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Course EN-3021

Solid Waste Management and Waste Reduction Techniques

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SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT AND WASTE REDUCTION TECHNIQUES Why Should Engineers Be Interested? The management of solid waste is one the United States most protracted policy concerns. Making room for the 236 million tons of solid waste generated per year is of course a problem. But so are the increasing land use and environmental concerns surrounding the current disposal methods. Public decision-makers are faced with a wide range of tough choices and uncertain outcomes. In other words, solid waste is a problem and a problem that should be addressed on many fronts. The traditional waste management bureaucracy is dominated by engineers, whether working for a city public works department, a regional special purpose agency, or a private waste management firm. Engineers are also intimately involved in many of the activities that produce large amounts of waste, such as construction or industrial processes. We as engineers have been successful at designing better and safer disposal methods. But we have been reluctant to effect strategic planning initiatives that address the whole waste generation and disposal cycle. Source reduction, material reuse, recycling, product packaging constraints, or industrial process changesall are examples of steps that can be taken toward reducing the amount of solid waste. The current production and management mindset, though, is in many ways still focused only on finding bigger and better methods of solid waste collection and disposal. This course will outline many of the strategies the engineers can implement to move past the current mentality, to more effectively reduce and manage solid waste. Not all of the techniques listed in this course are pure engineering solutions. Many are financial or policy-oriented. But since engineers are in the drivers seat in managing solid waste, it is incumbent upon them to be aware of the entire spectrum of possibilities. Indeed, the New Zealand Trust, an organization dedicated to reducing the amount of solid waste produced in its home country, has explicitly listed engineers as key participants in the fight to waste less. This course has many parts. First, since examining the past can often help us plan for the future, the course opens with a brief history of waste management in the US, leading up to current practices. It then goes on to describe in simplified terms the technical and operational details of waste management today. Finally, it will conclude with a discussion of waste reduction techniques. BRIEF HISTORY OF SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT Mother Nature as Solid Waste Manager Humans have been generating solid waste as long as they have been consuming plants and animals. Ancient human settlements disposed of animal bones, plant residues, and other debris into what archaeologists now call middens. Today, these middens are valuable sources of information about ancient cultures.

The Ohlone Indians of the San Francisco Bay area built huge shell mounds or shell middens of discarded abalone, mussel, and clam shells--staples of the Ohlone diet--along with sediment, ash, and rocks. Over time the mounds grew larger and taller from successive use, accumulating shells, animal and human remains, ceremonial burial objects, artifacts of everyday use, and architectural remains. Over a period of about 3000 years, more than 400 of these mounds were built around the Bay, and the largest were over 200 feet long and 30 feet high. Archaeologists now think that these shell mounds had spiritual as well as practical value. That is a particularly dramatic example of early solid waste management. Most cultures merely disposed of solid waste in nearby piles. When humans were sparsely settled and when the composition of the solid waste was primarily food waste, management wasnt an issue. Often it was composted or fed to livestock. If waste was left in place, it would biodegrade. Mother Nature was the solid waste manager. This system lasted for thousands of years. However, along with the industrialization of the 1700 and 1800s came rising urbanization and rising consumption, and solid waste gradually became more and more of a problem. Beginnings of Waste Management At first, many thought that the accumulation of public refuse was merely a noisome symptom of living in a city. Public refuse, which included household wastes, ashes, horse droppings, and litter, certainly wasnt seen as something that required organized and systematic management. If waste accumulation did become a problem, a privately paid scavenger was employed to cart it away. It wasnt until the 1880s that the refuse problem began to receive widespread public notoriety. At this time, so-called sanitarians began addressing municipal water supply and sewer disposal issues. These same sanitarians began to turn their attention to solid waste as a new danger to human health, the third pollution. The public, who already experienced the benefits of publicly managed water and sewer services, embraced the idea of a publicly managed waste management effort. Boards of health or health commissions were created and given power over waste collection and disposal. These boards were usually comprised of elected officials; very few boards had medical or technical members. Early disposal methods were crude. Most cities simply dumped their collected wastes into nearby bodies of water, or, if water wasnt handy, onto vacant lots outside city limits or near undesirable neighborhoods. In 1880, 40 percent of cities dumped their waste on land or buried it, 22 percent used it as fertilizer or animal feed, 10 percent dumped it in water, and 1 percent burned it. New York City dumped over one million cartloads of garbage into the ocean in 1886. As America shifted from a producer to a consumer society from 1880 to 1920, the amount of waste generated skyrocketed. Part of the problem was the nature of the goods consumed. Mass production techniques gave rise to new products like gum, razors, and tin cans that had never been made in the home and were cheap enough to be disposable. Second, rising incomes and declining prices allowed ever increasing consumption of these items. The result was a 43 percent increase in garbage in Pittsburgh between 1903 and 1907. In the same period, Milwaukees increased by 24 percent, Cincinnatis by 31 percent, and Washington, D.C.s by 24 percent. In 1905, the average American generated 860 pounds of waste a year. 2

