhew and R. Sammon (NASA/GSFC), NOAA/NGDC, DMSP

And that’s a waste, not only because the organic matter itself has societal and environmental value (for instance its Btu content), but because the steps leading to its interment involve substantial economic and environmental consequences. Granted, it’s not quite as wasteful as the practice of composting MSW organic material at great cost and then granting it full diversion credit as an airspace-robbing landfill daily cover. Nor is it as devious as asking the nation’s taxpayers to provide a prop to recycling markets by exporting a substantial portion of the materials to foreign shores, but it’s of the same stripe.

Adapting to Change
Earlier this fall as I sat staring at the stunning NASA scene titled Earth_Lights [http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap040822.html], agonizing over an address I was scheduled to deliver to a solid waste group, it dawned on me that the same hand of man depicted through the scene’s myriad points of light also produced the base materials with which waste managers wrestle every day....and the significance of the mosaic did not end there.

Electrification, I pointed out to the audience, is little more than a century old. At its inception the world’s population stood at 1.4 billion people—roughly 10 times what it was at the time of Christ. Since 1900 the world’s population has expanded 5-fold to 7 billion, and is headed for 8 billion by 2020. During this same time the worldwide gross product has grown 100-fold. That idea that productivity and population are linked is hardly news, but it’s the magnitude of the change that bears serious notice.

In the aftermath of the presentation, I was privileged to visit Seoul and Pusan, South Korea; and Shanghai, China, where in coming face-to-face with the visage of truly explosive growth, I became aware as never before of the chilling realization that the phenomenal growth in the last century was but a mild prelude for what lies ahead. It’s that vision I’d like you to carry forward to my next thoughts.

A New Language for the Future
While I still think that getting the stuff off the curb and overseeing its disposition lies at the base of our responsibilities, it’s no longer possible to ignore the impact that a rapidly shrinking globe is having on the entire structure of our lives. As Nashville's solid waste manager, Chace Anderson, pointed out to me, we live in a world where one nation’s actions affect the well-being of other nation-states...and this insight links waste management with broader environmental and societal issues.

At the poles of the waste industry we have those who stand for achieving the highest efficiency at the lowest cost versus those who want to diminish waste regardless of the cost, and between them lies a gulf of misunderstanding and distrust that we must bridge. To this end we need to develop a language that allows us to lay aside our institutional blinders and focus on the fundamentals of waste management so that the public and our policy makers can understand the true issues and make meaningful decisions. If we don’t succeed in this then we will find ourselves shut out of the policy formation process. How we proceed will be the subject of future columns, and to this end I solicit your input.

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MSW - January/February 2006