Four Years of Trash

Notes from an experiment of not landfilling anything for four years.

For readers looking at the wall of text below and wondering if you can get the gist without reading the whole thing, you can. Mostly. Scroll to the Too Long; Didn’t Read section at the bottom.

~45 minute read

Introduction

Weird Life Experiments

People do weird life experiments from time to time and they can be interesting. It's a common human endeavor. One of my recent life experiments was to not throw away any of my trash for four years.

I didn't think about all the bags of trash my family generated growing up, except that I dreaded when it was my turn to haul it to the front curb for pickup. Our food scraps were comingled with the rest of our trash, and a week between pickups gave ample time for anaerobic decomposition to create a nostril-violating stench. Sometimes critters got in, creating such famous pieces of modern art as "coffee grounds, on the ground" and "liquids - a thousand colors."

It wasn't until I was 17 that I thought about my material throughput. We were moving to a new house, and I had to sort through the possessions of my childhood and decide what I would keep and what I would part with. Something about the permanence of the plastic toys that would live on in a landfill long after I expired made me uneasy.

Life is temporary.

Trash is forever.

However, this is not about guilt. It’s about trash-handling.

This is not another blog piece by some crazed eco-warrior about how they reduced their trash output to almost nothing.

I've read those too. No Trash Project, No Impact Man, Zero Garbage Challenge, Zero Waste Home, Trash is for Tossers, and many more. These sorts of stories can be divisive. Our waste habits are as private to us as the reasons for our food preferences, and it's always thorny talking about something so personal. The topic evokes a range of responses:

But this article isn't about guilt. Or purity. Or how you should use a toothbrush scavenged from a dumpster.

You probably shouldn't.

If you are a self-identified tree hugger, suspend any guilt you may have about waste. And if you think environmentalists are all whiny, puny pricks, put those thoughts aside too.

This story is about waste - how much we collectively produce, and some of the barriers we encounter in the last mile problem to reduce it to zero.

Contents

  1. PART 1 - Consumption & Trash Handling in the Environmental Movement
  2. PART 2 - Experimental Design, Limitations & Results
  3. PART 3 - Putting the Results in a Global Context
  4. PART 4 - Waste Handling in the United States
  5. PART 5 - Focus on Two Subcategories: Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and Construction and Demolition Debris (C&D)
  6. PART 6 - A Closer Look at Municipal Solid Waste Recycling
  7. PART 7 - Major Initiatives and Strategies to Reduce Landfill Waste
  8. PART 8 - Relative Importance and Individual Action
  9. PART 9 - Closing Thoughts/Conclusion
  10. SUMMARY - TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)
  11. APPENDIX - Further Reading

PART 1 - Consumption & Trash Handling in the Environmental Movement

Trash handling as part of the overall environmental picture

The 4th IPCC report on climate change came out as I entered college, and I felt compelled to learn more about the issue.

Thus began my exploration of the environmental movement.

Now, to be a "good environmentalist" you are supposed to drive less, bike more, not eat meat on Mondays, mourn the loss of habitat to parking lots, give able-bodied people angry glances for taking the elevator instead of the stairs, take shorter showers (if at all), recycle everything, and, of course, repent for all of your trash sin you send to a landfill.

Twice on Earth Day.

Perennial top ten tips to "be green" from schools and nongovernmental organizations always list the cliché: "Reduce, reuse, recycle."

The "sustainable consumption" wave of environmentalism came about partly because the movement needed a new focus after the mostly victorious air pollution, water pollution, and pesticides campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. An ancillary result of the early environmental protection movement was the formation of "environmentalist" as an identity group, with behavior badges to show membership, and the marketing industry’s response to that identity.

Living up to that identity as I began to adopt environmentalist views, I quickly developed a strong distaste for all the bits of single-use junk that insert themselves into our lives, wanted or not.

In fact, most people are annoyed with this stuff even if they don't consider themselves environmentalists. Things like candy wrappers, chip bags, clamshell containers, charity event t-shirts, logo-plastered office widgets designed by some marketer with a weird fetish for "I Spy" books.

We are primed to take free stuff when it’s offered to us and buy things we don't need. It's not until we’re cleaning out or moving a few years later when we discover the pile of accumulated junk and wonder, "Why did I let this come into my life?"

So, early in my college years, I adopted the view that if I accepted free plastic crap or purchased food in disposable packaging, that was my trash.

