By Thomas Parker
Sustainability. Fuel Surcharges. Greenhouse Gases. Rising Crude Oil prices. Instability in the Middle East. Global Climate Change. Renewable Energy. Zero Waste. Limited Natural Resources. Green Power. These topics have been in the mainstream media recently.

All of these issues are linked to solid waste. Solid waste managers are tasked on a daily basis with making important decisions on how to trim costs and perform more with less. It is my opinion that the solid waste management industry has many tough decisions to make over the next five years.  Do we continually rely on landfills as the main component of our solid waste management programs, or do we take a new direction and evaluate and implement cost-effective methods to decrease our reliance on landfills?

Over the past 20 years, I’ve been proud of my role in the development of integrated solid waste programs for communities throughout the United States and abroad. Our industry has developed state-of-the-art landfill disposal facilities that use high-tech liner and leachate collection systems allowing us to safely discard our waste in an environmentally and economically sound manner. Should we continue the same course and keep dumping millions of tons of trash into landfills, or should we further expand programs to divert waste from landfills as is economically reasonable?

I believe that this is an excellent time for us to reduce our reliance on landfills. I am not advocating the banning of landfills, nor do I believe that zero waste is achievable. However, I believe that we should all adopt the concept of waste minimization and determine cost-effective programs that lead to a sustainable future. In 2005, the United States generated approximately 388 million tons of garbage, recycling and composting 28.5%, combusting 7.4% in waste-to-energy facilities, and landfilling 64.1%.

A fast-food restaurant ran television ads that used the slogan “Think Outside the Bun,” which attempted to sway the viewer to switch from a hamburger to a taco. We need to “Think Outside the Landfill.” In the past 15 to 20 years, thousands of communities have constructed state-of-the-art landfills, waste-to-energy facilities, high-tech material recovery facilities (MRF’s), greenwaste collection programs, and bioreactor landfills to address solid waste management needs.

By evaluating and implementing advanced solid waste programs that may include combustion and alternative treatment technologies, we continue to “Think Outside the Landfill.”

With the price of crude oil hovering around $75 a barrel, diesel fuel over $3 per gallon, natural gas price doubling since 2002, banning of MTBE as a fuel additive, and more communities implementing long-haul solid waste programs, it is time to re-evaluate solid waste management practices in North America. Additionally, many communities around the globe are evaluating whether alternative technologies are cost-effective on a large-scale basis.

As our industry continues to evolve, we must exercise patience when evaluating and implementing “space-age” type technologies by start-up entrepreneurs. More and more entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork to promote alternative solid waste technologies such as gasification, pyrolysis, plasma arc, and others.

Communities should never invest local tax dollars or user fees in unproven technologies. Research and development and commercialization costs should either be born by the federal government or the developer of the technology.  Although we need to develop programs that are sustainable, from which future generations can reap the benefits, and although we need to plan now for sustainable Cities of the Future, we also need to avoid the mistakes that communities made in the 1970s and 1980s by investing local dollars in unproven technologies that never worked.

Cities of the Future
The City of the Future is one that continually evaluates innovative, cutting-edge technologies and programs that will divert a large portion of solid wastestreams from landfills. The City of the Future will manage water, energy, and solid waste with the goal of sustainability at the forefront. The City of the Future will have leaders who develop sustainable programs that further improve the community to achieve the following:

• Reduce solid waste generation by establishing policies that encourage manufacturers to reduce the volume of packaging materials
• Reuse/Recycle/Recover over 50% of the pre-collection waste
• Utilize high-tech MRF’s to process materials and transport to local markets
• Promote the development of “green” local secondary material manufacturing facilities through implementation of tax credits and incentives
• Thermally treat the remaining waste by either incineration or gasification and produce renewable “green power” or “green energy”
• Landfill the unusable material discarded from MRF’s and ash/char from thermal treatment facilities

RISE
In mid-July, Sen. James Jeffords, Vermont (I) and Tom Carper, Delaware (D), introduced the Recycling Investment Saves Energy (RISE) Act to the Senate. Once implemented, the RISE Act will encourage recycling to save energy and improve the quantity and quality of recycled materials by allowing companies “...a 15% tax credit or 50% accelerated depreciation for the purchase of machinery...used exclusively to collect, distribute or recycle material.”  I encourage you to support the RISE bill by writing to your congressional leadership. SWANA is one of 46 professional organizations and/or industry partners supporting this bill.

Sustainable Society
Community leaders need to embrace sustainability in all facets of municipal government, including the management of solid waste. With the current price of energy, a “greening” society, and federal energy tax credits, solid waste managers need to take a hard look at alternative programs to reduce the amount of waste being sent to landfills. Managers and community leaders must be cautious in spending taxpayer funds to develop alternative technologies that have not been proved on a large-scale basis.

The development of alternative technologies must be performed in a very rational, measured, and prudent course of action. All of us need to “Think Outside the Landfill” in order to achieve a sustainable society.

Tom Parker, PE, BCEE, is the incoming president of SWANA and is CDM’s Solid Waste Practice leader located in Albuquerque, NM.

MSW - September/October 2006