Quickly, then, the early disposal methods became inadequate, and public health officials struggled with new ways to dispose of the mounting refuse. The 1895 appointment of Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., as street cleaning commissioner of New York City signaled a mustneeded shift in solid waste management thinking. Waring was an engineer-cum-sanitarian, already famous at the time for his work with sewers in Memphis. To tackle the daunting solid waste problem in New York, Waring implemented a multi-faceted approach that targeted waste generation and collection as well as disposal. He started a public education campaign to encourage citizens to throw away less, to separate their waste at the curb (into garbage, rubbish, and ashes) to facilitate collection, and not to litter (which was acceptable public behavior at the time). He professionalized the street cleaning corps. He redesigned the garbage barges so they dumped waste more efficiently and farther from shore. Finally, he built rubbish-sorting and garbage-reduction plants, where waste would be sorted and salvageable materials, such as rubber, tin, or grease, picked out and resold. The profits from this were used to offset collection costs. Warings tenure was short--he left in 1898--but his impact was large. First, he assured the public that the municipal government was the best body to handle solid waste. Second, he showed that technological solutions were very successful. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he was key in passing the responsibility for solid waste from public health officials to engineers, where it has resided ever since. Unfortunately, his other initiatives, such as curb separation and minimizing waste generation, were not so long-lived. Emerging Technologies The engineering community followed Warings lead and approached the waste problem pragmatically, with the goal of minimizing cost and maximizing efficiency, particularly with respect to collection and disposal. The engineers also focused on technological solutions, ignoring issues of waste generation, consumer behavior, or public participation. Two such technologies emerged in the early 1900s as important forms of disposal: incineration and reduction. The concept of incineration, or the burning of waste, arrived from Britain in the 1880s. The first incinerator was built in New York City in 1885. By 1908, 180 incinerators had been built around the country. Some cities began experimenting with using the incinerators to generate electricity. New York City built such a plant in 1905. This proved to be too expensive and couldnt compete with traditionally generated electricity. At first, another fuel, such as natural gas or coal, was added to the garbage to facilitate combustion. This became too expensive, so the garbage was burned without the addition of fuel. However, the temperatures achieved werent very high, which resulted in noxious smoke and incomplete combustion. Incineration lost favor as quickly as it had gained it, and by 1909, only 70 plants still remained in operation. Reduction refers to a process of extracting oils from city garbage. It appeared in 1886 in Buffalo, New York, and was intended to give the city saleable byproducts like grease or fertilizer. The idea was greeted with enthusiasm, but due to undesirable side effects, especially foul odors, only twenty-six reduction plants were built by 1913. Therefore, land disposal, by default, became the primary disposal method. But merely dumping on vacant land was becoming increasingly objectionable, so engineers began searching for better 3

ways of land disposal, and in particular ways to utilize the waste, particularly the inorganic waste. Using it as fill or reclamation material became popular. Davenport, Iowa used refuse to build levees along the Mississippi, for example. The idea was especially popular in the San Francisco Bay area. Between 1860 and 1960, the San Francisco Bay decreased in size by 29 percent, from 680 square miles to 430 square miles, as communities dumped millions of tons of garbage and dredging material to generate new land for development. In 1934, Fresno, California opened the first modern sanitary landfill in the United States. The concept of sanitary fill arose in Britain in the 1920s. The method was based on using engineering techniques to control the putrefaction of organic wastes in an open dump. Layers were used: 12 inches of garbage were covered by 24 inches of ashes and street sweepings, which was covered by a layer of dirt, and then the cycle repeated. Fresno used the first cut and cover method, in which a huge trench or hole was dug and subsequently filled with the alternating layers of waste and soil. The idea caught on quickly. By 1945, over 100 cities had adopted the sanitary landfill. It replaced incineration and open dumping as the disposal method of choice for local communities. The sanitary landfill was particularly popular among engineers because it solved several problems as once. It eliminated the need for curbside waste separation. It had enormous capacity to meet future increases in waste generation. It was not labor intensive to operate and so was more cost efficient. It was a one-stop solution that was out of sight, out of mind. However, in the 1950s and 1960s sanitary landfills were little more than open dumps with some dirt and chemicals sprinkled on top. In many ways, they created more problems than they solved, such as contamination of nearby water sources, methane gas explosions, and uncontrolled fires. In early 1960, the EPA found that 90 percent of landfills could not be called sanitary because of their effects. At the same time, community opposition to landfills was on the rise. In response, in 1965 Congress passed the Solid Waste Disposal Act, which required environmentally-sound methods of waste disposal. These forces combined to precipitate a new interest in incineration. Incinerators had seen a slow but steady growth since their heyday of the early 1900s. In 1969, there were 364 municipal incinerators in operation. However, new environmental legislation and the new-found interest as a replacement for landfilling sparked radical changes in technology, especially in the idea of waste-to-energy, or the recovery of energy from burning trash. The idea was not new, of course, but new techniques and economies of scale made the method more cost efficient and more attractive. Large plants, capable of burning up to a thousand tons of unsorted waste a day, began to appear in the 1970s. Private firms entered the market to build these plants. The EPA and many state officials touted incineration as the best method to relieve landfill capacity. Incineration never took off. Many local communities saw it as worse than landfills. Smoke and odors, the same factors that doomed incineration 60 years earlier, were the main culprits. Many local communities saw it as worse than landfills. In fact, it soon became apparent that the 1965 Solid Waste Disposal Act wasnt strong enough. Furthermore, the issue of hazardous waste began to receive attention. The result was the 1976 landmark passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). There is probably no other piece of environmental 4