My responsibility. My cubic corner of the landfill.

And soon after that I decided to try not landfilling anything as an experiment. I'd heard about other life experiments people have done, such as not talking for years, walking everywhere, not touching anything metal (that one seemed a bit extreme) - and figured this was doable.

PART 2 - Experimental Design, Limitations & Results

Experimental design - measuring four years of trash

When I started, I didn't have an end date in mind. I figured I would *carry* my trash for as long as I could. At the time, I could carry all of my immediate belongings in two backpacks, which made moving quite simple and easy. So I had extra incentive to keep my trash output to a minimum. If I produced at the rate of the average American, in a year the weight of my landfill trash would exceed 850 lbs (385 kg), more than all but a few of the strongest powerlifters can lift off the ground. I would not be able to carry that in two backpacks.

Important Disclaimers

Results

Between October 2011 and October 2015, I produced 26.6 lbs (12.1 kg) of trash. As an average American, I would have landfilled 21% of my total waste at a rate of 2.32 lbs/person-day for a difference of 2.32*365*4 - 26.6 = 3360.6 lbs = 1.68 tons of trash. The picture shows my trash in detail.

Trash. Scroll over items to get descriptions. (data)


My Trash Output per Year (data)

Impact Analysis

Reducing Waste - Personal Strategies and Significance

To estimate the impact from my waste stream, I need to consider the counter-factual - what would I have done instead? And which impacts were most important to my landfill waste reduction?

First, I did not include construction and demolition debris in the total. My experiment only impacted my municipal solid waste production. Muncipal solid waste constitutes 32% of total landfilled waste. I reduced this to less than a hundreth of the typical American (26.6 lbs vs. 3360 lbs). If we make the crude assumption that the $50 average landfill tipping fee covers the social cost of landfilling waste, my trash reduction experiment provided $85 worth of benefit to society.

Giving a set number suggests an accuracy that I don't think is possible for this sort of calculation, though I don't think it will be drastically off from this. Perhaps within a factor of two. Meaning the social benefit from my trash experiment was worth $10-$40/year.

There are some demographic differences (age, gender, marital status, children) in waste production I could account for to give a better estimate, but I don't have specific, reliable data for U.S. differences, and the pure demographic markers don't seem to change the estimate more than +-10%. I imagine that geographic differences are hyper-local, and that geographic differences overlap with lifestyle decisions (urban vs. rural living) which I can arguably claim credit for as reducing my waste.

My Trash vs. American Average over Four Years (data)

I've mentioned some disclaimers above that contributed to my waste reduction. By far the most significant thing I did was buy less stuff. Outside of groceries, I spent less than $900 per year on material goods and less than $75 on eating outside the home (I rarely went to restaurants).

Lifestyle and behavior factors that helped me reduce waste are:

Other things I did to cut down on my recyclable waste:

PART 3 - Putting the Results in a Global Context

My trash production came to less than 7 lbs/yr.

How does this compare to the rest of the world? Is it just as hard to cut individual waste production in low-income countries as it is in a wealthy country like the U.S.? Or is it easier in the U.S. because we have so much stuff at the baseline?

Alternatively, is total landfill space the best metric? Are the carbon emissions or energy used in dealing with waste a more significant environmental concern?

There is a wide variation in embodied energy and total life cycle emissions of different components in the waste stream. Many materials are inert, harmless, and are more expensive to reuse or recycle. Should the public focus be less on total trash output and total recycling rates, and more on ensuring that all copper or aluminum is getting recycled?

These questions are very difficult to answer, for a variety of reasons.

There simply isn't much reliable data on how much waste ends up in landfills and what gets recycled, especially outside of the U.S. and other wealthy countries.

Waste is measured by weight, which varies considerably with moisture content and can easily throw numbers off.

Data also has to be aggregated over thousands of trash collection sites.

It's not easy to track what gets recycled and what doesn't, partly because you have to also know what was produced during that time, and partly because recycling commodity prices are highly volatile. What was marginally profitable to recycle a few months ago may now be cheaper to landfill.

Waste gets bought, sold, and shipped around the world. And in many parts of the world, trash isn't regulated and is disposed of in open pits.

To address these questions, I've tried to piece together disparate sources of information from academic journals, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reports on regulating waste, and data from third-party nongovernmental organizations that focus on waste.

