Recycling Advocates of Middle Tennessee

Methodology

Zero Waste

Internalization of economic, environmental, and health costs and benefits of both material recovery and disposal favor zero waste. Therefore, that is what RAM will present here. Why anything else?

Key Realizations

First, most environmental damage from disposal happens during virgin resource extraction. Far more. On average, roughly 50 times more. Not even remotely close. Varies widely by type of material. E.g. 1 ton of cell phones contains more gold than 1 ton of ore mined to extract that same amount of gold. About half of all U.S. solid waste is mining processing waste, but much mining required for U.S. goods happens outside the U.S.

Second, most economic benefit from recycling comes from manufacturing products from recovered materials as feedstock. Developing local remanufacturing makes internalizing material recovery benefits easier for policymakers to understand, and communicate to constituents. Additional costs to recover materials are far less than benefits to waste producers' bottom lines as a result of economic expansion stemming from additional remanufacturing fed by recovered feedstocks.

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Third, typically most, about 2/3, of municipal solid waste (MSW) comes from commercial sources. Much of that is construction & demolition (C&D) wastes. Both of these are typically far richer in recyclable material value, and easier to recover from, than residential MSW. Often they are already either wet or dry streams, which makes cost-efficient wet/dry material recovery techniques easier to apply. In many cases, much larger quantities of single commodities are easy to separate at the source. Many source-separation practices are done under employers' supervision.

Fourth and finally, today's municipalities typically focus nearly exclusively on single-family residential wastes. Causes for this include:

Disposal companies promote this heavily, to divert attention away from more lucrative disposal of commercial wastes.
Many environmental activists fall for this trick because they do not do their homework.
Most voters -- who influence officeholders -- live in single family homes.
Municipalities often collect MSW from only single family residences.
Disposal interests keep the focus on this sector by focusing on gimmicks like "Pay-As-You-Throw" (PAYT), with its endless complications, and preservation of disposal. PAYT tricks citizens and officeholders into thinking the problem can be fixed most through higher participation rates, instead of switching to much higher-yield wet/dry systems. In wet/dry systems, participation boosts quality. Not diversion. Wet/dry systems typically recover both more high-quality materials, and more low-quality materials, than source-separated recycling programs. Recovery via wet/dry systems is only limited by market availability. Markets most typically scarce involve composting, aggregates, heavy-molded/extruded products, and pyrolysis.

Key Must-Haves

All wastes must be processed, even if that only requires quality control.
For adequate capacity, All waste processing facilities must be sized to handle maximum expected inputs over the coming decade, at least.
To avoid downtime, All facilities must be designed sufficiently robustly to handle all types of wastes delivered to them.
Facilities must include, at a minimum, the following (letters match corresponding items on the Zero-Waste page):
1. Dry waste sorting/recovery facilities, for both MSW and C&D wastes, typically separately, as C&D sorting systems have been developed already as a specialty. Residues like e.g. soiled paper would go to Wet waste composting/anaerobic digestion (B below), and broken glass would go to Aggregates (C below).
2. Wet waste composting/anaerobic digestion facilities. Inorganic residues screened out from the compost would go to Dry waste sorting/recovery facilities (A above), which might send them to C, D, or E below. It is important not to shred on the front end, which can result in inorganics too small to be screened out from compost later. Glass should be screened out for use in aggregates, and not ground up as part of a compost product -- as agricultural markets involving livestock detest a hoof/foot-irritating component.
3. Aggregate sorting/recovery facilities. This would market these to contractors as a substitute for mined gravels.
4. Heavy molded/extruded products facilities, which often create composites out of thermoplastics as binders and other wastes as fillers (e.g. Trex, which combines film plastics with wood), some uses of which are illustrated as examples below,
5. Pyrolysis or other energy/fuels production facilities (e.g. Enerkem, which makes methanol and cellulosic alcohol out of waste) for wastes that can not be dealt with better (higher-value product feedstock) by facility types A-D. This does not include incineration of wastes, as this produces environmentally inferior byproducts. Residues would go to facility types A, C, or D, depending on what they are -- e.g. metals to A, ceramics to C, and residual chars to D for use as fillers.
6. Hazardous waste collection and processing facilities, which emphasize re-use as much as possible. Contractors and individuals can sign waivers and take out discards from others that they can use instead of new products.
7. Another essential component is a contractual requirement that all residues coming from facilities A-F must be part of the feedstock for other facilities A-F. Not disposal.
Other key must-haves include:
1. Successful marketing of all recovered commodities -- material recovery is measured in internalized value.
2. Maximizing local market development -- to see results -- and be able to incorporate value into internalized disposal fees with a minimum of dispute over valuation.
3. All economic, environmental, and health costs and benefits need to be internalized for both material recovery, and hypothetical disposal. Flow control needs to be assured, economically if possible, to steer all unmanaged wastes to processing facilities. If allowable by the state, disposal tip fees need to incorporate the full internalized cost of disposal for wastes coming from the jurisdiction aiming for zero waste -- to make these far higher than processing facility tipping fees. If such charges are levied by an extra-jurisdictional disposal entity, it would help the flow control to work if part of the cost assessed were to go to the disposal entity, to pay for their efforts, and in order to assure their cooperation.
4. Collection needs to be coordinated with processing (A-F above). Franchising should be considered, where a single collection and processing entity is obligated to produce the desired results, with penalties for failure sufficient to assure compliance. As a starting point for developing this, the city of San Jose, California has made their contract for this in the commercial sector (for a wet/dry approach) available to the public online.

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