legislation as far-reaching, or as troubling to industry, as RCRA. It primarily addresses hazardous waste management, but it does have a significant normal solid waste component that authorized money for solid waste research and created an Office of Solid Waste within the Environmental Protection Agency. It also established minimum federal technical standards and guidelines for state plans to promote environmentally sound disposal methods, maximize the reuse of recoverable resources, and foster resource conservation. In general, it adopted a philosophy of preventing solid waste generation rather than dealing with waste disposal. RCRA focuses on hazardous waste, where it has been quite successful in curbing waste generation. It wasnt as successful in dealing with normal solid waste. In 1990, Congress passed the Pollution Prevention Act. This Act focused industry, government, and public attention on reducing the amount of pollution through cost-effective changes in production, operation, and raw materials use. Waste Management Today Today, we are left with an uneasy acceptance of the status quo. The two Bsburning and burying, or incineration and landfillingremain the primary disposal methods. Even though the number of landfills in the United States is steadily decreasingfrom 8,000 in 1988 to 1800 in 2003, the total capacity is staying relatively constant. New landfills are simply much larger than in the past. On the other hand, in 1999, there were 102 incinerators, with the capacity to burn up to 96,000 tons of waste per day. SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT At this point, we will move to waste management practices of the present. We will look at the state of the industry and current waste generation practices. First, we will look at some of the terms and concepts that will be used later in the course. Definition of waste The term solid waste is all-inclusive and encompasses a wide range of different products. Garbage is food wastes: animal, fruit, and vegetable residues. It excludes human waste. Rubbish or trash is composed of such materials as paper, cardboard, plastics, wood, glass, and cans. Ashes are what remain after the burning of wood, coal, and other materials. Construction and demolition wastes include such things as concrete, stones, plaster, plumbing parts, and shingles. Special waste includes street sweepings, roadside litter, dead animals, and abandoned vehicles. Treatment-plant waste includes the sludge and residue from water and wastewater treatment plants. The term refuse is often used to describe solid waste generated by a household and so includes garbage and rubbish. The term solid waste has a slightly different definition under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the main piece of legislation governing solid waste. Here, solid waste can be any solid, semi-solid, liquid, or contained gaseous materials that have reached the end of their useful life and can be discarded. Solid waste can come from industrial, commercial, mining, and agricultural operations as well as households.

Oftentimes, the source of waste is distinguished. Industrial wastes are those that arise from industrial processes and usually include ashes, construction waste, and special wastes. Municipal wastes are those that arise from day-to-day life in the city and are the ones we are most familiar with. They include both household and commercial waste, but also include special wastes and treatment-plant wastes. Finally, wastes are often divided into hazardous and nonhazardous wastes. A hazardous waste is one that poses an immediate or long-term threat to human, plant, or animal life. Waste Collection The mechanism of waste collection is familiar to everyone. Once a week or so, usually early in the morning, a garbage truck comes to your house to empty your garbage cans. A garbage truck can carry about five to seven tons of garbage. The trucks have compactors built in, which gives them greater capacity. Many communities also have curbside separation of recycling, and the same or a different truck and crew will pick that up. If the community is small, the garbage truck might go straight to the final disposal location at the end of its route. More usually, the truck will go to a transfer station, where the various truckloads of waste are collected and consolidated. Here, the waste is also sorted and compacted. From the transfer station, the waste goes on to final disposal at either a landfill or an incinerator. Waste Disposal As mentioned earlier, the two most common means of solid waste disposal today are sanitary landfills and incinerators. Sanitary Landfills A sanitary landfill is in principle a simple thing. Solid waste is placed into an excavated trench, where a bulldozer spreads and compacts it. At the end of each day, soil is placed over the compacted waste, in a layer of six to twelve inches deep. This layer is known as the daily cover. The next day, more waste is placed on top of the previous days daily cover, and the process repeats. This way, the landfill gradually gains height. The final earth layer is called the final cover, and it is two to five feet thick. The name sanitary notwithstanding, landfills can be nasty places. The buried waste decomposes in an anaerobic environment, so it generates methane gas (so-called landfill gas, or LFG). Rainwater and water entrained in the waste itself collects and trickles down through the landfill, picking up chemicals and becoming a toxic product called leachate. Leachate can work its way into surface or underground water sources. Both LFG and leachate must be managed, both during and after landfill operation. The EPA recognizes four types of landfills: municipal solid waste, bioreactors, construction debris, and industrial waste. The names are self-explanatory, with the exception of a bioreactor. A bioreactor is a municipal solid waste landfill that is designed to quickly transform and degrade 6