I present the data with rough percentages and relative importance, but caution readers that there are big uncertainties in these numbers.

The Global Context

Given the importance of waste-reduction as part of environmentalist identity, I expected to find much better data.

The lack of data may be related to the lack of strong consensus on why waste and landfills are important public issues.

Some reasons for public concern about waste production and handling include:

  1. Economic costs of dealing with lots of waste, including the cost of desirable landfill space and transporting waste;
  2. Greenhouse gas emissions from waste emitted via transportation to landfills;
  3. Greenhouse gas emissions from decomposition of waste at landfills;
  4. Greenhouse gas emissions from the extraction and processing of virgin resources to make new goods to replace items that were not recycled or reused;
  5. Political difficulties of identifying spaces for landfills.

Global waste production will triple this century [1],[2] with rising population and economic output. The associated financial and emissions costs for waste disposal will grow as well.

Different trash production rates around the world

Peter Menzel did a great photo documentary project in the late 1990s of families from around the world with all their stuff. It’s enlightening to see photographic evidence of the disparity in material ownership around the world.

Although the per-capita solid waste production globally data is limited, it supports the photographic anecdotes.

Annual per Capita Municipal Solid Waste Output by Country Income Level (source)(data)
Global Municipal Solid Waste Composition by Country Income Level (source)(data)

Individuals living in high-income countries (e.g. the United States) produce about 1.5 times those as much waste as those in upper-middle income countries (e.g. Brazil), twice as much as those in lower-middle income countries (e.g. India), and three times as much as those in low-income countries (e.g. Bangladesh). The ratio is a lot lower than would be expected by a linear correlation to per capita GDP, which would predict a 10-50x difference in trash production.

Even though consumption expenditures differ drastically, municipal solid waste production across cultures are within the same order of magnitude.

The differential is somewhat accounted for in the composition of the waste streams. In high-income countries, consumers put a lot of paper products into their waste stream (junk mail, boxboard packaging). In low-income countries, organic waste (food scraps) comprise the majority.

A pessimistic interpretation for this is that the high-wealth country data omits too much construction and demolition debris and specific types of damaging waste, such as electronic waste from discarded computers and other devices, which is often shipped overseas.

An optimistic interpretation is that waste production is somewhat decoupled from economic wealth. With decoupling, the difference in consumption is due more to increased quality and longevity of goods rather than quantity of goods. This would follow the general trend in well-being, where each doubling of income corresponds to a 0.5 point increase in life-satisfaction on a 10-point scale.

The waste management disparity is much larger. It takes effort to collect, sort, and properly landfill waste. High-income countries spend about $75 per capita to do this, while low-income countries spend about $1.40 per capita.

Global Municipal Solid Waste Disposal Method by Country Income Level (source)(data)
Annual per Capita Municipal Solid Waste Budget ($) by Country Income Level (source)(data)

In many low-income countries, there’s just not enough money to handle waste carefully, so it’s dumped into open dumps or dumped illegally. In these countries, informal trash pickers contribute labor to do most of the recycling and material reuse that occurs; they divert recyclables from municipal waste streams to recycling centers to earn money, and thereby provide a service their governments can’t afford to provide.

Given how little money can be made by picking recyclables from open landfills, recycling and diversion rates in low-income countries may be a decent metric for what is reasonably achievable in resource recovery, discounting the organics that could be composted.

PART 4 - Waste Handling in the United States

Waste handling in the U.S.A.

We have much more data on waste composition in the U.S than in other parts of the world. But more data does not necessarily mean better data.

In writing this piece, I tried to answer some basic questions:

  1. How much waste do we (U.S. as a country) produce each year?
  2. What is the composition?
  3. How much of it is landfilled?

This proved difficult.

The U.S. EPA Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery (ORCR) is responsible for the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The ORCR certifies landfills and manages waste statistics. They track a variety of wastes, including:

In total, the EPA manages 2.5 billion tons of solid, industrial, and hazardous waste each year. I haven’t been able to find out how this number breaks down into the constituent waste stream contributors.

In a recent report the EPA puts municipal solid waste at 254 million tons per year, and C&D waste at 530 million tons per year.

That's a third of the 2.5 billion ton total.

Adding in 10 million tons of foundry sand, 130 million tons of coal ash, and 34 million tons of hazardous waste gets us to 38%.

