Americans put out their trash every week and a truck comes to take it away. But there really is no “away,” as all the pizza boxes, plastic bags and food scraps have to go somewhere. According to various studies, Americans produce between 1,600 and 1,700 pounds of garbage each year, roughly three times higher than the global average. That’s enough to bury almost a million football fields under six feet of trash.
Mike Ewall began fighting incinerators or so-called “trash to energy” plants in the 1990s while a high school student. He went on to found the Philadelphia-based Energy Justice Network, which still focuses its work on preventing the construction of or closing down incinerators. But he’s expanded his area of interest to include the disposal of all garbage and how to minimize it to Zero Waste.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Ewell about the relative toxicity and sustainability of incineration, landfills and recycling — and describes what he calls the “hierarchy of waste.”
MIKE EWALL: People seem to think that incineration is better than landfilling. However, when you burn waste, you’re putting about 70 percent of it into the air in the form of air pollution and the other 30 percent in the form of toxic ash, which still goes to a landfill, making the landfill smaller but more toxic. It’s not the size of landfills that’s harmful to people; it’s the toxicity. So it’s actually worse to burn and put all that pollution in the air, make things more toxic and then make the landfill more dangerous than if you were just to put the waste straight into the landfill at less cost.
MELINDA TUHUS: I guess I would say that the best solution is to create less waste. There’s also recycling, which is supposed to be preceded by reducing and reusing before you recycle. Seems like that doesn’t happen much, and it seems like recycling has completely fallen apart from what it was 20 years ago, when there were maybe fewer items but they were separated and it was cleaner stuff and there was a market for it and now it seems like the market has fallen apart.
MIKE EWALL: So, recycling markets are very strong right now, and they’re expected to stay strong for the foreseeable future. They were having problems in the past few years because China got fed up with the poorly sorted recyclables from single-stream recycling programs, and China and other Asian countries started saying No to taking our recyclables. But the domestic markets have caught up. There are a number of plastics that don’t have a market, that are not easily recyclable, so out of 1s, 2s and sometimes 5s — those other plastics would need to be phased out. They are some of the more toxic plastics. And glass also has a problem unless we have a bottle bill; separating glass by color gives it a really strong market, but when it’s not separated well it’s not as valuable, but still has some value to it. So I would say recycling markets are good now, they are going to stay good, and this myth that somehow recycling is broken is wrong.
MELINDA TUHUS: Wow, I had no idea! That good news, and I’m glad to hear it. I want to talk a little bit about how to arrive at Zero Waste. Another huge piece of the garbage situation is organics that people throw away from food preparation or food spoilage – food in the fridge that never gets eaten and spoils. What can you say about that? Is there anything happening to deal with that piece of it?
MIKE EWALL: Let me get to that by going through the hierarchy and what I consider the order of priority. I like to start at the top of the hierarchy and working my way down. I think the number one important thing to do is make sure that you’re not doing the most dangerous thing you could possibly do, which is to use incineration. So, incineration is not even on the Zero Waste hierarchy on purpose, because you recognize that it’s the most expensive and polluting way to manage waste, but also that it often involves contracts that require that you generate a certain amount of waste or pay anyway to the incineration company, as if you did. It’s called Put or Pay clauses in their contracts, which landfills don’t have, but incinerators generally do. And that punishes you for doing the right thing, so that is just deadly to a Zero Waste effort, and due to the grave health and environmental harms from incineration, it’s imperative to get incineration out of the way before prioritizing any other pieces of the Zero Waste solution.
To start at the top of the Zero Waste hierarchy, we start with redesigning and rethinking things. Ultimately, we need to start with corporate industrial design and how products are produced, because for every pound of waste you throw in your trash can, 70 pounds of waste were created before you even picked that item up off the store shelf. So, we really can’t tackle this whole system by composting and recycling our way out of things. We must start at the top of the Zero Waste hierarchy and deal with the products themselves and how they’re manufactured.
Then, once you’ve done that, you get to reduce, reuse, recycle and compost, and there are many different policies that can get you there. There are efforts by states and local governments to ban certain types of single-use plastics, which is great, and reusing, of course, thrift stores and other things that encourage reuse, and then the recycling and composting are the next priorities. And the most effective way to get the reduce, reuse, recycling and composting going on is to have a system called unit-based pricing, otherwise known as pay as you throw or save as you throw. This is where people – and companies, too – should be paying per bag or per bin or in the companies’ case, per dumpster – so that the price signal is there. Just like we pay for how much electric, water and gas that we use, with waste it’s often different. Your neighbor can put out ten bags a week and you put out one, you end up paying the same amount and it’s not fair. So, when they do charge people per bag, you find instantly the amount of waste generated that hits the curb goes down by 44 percent.
Learn more about the group’s work toward a clean energy, zero-emission and zero waste future by visiting the Energy Justice Network at energyjustice.net.