organic waste. The increase in waste degradation and stabilization is accomplished through the addition of liquid and, in some cases, air to enhance microbial processes. Bioreactors are a new approach to landfill design and operation that differ from the traditional "dry tomb" municipal landfill approach. Incineration Burning solid waste has been popular in the United States, and it remains a popular in many others areas of the world. It has benefits: it reduces solid waste by up to 90 percent by volume 75 percent by weight, helps to destroy bacteria and germs, and reduces the amount of waste to be landfilled. After efficient combustion, only residual ash remains for disposal. Incineration also has its drawbacks. It obviously produces smoke and odor, and the residual ash must itself be disposed of, usually in a special-purpose landfill called a monofill. The smoke often contains numerous pollutants, such as cadmium, lead, mercury, dioxin, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen chloride. Industry Composition Today, the solid waste management industry is a mix of public and private sector, of small and large firms, of horizontal and vertical integration. In 1999, 27,028 organizations operated in the industry. Almost 56 percent of these organizations were public sector entities, while 44 percent were private companies. Of the total, approximately 15,500 (57 percent) provided collection and hauling services only and did not own or operate any solid waste disposal or process facilities such as landfills or incinerators. The remaining 11,500 organizations operated the estimated 15,700 solid waste management facilities in the U.S. The private sector owned 53 percent of the solid waste facilities and the public sector owned 47 percent. In total, the industry managed approximately 545 million tons of waste. (This number includes waste that is not classified municipal solid waste by the EPA). Of that total, about 374 million tons was landfilled; 31 million tons was incinerated; and 140 million tons was recycled. The private sector handled 69 percent all the solid waste recycled, incinerated, or landfilled, while the public sector handled 31 percent. Most private firms are small: a single landfill, or a fleet of garbage trucks. Some are quite large. Waste Management, Incorporated, for example, operates 284 active landfills, 16 waste-toenergy plants, 73 landfill gas-to-energy facilities, 160 recycling plants, 293 transfer stations, and over 1,400 collection facilities. Allied Waste Industries, Incorporated, operates in 39 states through a network of 329 collection companies, 150 transfer stations, 167 active landfills, and 65 recycling facilities. A public sector waste management organization can be a department of the local government. The city of Houston, for example, has a Department of Solid Waste Management. Or it might be a special district. The Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Solid Waste District is a dependent district. Palm Beach County, Florida, has a county Solid Waste Authority, which is an independent district. 7

It is important to remember that even if a local government does not actually perform waste collection or disposal, it will often have an agency responsible for managing the private firms. The Solid Waste Agency of Lake County, Illinois, for example, provides technical and business expertise to help municipalities manage their solid waste contracts. Many times, the public and private sector complement each other. In Houston, for instance, the city Department of Solid Waste owns the landfill and recycling facilities, as well as collects the waste from about 67 percent of residences and businesses. Private firms collect from the remaining 33 percent. Since this portion tends to be large businesses, private firms collect about 65 percent of total waste. Industry Finance Many waste reduction techniques are financial or economic in nature. For this reason a brief discussion of the solid waste industry financial structure is warranted. Solid waste agencies generally raise revenue through user fees. These user fees come in various types. The most common type is a monthly or yearly fee charged for waste collection. This fee often shows up as a separate line item on some other bill like the property tax bill or the water bill. Typical rates might be $75 a year for a single family residence, $50 a year for apartments. Commercial establishments usually pay based on the size of dumpster they use. The second user fee is called the tipping fee. This is the fee charged for actually disposing of the waste at the waste facility. The specific tipping fee structure varies from waste disposal facility to waste disposal facility, but generally, waste disposal is charged on a per-ton basis. Different types of waste are priced at different amounts. For example, a landfill in North Carolina charges $29.50 per ton of municipal solid waste, but $59.00 per ton of construction and demolition waste. Individuals who visit the landfill are usually charged a flat fee, $20 per visit for example. Since the organization that collects solid waste is not necessarily the organization that operates the disposal facility, the tipping fee is a separate fee from the collection fee. In many ways, the current state of solid waste management and finance is amazingly successful. On average, it only costs a municipality about $70 to $80 to collect and dispose of one ton of solid waste. A household may only spend $100 a year on waste collection. Considering the labor, capital, and transport costs associated with the whole process, these figures are quite low compared to other infrastructure services. But since they are so low, there is little incentive to change behavior.