Also, this contradicts other EPA sources, which state that "Industrial secondary materials (e.g., coal combustion residuals, foundry sand, and construction and demolition (C&D) materials) account for nearly 90% of all wastes generated in the United States each year."

530 million tons of construction and demolition debris + 10 million tons of foundry sand + 130 tons of coal ash, divided by 2.5 billion tons total, yields a 27% portion, not 90%.

Another report states that "each year, approximately 7.6 billion tons of industrial solid waste are generated and disposed of at a broad spectrum of American industrial facilities."

This is 3 times the 2.5 billion number. And only industrial waste. Why such a large difference?

I asked the EPA by email. Their response:

"The 2.5 billion tons figure is compiled from the best available data the Agency has from the last 23 years. This figure includes the following types of waste streams: municipal waste, construction and demolition, hazardous waste, industrial waste, and special waste (i.e., cement kiln dust, mining and mineral processing waste, crude oil and natural gas waste; and fossil fuel combustion waste).

There generally will be discrepancies in reconciling the number for this figure because the information comes from both EPA sources as well as industry sources covering various periods of time.

For example, the recent estimate for construction and demolition (C&D) waste generation of 530 million tons number in the 2013 “Advancing Sustainable Materials Management: Fact and Figures” report includes C&D waste generated from buildings, roads and bridges, and other structures. The Agency’s prior estimate for C&D waste was much smaller since it included estimated amounts from buildings only.

In addition, the 90% industrial secondary materials figure cited in “RCRA’s Critical Mission and Path Forward” not only includes coal combustion residuals, foundry sand, and C&D material, but also other special and non-hazardous industrial wastes.

Lastly, the 7.6 billion tons of industrial solid wastes generated and disposed of cited in the “Guide for Industrial Waste Management,” originally published in 1999, includes wastewaters whereas the 2.5 billion tons excludes wastewaters for most of the wastes.

The Agency recognizes that there is more work that needs to be done to reconcile and improve these waste generation estimates. The Agency continues to enhance the [Sustainable Materials Management] Facts and Figures report by adding updated C&D generation amounts, and is beginning a study to better measure the amount of industrial secondary materials that are generated. I hope this information is helpful to you."

I can't reconcile these numbers.

The data is mixing solid wastes with things like waste processing water from mining and oil/gas development and other industries, some of which is injected into underground wells for disposal and regulated by the EPA.

Not included in the waste numbers are nitrogen and phosphorous laden run-off into waterways, plastics and other litter that makes its way into land, rivers, and oceans, and criteria air pollutants (NOx, SOx, PM, Lead). Also missing are greenhouse gas emissions, which the the U.S. emitted 7 billion metric tons of last year (1 metric ton ~ 1.1 short tons).

Trying to draw a box around what we call "waste" and "not waste" is pretty arbitrary, and is more a function of personal impression and decades of compounding federal legislation than a rigorous conservation of mass accounting across phases of matter.

Any calls for waste purity and repentance should keep that in mind.

Solid waste that goes to landfills is subset of all the waste and pollutants the EPA tracks, and is composed primarily of municipal solid waste and construction & demolition debris.

PART 5 - Focus on Two Subcategories: Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and Construction and Demolition Debris (C&D)

For the sake of defining a scope to get some idea of our waste quantity and composition, and until the EPA has better information transparency on their own subsets of waste numbers, I've focused on Municipal Solid Waste (MSW), and Construction and Demolition Debris (C&D), two types of waste which we know about from public reports and academic articles, and that that seem to constitute the bulk of our landfills.

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW)

Muncipal Solid Waste (MSW) is the target of the environmentalist adage "reduce, reuse, recycle."

It's what we think of most when we think of environmental behavior, the icon of our material existence, the preeminent example of consumerist ills. Gregg Segal did a photo project of people in California with all of the waste they generated in one week, showing just how much waste we generate in our lives.

Yet, as we saw above, MSW is – at most – a third of what our communities landfill, and an even smaller percentage of our waste.

At fault here is the human tendency of availability heuristics. We tend to overemphasize the importance of our recent in-person day-to-day experiences. Because most of us experience trash by hauling waste bins of household trash to the curb or dumpster, rather than processing waste as it's coming into a landfill, loading C&D debris, measuring our liquid or gas waste production, or verifying waste numbers in a regional EPA office, we don't have a good idea of our collective waste.