Waste Generation Patterns Today In 2003, U.S. residents, businesses, and institutions produced more than 236 million tons of solid waste, which is approximately 4.6 pounds of waste per person per day or 1680 pound per year. By comparison, European countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom generate around two to three pounds per person per day. 8

When developing waste reduction techniques, it must be noted that the solid waste volume produced by a community is composed of a wide variety of different materials. This mix of wastes is known as its waste stream. Table 1 below shows the waste stream for Alameda County, California, in 2000 (population 1,455,000). Table 1: Alameda County Waste Stream Composition Material Groups Organics (rubber, wood, textiles, leather) Paper (including magazines and newspapers) Misc. Waste (including computers, construction debris) Food Waste Plastic Yard Waste (lawn clippings, branches, etc) Metals (cans, large kitchen appliances) Glass Total

Tons Disposed 361,156 355,288 252,378 184,717 164,725 109,393 95,274 29,754 1,552,683

% of total 23.3 22.9 16.3 11.9 10.6 7.0 6.1 1.9 100.0

Of course, every community will be different. Table 2 below compares Alameda County to the national average. Also, waste production changes over time as well. Table 3 chronicles the changes in the national average waste stream over the last four decades. It paints a picture of changing consumption habits and also successful recycling programs. Identifying and classifying the waste stream is the first step in developing any waste reduction strategies. Numerous methods exist to do this. The California Integrated Waste Management Board has waste stream calculators on its web site (www.ciwmb.ca.gov/LGCentral/WasteStream). The EPA also has tools on its website (www.epa.gov/osw). Local decision makers must note that both the rate of waste generation and the composition of the waste stream change over time.

Table 2: Waste Stream Comparison in 2000 (% weight) Material Groups

Alameda

National 9

Organics (rubber, wood, textiles, leather) Paper (including magazines and newspapers) Misc. Waste (including computers, construction debris) Food Waste Plastic Yard Waste (lawn clippings, branches, etc) Metals (cans, large kitchen appliances) Glass Total

County 23.3 22.9 16.3 11.9 10.6 7.0 6.1 1.9 100.0

Average
12.3 37.5 3.3 11.3 10.5 11.8 7.8 5.4

100.0

Table 3: National Average Waste Stream over Time (by % weight) Material 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2003 Groups 7.5 7.3 9.1 11.6 12.3 13.2 Organics 34.0 36.6 36.4 35.4 37.5 35.2 Paper 1.6 2.1 3.2 3.0 3.3 3.3 Misc. Waste 13.8 10.6 8.6 10.1 11.3 11.7 Food Waste 0.4 2.4 4.5 8.3 10.5 11.3 Plastic 22.7 19.2 18.1 17.1 11.8 12.1 Yard Waste 12.3 11.4 10.2 8.1 7.8 8.0 Metals 7.6 10.5 10.0 6.4 5.4 5.3 Glass Total weight 88.1 121.1 151.6 205.2 234.0 236.2 (million) tons)

WASTE DIVERSION, REDUCTION, AND ELIMINATION Introduction As we have seen thus far, the traditional way of dealing with solid waste has been to implement more efficient collection systems to convey waste to bigger and better disposal facilities. This traditional method is based on technology and seeks to minimize cost. As a community produces more and more solid waste, the normal response is to build another or a larger landfill. This approach is fast becoming untenable, for many reasons. Local budgets are becoming increasingly stretched. Suitable locations for new landfills or incinerators are increasingly hard to find as both urban areas and community opposition grow. Environmental awareness is growing too, both in regards to waste disposal and waste generation. Energy and resources are becoming more expensive. Therefore, engineers and other decision makers need to consider waste diversion, waste reduction, and waste elimination. In other words, they must move past the two Bs and on to the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle. 10

The Three Rs Reduce Source reduction, often also called waste prevention, (and different from the process of reduction described earlier) refers to any change in the design, manufacture, purchase, or use of materials or products (including packaging) to reduce their amount or toxicity before they become municipal solid waste. Simply put, source reduction means producing, consuming, and throwing away less. It can be as complex as redesigning a product to use fewer raw materials in production, to have a longer life, or to be used again after its original use is completed. For example, the weight of a 2-liter plastic soft drink bottle has dropped from 68 grams to 51 grams since 1977. That has kept over 250 million pounds of plastic per year out of the waste stream. Reduction can also be as simple as reusing those plastic soft drink bottles after theyre empty. Not only will this keep the bottles out of the waste stream, but it will obviate the need to buy a new plastic bottle. It is important to remember that waste is not just created when consumers throw things away. Waste is created at every step in the life cycle of a productfrom extraction of raw materials to transportation to processing, manufacture, and use. Source reduction is the most preferable method of waste management since it averts the creation of waste in the first place. Reuse Reuse is closely tied to source reduction. Reusing products decreases both the amount of postconsumer solid waste, but also reduces the amount of waste created in the production of those products. Simple ways to reuse include using cloth napkins, using refillable pens or rechargeable batteries, and turning empty jars into leftover food containers. It also includes donating or selling old or unwanted clothing and other items. Reuse is considered better than recycling. Resource recovery, a term closely related to reuse, refers to the extraction of useful raw materials, such as glass or metal, or energy from solid waste. Recycle Recycling is the best-known technique for reducing the amount of solid waste generated. Recycling means reusing materials and objects in their original or changed forms rather than discarding them as wastes. Recycling turns materials that would become waste into materials that can be reprocessed for re-use. Recycling is one of the best environmental success stories of the last decade. Recycling, including composting, diverted 64 million tons of material away from landfills and incinerators in 1999. In general, the US recycles about 28 percent of its waste. Some typical recycled materials include car batteries, recycled at a rate of 97 percent, paper and paperboard at 42 percent, and yard trimmings at 45 percent. Targeting Waste Generation 11