Still, there is a lot we can do to reduce MSW, and it is something we have individual control over.

EPA keeps track of MSW generation and recycling rates by material (paper, food, metals, etc.) and by product (packaging, durable goods, etc.), and occasionally releases reports summarizing the data. This data varies quite a bit. Not all states keep good track of MSW generation. Per-capita production varies by a factor of three across states (Hawaii is particularly wasteful), and recycling rates vary from the single digits to over 50% including composting. Because of the difficulty in tracking waste, the EPA method may be underestimating MSW generation by as much as 50%.

U.S. Municipal Solid Waste(source)(data)
Filter by: Method Product Category Material
Then by: Method Product Category Material

More than a quarter of MSW is food and yard trimmings - biodegradable material that could be composted instead of landfilled. Only 5% of food waste and 60% of yard trimmings are recovered for composting. As a result, about one-third of landfilled MSW is food or yard trimming waste.

When organic wastes are discarded in a landfill, the lack of oxygen causes them to break down into methane, a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. This methane is released from the landfill - often through direct venting - and greatly offsets any carbon sequestration benefit from burying the carbon-based materials. Composting organic wastes so they break down in an aerobic environment, with oxygen, releases carbon dioxide instead of methane, and the compost can then be used as fertilizer, displacing other carbon-intensive fertilizers. This has the effect of making net-negative carbon emissions, as opposed to landfilling, which can be comparable only if it captures most of the methane and uses it to generate power, displacing more carbon-intensive sources of power generation.

Methane emissions from landfills alone are equivalent to 103 million metric tons of carbon dioxide; meaning, roughly speaking, the methane emissions from landfills are about half as important as the total waste tonnage going to landfills (or a third of the environmental cost). Capturing methane at the ~2000 landfills in the U.S. is then roughly as significant an action as doubling the recycling rate.

Another quarter of MSW produced is paper, of which half is corrugated boxes and a quarter newspapers, magazines, office paper and mail.

Construction and Demolition Debris

The next major category of our landfill waste is construction and landfill debris.

Construction and demolition waste from building, bridge, and road construction and demolition accounts for somewhere between 26% and 70% of solid waste production.

As is usual with these sorts of studies, there are many ways to quantify waste, and few studies have verified data. Earlier estimates of C&D waste put the total at ~150 million tons/yr [1][2] with the majority of waste from renovation (~44%) and demolition projects (~48%). New construction only accounts for about 8% of debris.

U.S. Building Construction & Demolition Debris Source (million tons) by Type (source)(data)
U.S. Construction & Demolition Debris Composition (source)(data)

C&D waste is largely composed of asphalt and concrete (40-50%), wood (20-30%), and drywall (5-15%), though this study seemed to only include building C&D related wastes, excluding road and bridge construction and demolition.

Newer estimates put the total at 530 million tons, over 90% of which is concrete or asphalt, with half the waste from concrete and asphalt from road and bridge demolition. Rough percentages and amounts haven't changed much over twenty years; wood (20-30%), and drywall (5-15%) are still the same proportions of building-related C&D debris. Asphalt shingles are the next most common, with plastic, bricks, metal, ceramic, insulation, old corrugated containers (OCC, meaning big cardboard boxes) making up the rest.

This waste ends up equally in MSW or special C&D landfills, which require less care because most of the material is inert and non-toxic. Only 20-30% of C&D waste is recycled. Of this, asphalt has a particularly high recycling rate of around 70%-80%, being reused as asphalt pavement again, while only 50%-60% of concrete is recycled.

Cement, the binding agent in concrete, while only 12% of the mass of concrete, accounts for nearly 94% of the energy, and the vast majority of its carbon emissions. While new cement still needs to be made, because of the amount of concrete production, increasing the recycling rate of concrete from old buildings into new aggregate by 1% would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 0.3 million metric tons.

There is a large variation in C&D debris recovery rates between states, varying between 20-80%, linked to the wide variation in the cost of inert waste disposal in C&D landfills from state to state.

[Examples of a high cost/high recovery state and a low cost/low recovery state.]

U.S. Building Construction & Demolition Debris Disposal Method (source)(data)

While metals are a small component of C&D debris, they warrant special mention. Metals have high embodied energy and carbon, which means that using recycled material is much less energy and carbon intensive than using virgin material. Also, they’re found in the waste stream in relatively small quantities and can be easily separated, so they are value-dense in recyling. More than 80% of C&D steel is recycled, but aluminum and copper recycling rates are a low: 30%-53% for copper and 42%-70% for aluminum.