What follows now is a long list of possible waste reduction and waste elimination techniques, specific methods of implementing the Three Rs. As stated earlier, not all of these strategies are purely engineering but can be broken into three categories: technological, financial, and policy. They are in no particular order and of course are not appropriate in all situations. When thinking of solid waste reduction, it is important to remember that waste is generated at every step in the process that brings a product to market, from resource extraction to manufacture to packaging to consumption. The techniques listed here are not revolutionary. Colonel Waring used many of them over 100 years ago in New York City. But they do require changes in thinking and changes in behavior. Technological Tools Waste-to-Energy One form of resource recovery can be found in the waste-to-energy (WTE) plant. A WTE plant burns waste as a way to produce electricity, allowing the energy in solid waste to be recovered as electrical energy. One pound of waste can keep a 60-watt light bulb burning for 5 hours, or a low energy bulb for as long as 24 hours. The WTE plant is characterized by highly controlled combustion supported by extensive air pollution control and ash management systems. In a typical process, the waste is first sorted to remove any large noncombustible material. From there, it enters the combustion area, where it is burned at a temperature of about 1800oF. The hot gases from this combustion are used to generate steam, which in turn is used to generate electricity. The gases then go through a scrubbing process, which cools them, neutralizes any acids, and removes particles. There are currently 89 waste-to-energy plants operating in 27 states, handling about 95,000 tons of solid waste a day (the waste produced by 41 million people). These waste-to-energy plants generate about 2,500 megawatts of electricity to meet the power needs of nearly 2 million homes. Gasification and pyrolysis are two emerging technologies for turning waste into energy from waste streams of a uniform or homogenous nature. In gasification, a thermo-chemical process heats biomass in an oxygen deficient atmosphere to produce a low-energy gas containing hydrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. The gas can then be used as a fuel in a turbine or combustion engine to generate electricity. Pyrolysis is similar, but the biomass is heated in the complete absence of oxygen. Gas, olefin liquid, and char are produced in various quantities. The gas and oil can be processed, stored and transported, if necessary, and combusted in an engine, gas turbine, or boiler. Char can be recovered from the residue and used as a fuel, or the residue passed to a gasifier and the char gasifed. Landfill gas to electricity Another form of resource recovery is to take the methane gas generated by landfills (landfill gas, or LFG) and use it to generate electricity. Most commonly, this is done at the landfill itself. The electricity is generated in the same way as at any coal- or natural gas-fired electrical power 12

plant. An LFG-to-electricity system has three basic components: the gas collection system, which gathers the gas being produced by the landfill; the gas processing and conversion system, which cleans the gas and converts it into electricity; and the equipment which connects to the electrical grid. A LFG-to-electricity system at the Central Landfill in Johnston, Rhode Island, which receives about 90 percent of the states solid waste, supplies as much as 12.3 megawatts of electrical power, enough capacity to serve roughly 17,000 households. The landfill then sells this electricity to a local subsidiary of New England Power. Landfill reuse While not strictly a waste management tool, its worthwhile to take into account that the landfill will one day be full and, with proper precautions, available for other uses. That day may not come for 20 to 30 years, but these are the time horizons often contemplated in city plans. The urban fringe may have extended that far by then. It is not uncommon to turn waterfront waste dumps into marinas or parks. However, contrary to popular belief, wastes in landfills dont biodegrade or decompose quickly. Available oxygen is quickly used up beneath the soil covers, and so the decomposition process becomes anaerobic and proceeds slowly. Although it isn't known long how this process lasts, some experts estimate that it will take between 300 and 1,000 years for a landfill to stabilize, or for the wastes to be completely decomposed. Even after a landfill is closed, all the environmental control measures, such as landfill gas collection and leachate monitoring, must continue. Very few modern landfills have reached the stage where they no longer need longterm care and management. The idea of a park or even a housing development on top of an old landfill may sound distasteful, but with the right measures just described, it is a valid option for landfill reuse. Financial Tools Increase Tipping Fees Applying full social cost accounting techniques to solid waste collection may lead to higher tipping fees. Increasing tipping fees to levels that incorporate the full cost of externalities, both positive and negative, into solid waste calculations, internalizes all costs. This in turn could alter waste generator and consumer behavior to decrease waste generation. The EPA has begun to embrace the concept of full cost accounting as a powerful waste management technique [32]. Variable User Fees (Pay as You Throw) Pay as You Throw (PAYT) is the term used to describe the application of variable user fees to solid waste. As described earlier, in most communities, households or businesses pay a flat monthly or yearly fee for solid waste collection, despite the amount of waste generated. Obviously, there is no incentive, then, to minimize waste generation. Under a PAYT program, however, a household is given an incentive to reduce waste generation. Typically, a household 13

is given a choice of various sizes of garbage can. The bigger the can, the higher the monthly fee associated with waste collection. (In urban areas, a garbage can might be substituted with a special garbage bag; waste collectors will only collect waste in the proper bag, and the bag pricing scheme will be the same). This provides a price incentive to reduce solid waste generation. A recycling program goes hand-in-hand with a PAYT program to provide an outlet for the diverted wastes. (There is always the concern, though, that this could lead to increased illegal dumping of solid waste. An enforcement effort probably should accompany these programs). Advance Disposal Fee This is essentially a fee designed to cover the externalities associated with disposal of the product. A modest fee is added up-front to the cost of electronic and other big-ticket items such as computers, printers, appliances and vehicles, which is redeemed at the end of their lives to help cover recovery, dismantling, or recycling. Deposit/Refund Systems Some experts have advocated robust deposit/refund systems, also known as bottle bills. Under these familiar schemes, a deposit is paid when the product is purchased but returned to the buyer when the product is recycled. This system is not new for such things as soda bottles, but there is no reason why the idea cant be applied to many other products. It also creates meaningful income and employment opportunities. Policy Tools Landfill Bans By progressively banning from landfills toxic materials and materials for which markets exist or could realistically exist in the future, waste generators are forced either to enter those markets or reduce their production of those types of waste material. Extended Producer Responsibility Borrowing a page from the Resource and Recovery Act, a more radical approach is to impose cradle-to-grave material management responsibility on municipal solid waste generators, as is already done for hazardous waste. Since waste generators would have legal or financial responsibility for waste, they will likely produce less of it. Thrift Stores Thrift stores are remarkably efficient venues for recycling and reusing post-consumer goods. Goodwill stores, for instance, re-sell almost 99 percent of what they receive in donations. And they arent marginal operators, either; Goodwill and Salvation Army stores, to use two common examples, generate over $14 billion a year in their combined revenues. Unfortunately but not surprisingly, thrift stores often fall victim to zoning regulations. In many cases, local citizens see 14

thrift stores as magnets for undesirable people and so agitate against them in the form of enacting zoning changes. In other cases, thrift stores, which operate on paper-thin budgets, cannot meet standards for building appearance or similar requirements and are forced to close their doors. In short, then, policymakers could actually make a significant step toward solid waste solutions by considering thrift stores in their proper context and working to enable them. Product Content Standards Designers can specify recycled-content or low-waste products in design, construction, and procurement contracts. The building industry is one of the largest sources of solid waste, and so if recycled-content material and material-efficient procedures are designed into buildings or specified in contracts, significant waste reduction can result. Engineers can also specify quality standards on things like compost or mulch, to guarantee a certain, reliable level of quality. This in turn will encourage greater use in agriculture, where current uncertainty in compost and mulch quality is an obstacle. Finally, engineers and local officials can prohibit certain products. Both the cities of Los Angeles and Berkeley, California, for instance, have old-growth-wood-free purchasing ordinances in place. Oakland, California, passed a measure to change the local tax treatment of raw materials for goods manufactured in the city. This particular measure had an economic development purpose, but theres no reason a similar measure couldnt be passed to influence product content. Green Building Government can incorporate green building standards in local ordinances or in construction contracts. Green building is defined as design and construction practices that significantly reduce or eliminate the negative impact of buildings on the environment and occupants.. The principles of green building cover many topics, stretching from indoor air quality to water supply. However, most importantly for purposes of this paper, they also address the generation of construction and demolition waste. Currently, 136 million tons of waste are generated each year in the construction and demolition of buildings. This represents a substantial fraction of total national solid waste production, and clearly any steps to reduce this waste will have significant impact. Numerous cities already have some sort of green building policy, including San Jose, California, and Portland, Oregon. The city of Pleasanton, California, recently adopted a green building ordinance for commercial buildings. Such a green building ordinance can be controversial, however. The Pleasanton Chamber of Commerce opposed the ordinance because it felt that commercial buildings would become more expensive to build and that Pleasanton would thereby lose a competitive edge. Mandatory Corporate Environmental Reporting Ensure that all businesses produce waste plans and report on their progress towards targets. The City of Berkeley, California, recently considered a measure to prohibit the sale of non-fair trade coffee; it is not inconceivable that similar measures could be passed that require local businesses to disclose their solid waste information. Resource Recovery 15