PART 6 - A Closer Look at Municipal Solid Waste Recycling

One man's trash is another man's small-margins commodities exchange market

Of the MSW waste we generate, two-thirds of it ends up in landfills. The rest is recovered through recycling, composting, and - in some places - incineration.

But not everything sent to a recycling center gets recovered. What ends up actually getting recycled depends on the kind of recycling, the quality of the sorted recyclables, and the value of the materials on the market.

Curbside Recycling (Paper, plastics, steel, aluminum, glass)

The economics of recycling are often missed in calls for zero waste. It costs money to sort recycling and make it usable to manufacture new products. And there needs to be a demand for the recycled materials. Manufacturers will buy slightly lower quality recycled material only if it is sufficiently cheaper than using virgin material.

Plastics are a good example of this. As oil prices drop, among other factors, it is cheaper to use virgin polyethylene terephthalate (the feedstock for plastic bottles and other consumer packaging) than to use recycled PET for plastic bottle manufacture. These price fluctuations can be substantial. The value of curbside recycling has varied by a factor of three over the last two decades, often with sharp price drops in a matter of months. When the prices drop, recyclers can take big losses, and many may end up sending once recyclable material to the landfill, or overseas where it is cheaper to process. Some materials - like plastic bags - are simply too costly and difficult to recycle to justify the benefit in doing so.

In recent years, another factor that has been affecting the profitability of recycling is the shift to single stream recycling. Single stream recycling was implemented to boost recycling rates. The idea was that by combining all recycling together into one bin, the ease of recycling would boost recovery percentage. While it has done so, it has made it harder produce high quality recycled material compared to separated recycling stream.

Single stream recycled material is collected and sent to Material Recovery Facilities (MRFs), where various blowers, optical scanners, magnets, and gravity systems separate the material into different streams. This process is imperfect, and there is significant contamination in the end products. For example, up to 10% of paper bales may include plastics and vice-versa, as air sorters confuse light plastic and heavy paper.

Example Material Recovery Facility Process (source)

Much material that could be recycled is lost in the process, ending up as contaminants in another material stream, or part of the MRF waste residuals which get landfilled. Glass complicates the process too; glass often breaks during collection, creating fine shards that are some of the trickiest and most expensive contaminants to deal with in an MRF.

Imperfect sorting explains part of the difficulty in materials recovery facility (MRF) operation.

Another issue is contamination at the bin. Single stream recycling has encouraged the habit of “aspirational recycling" - throwing non-recyclable materials into bins because the hopeful do-gooder thinks they might or should be recyclable, but they can’t be handled by the recycling facility. As much as one sixth of the material sent to MRFs isn't recyclable. Common contaminants include plastic bags, loose metal, shredded paper, flattened containers and cans (which get confused for paper), and containers with substantial liquid or food residue still inside. These contaminants end up causing cascading problems as they are mixed with other clean recycling streams, contaminating them as well.

While single stream recycling has boosted total recovery rates for materials as people are more willing to recycle, it decreases the overall fraction of recoverable materials, costs more, and uses more energy.

Single-stream recycling is therefore a local optimum. It may be the best way to increase recovery rates for a population unwilling or unable to properly separate materials for recycling, but it won't get us to recycling rates above 90% or higher as advocated by zero-waste enthusiasts, even assuming that all recyclables we produce can find a willing buyer.

If further increasing the recycling rate ends up costing more and using more energy, then it undermines the environmental justification for doing so. I'm a bit skeptical of studies that try to determine optimal recycling rates, especially ones as low as 10%, but they make a case that the optimal rate is significantly less than 100%.

With this in mind, it is likely impossible or counter-productive to achieve zero waste. Zero waste is loosely defined, and some definitions imply that zero waste means recovering 90-98+% of recoverable materials in municipal solid waste, using zero waste as a process to improve recovery rates and redesign products rather than an explicit landfill diversion goal. Still, some cities like San Francisco are trying to reach 100% diversion rate zero waste, without incineration. The last 10% will be enormously difficult, and will not be possible through recycling alone. There are some major intiatives and options to get there as I detail in the next section.

PART 7 - Major Initiatives and Strategies to Reduce Landfill Waste

There are some major initiatives to boost material recovery. The EPA's Sustainable Materials Management Strategic Plan focuses on food waste, built environment, and sustainable packaging as priorities for the next decade.

Food Waste

Most food waste in the U.S. is landfilled, creating methane emissions as described above, and missing out on a lot of potential fertilizer. Starting or participating in existing municipal composting programs is the primary way to reduce this landfilled food-waste.

Anaerobic digesters are another alternative. Digesters break down food, garden, and shredded paper waste, producing methane for power production. Anaerobic digestion is a much better capture mechanism than landfill gas, and the leftover material can then be composted. Anaerobic digestion reduces emissions through the composting process and through producing power from the methane, offsetting emissions from other (i.e. fossil fuel) electricity production. It is, however, more costly to build than municipal composting infrastructure.

Construction and Demolition Debris Recycling

There is a push in the construction industry to reduce C&D debris and increase recycling rates, partly because of environmental ratings like LEED and partly because it costs a lot to buy material that isn't used and then pay to dispose of it. Diverting demolition debris from homes and renovations will be the difficult part of this.

Sustainable packaging

There are a few companies that provide biodegradable/compostable packaging. Coupled with municipal composting programs, this has the potential to reduce quite a bit of packaging waste. It is a tricky problem to produce packaging that does not degrade and can contain food for a long shelf life, but then quickly degrades once no longer needed. More research is needed here. "Solving" the single-use food and beverage problem would greatly reduce municipal solid waste and plastic litter that ends up in oceans.

Expanded Producer Responsibility (EPR)

Expanded Producer Responsibility is legislation aimed at making manufacturers responsible for the end life of their products. Expensive and large items like refrigerators, tires, and computers are good examples of this.

Electronic Waste

Expanded Producer Responsibility is perhaps most promising for electronics, which are notoriously difficult to recycle because of the variety of materials and care needed to disassemble them. There is not enough capacity to recycle all of our electronics here in the U.S., and so while illegal under the Basel Convention, much of our electronic waste is shipped overseas to poor countries with lax environmental controls where it is burned or dissolved in strong acids, creating acute environmental and health problems. For those interested in reducing toxicity and health impacts of our waste, electronics waste is perhaps the biggest culprit and there are some organizations working on making sure we don't export our hazardous waste.

Incineration

There remains an alternative to landfills. Trash can be burned as a fuel to produce power, and such waste-to-energy plants are common in Scandinavian countries. In fact, Sweden and Norway import trash from other EU countries to burn in their waste-to-energy plants because they cannot produce enough at home.

Municipal waste isn't the easiest thing to burn. It's heat content btu/lb is much lower than coal and other feedstocks, meaning you need to put a lot more of it into the furnace to get the same energy out. And there is the really nasty problem of how to clean the exhaust gases to contain all of the toxins that are generated when you combine a smattering of complex molecules together at high temperatures. This air pollution risk, combined with the tendency for planners to site incinerators in places where people won't protest (because they are poor), has made it a key environmental justice issue that has earned it a terrible reputation from many environmental groups in the U.S.

There is also the complaint that many could-be-recoverable materials get burned as well.

On the positive side, incineration has two environmental benefits:

  1. Incinerators displace landfills and their resulting methane emissions and soil/water contamination.
  2. And incinerators displace electricity generation from other sources like coal-fired generation, which produces a lot of the same nasty air pollutants. Every 1 ton of MSW burned for fuel displaces 0.4 ton of coal.

Overall it's unclear whether incineration is a clear winner or loser. Incineration may detract from recycling and Expanded Producer Responsibility laws, and it may disincentivize the development of a circular economy where materials are perpetually reused.

But it also may be a cheaper way to deal with waste, and a decent way to produce baseload power that is currently met with coal or nuclear plants which have serious waste problems of their own. Coal slurry and coal ash is nearly hazardous waste. It's really nasty stuff, but it hasn't been classified as hazardous because of the size of the problem of dealing with it if it were. Nuclear waste is on a different level of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) concerns. While there is an extremely low likelihood of someone making a dirty bomb from nuclear waste, the potential damage from an incident is very high. Thus the risk – likelihood multiplied by damage – may be greater than the risks posed by air quality impacts of incineration, especially since we aren't very good at keeping nuclear material secure.

Perhaps if we get to a world where we are more sane with waste and recycling, we'll be better at equitable siting of incinerators and air scrubbing too.