Many commentators such as the Sierra Club and others feel that current disposal methods are wasteful because they destroy products and raw materials that could be recovered and reused. For this reason, they support the emerging trend of resource recovery parks. According to the California Integrated Waste Management Board, a resource recovery park is the collocation of reuse, recycling, compost processing, manufacturing, and retail businesses in a central facility. The public can bring all their wastes and recoverable materials to this facility at one time. Resource recovery parks also sell or give away reused and recycled-content products. Resource recovery parks can be quite successful. One such park, located in San Leandro, California, recovered a significant amount of materials as seen here in Table 4. Table 4. Recovered Materials, 1999 Material Tons Wood/green waste 119,505 Curbside recyclables 84,532 Dirt 15,881 Concrete 7,275 Paper 3,706 Appliances 1,998 Scrap metal 1,690 Tires 1,554 Total 236,141 The results in Table 4 are even more impressive when one considers that San Leandro is in Alameda County. If we compare the numbers in Table 4 with those in Table 1 above, we see that resource recovery parks are serious business: the park diverted 15 percent of the Countys waste. However, resource recovery parks often need help from local government, in the form of amenable zoning, promotion, and financial assistance.

Other Strategies The New Zealand Trust is an organization dedicated to making New Zealand produce no net waste by 2020 (the Zero Waste campaign). They have developed several other waste reduction strategies. These strategies are not necessarily within the responsibility or authority of engineers, but they are noteworthy nonetheless. Deconstruction Standards Create guidelines and standards for deconstruction of buildings to ensure maximum capture of reusable materials. Low Interest Loan Fund 16

Establish a low interest loan fund for businesses developing systems and new uses for recovered materials. Resource Recovery Infrastructure Ensure that every wasting opportunity at home, in the street or in the factory is matched by, or replaced with a resource recovery opportunity. Make resource recovery visible, accessible, and more convenient than other waste disposal options. Stockpile Resources Ensure that every landfill or transfer station has sufficient storage space available to stockpile resources until buyers are found. In some cases mono filling would be appropriate. Separate at Source Establish mandatory wet/dry separation at source. Extended Operator Liability Operators are responsible for long term environmental effects of waste disposal facilities (landfills, incinerators etc). Grant Programs Provide funding for start-up projects and community education initiatives that promote lowwaste measures but that have difficulty finding funding. Community Education Programs Develop community education campaigns that help everyone to participate in waste reduction. School Education Programs Develop resources for schools to teach waste minimization. Training and Research Support the establishment of a waste reduction sector, to design and test new technologies and research new materials and processes. Measurement and Monitoring Implement formal measuring and monitoring systems to enable measurement and management of progress towards waste reduction targets. 17

Community Ownership of the Waste Stream Give private and non-profit enterprises in the recycling and resource recovery industry access to the wasted resource stream. Facility Standards/Permits Create standards for resource recovery and recycling facilities that would be part of specifications for contracts and would also give the public confidence to use these facilities. Materials Exchanges Create a network of materials exchanges to enable industry to feed off each others waste products. Recycling Targets for Businesses Challenge business to excel in recycling through mandatory recycling targets. Grants/Tax Incentives Provide support for industry to use recycled materials in new and existing products through research and development grants and tax incentives. Branding Systems for Low Waste Businesses Develop criteria for low waste businesses that, if meeting the set criteria, would be able to display a recognized brand. This brand could be similar to the well-known recycling symbol.

Packaging Levy Establish a minimum packaging levy on all nonbiodegradable and non-reusable packaging. CONCLUSION Solid waste is still our third pollution. Managing it and especially reducing and minimizing its generation should be a goal of everyone. Engineers in particular have a role in waste minimization because of both their involvement in producing waste and their leadership positions in waste management and disposal. Tackling the solid waste problem is a multifaceted task, and this course was intended to provide engineers with an understanding of the solid waste situation in the US today and a glimpse into the numerous and diverse waste minimization and reduction strategies they can implement.

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27. Fetter, C. W., Contaminant Hydrogeology. 1993, New York: Macmillian Publishing Company. 28. Land Disposal Restrictions. 2002, Environmental Protection Agency: Washington, DC. 29. Relis, Paul and Howard Levenson, Discarding Solid Waste As We Know It: Managing Materials in the 21st Century. 1998, Santa Barbara, CA: Community Environmental Council. 30. An Introduction to the U.S. Green Building Council and the LEED Green Building Rating System. 2001, United States Green Building Council: Washington, DC. 31. Palmer, Karen, et al., The Cost of Reducing Municipal Solid Waste: Comparing DepositRefunds, Advance Disposal Fees, Recycling Subsidies, and Recycling Rate Standards. 1995, Resources for the Future: Washington, DC. 32. Questions and Answers about Full Cost Accounting. 1998, Environmental Protection Agency: Washington, DC. 33. Yates, Jon, Community Group Exults in Thrift Store Rejection, in The Tennessean. 2000: Nashville. 34. Crime Stats Overstated; Building Together Rezoning Rejected, in Mordecai News. 2001, Mordecai Citizens Advisory Council: Mordecai, North Carolina. 35. Energy from Waste. 2005, Renewable Energy Association, London.

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