PART 8 - Relative Importance and Individual Action

One strategy which I deliberately omitted in the previous section is that of deindustrialization or primitivism and related movements. Essentially the idea that we can reduce our environmental footprint through self-sufficient back-to-the-land agrarianism.

I appreciate the ideas of minimalism and self-sufficiency. These are great ideas to save money, and build self-esteem and self-purpose. But much of what were once geographic or economic necessities are no longer in our current globalized economy. Extreme self-sufficiency is at odds with specialization, automation, and the power of comparative advantage.

In a globalized economy, extreme self-sufficiency and hyper-localism amounts to material Balkanization that can reduce resilience, be more costly, and increase environmental harm. And even when environmental harm is reduced, it may be that the cost of doing so means valuing your time at pennies on the hour, at which point it makes more sense to offset your impacts - especially when the harms are globalized (GHG emissions) rather than localized (air pollution). If you decide to offset, Cool Earth is among the most cost-effective charities at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

While I do think in general reducing environmental damage tends be more effective when "more local" rather than "less local," the need to calculate and compare is inescapable. The compulsion towards minute and mundane impacts will not change our collective environmental and social trajectory.

"If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little."

The goal of recycling and waste management should be to prioritize and capture the most valuable components of our waste stream so they can reduce material costs, reduce environmental impact, and prolong nonrenewable resource supplies. In that spirit, here is a comparison of household recyclables to emphasize recycling importance and discourage "aspirational recycling."

Relative Recycling Importance

(Try putting in different numbers to see how the emissions saved by recycling everyday objects compares to driving.)

Recycling Greenhouse Gas Impact Comparison (source)(source)(source)(data)

(If you contest this data, please comment below with better sources. It's important I get this right!)

PART 9 - Closing Thoughts/Conclusion

After four years, the trash experiment became limiting. There were many things I liked doing but avoided because they created trash. Buying new shoes. Going hiking with friends and being extremely limited on food selection. Making things.

This was perhaps the biggest limitation. I really enjoy and admire electronics projects, woodworking, metalworking, bike maintenance, and gardening. But practicing these skills require material, tools, and the packaging that comes with them. During the four-year experiment, I switched over to doing more software projects and reading to compensate.

Also, the experiment was socially exhausting. Friends and family were mildly annoyed and mostly ambivalent. The waste experiment consumed most of my personal quota of "weirdness points" that each person gets before people start avoiding them.

Even though I'm done with the experiment, I still find myself hyper-aware of waste. I get annoyed at the frivolity with which a single granola bar wrapper or chip bag is discarded. I cringe seeing uneaten food and unused napkins thrown away. I'm baffled by the disutility on the shelves of convenience and department stores. I'm working on noticing this less so I can be out in public and not have it dominate my experience. It isn't that important. It's helpful to calibrate environmental rage relative to impact. Save it for all-glass buildings and the lack of adequate biking infrastructure.

What I gained from the experience (besides a pile of trash, some of which I threw away and some which I still have), are helpful life habits and mindsets. I have greater appreciation for the useful material possessions in my life, and treat them with greater care. I eat healthier and cook better; when you avoid packaging, meals end up being mostly produce, bulk foods, and some canned goods. It developed my sense of contentment from not having stuff that clutters and consumes space. I relied more on shared goods (library books, tools, compost bins), which made me more willing to share-alike and not feel the need to own something simply because I might at some point use it.

If you want to try the experiment, four to six weeks is probably long enough to get a sense of what you produce and have it in your mind during a few durable goods purchasing decisions. Sign up for the do-not-mail list. Spend an evening trying out dumpster diving or just curbside scavenging. (Dumpster diving is an embellished term). Inquire about municipal composting if your municipality doesn't already have it. And please, calibrate your environmental attention and energy relative to impact, not identity.

SUMMARY - TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

The short summary of the text wall above:

APPENDIX - Further Reading

References

Credits

Thank you to Katherine Watt for her keen editing and to my fellow coop members at Skullduggery, Houseasaurus, and Crows Nest for making it possible. Particulary Sam Tanyos for his worm compost wizardy, Daniel McClosky and Alex Malz for their dumpster diving instruction, and Nathan Sparks for his composting and recycling enthusiasm.

Edits

6 May 2017. Draft Published.

16 May 2017. Included Feedback from Editors.

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