For a morning keynote session at its 2011 Wastecon event, SWANA (the Solid Waste Association of North America) brought together several current and former board members and other panelists to discuss the topic of “Game Changers,” or fundamental changes underway in the solid waste industry.
Foremost among those topics were waste-to-energy and recycling initiatives and the potential for an increasingly smaller percentage of discarded materials to head to landfills.
Panelists such as Patrick Carroll of Palm Beach County (Fla.) and current SWANA President Jim Warner of Lancaster County (Pa.) remarked that their solid waste districts had recently invested heavily in waste-to-energy capacity.
Warner commented that extending the life of the landfill used to be the main reason for investing in such systems. “The energy wasn’t even talked about that much,” said Warner. Now, he said, “we’re making a 6-to-8 percent return on some of our [energy] projects,” so solid waste districts such as his can justify these projects on two fronts.
Republic Services, Scottsdale, Ariz., operates more than 200 landfills, but Will Flower, the company’s senior vice president of communications, says customers increasingly communicate that they’d like to avoid sending discarded materials there.
Looking back to the early days of SWANA in the 1960s, a ton of waste picked up by haulers was likely to result in a ton of material taken to a landfill, said Flower. That equation has changed significantly. “More and more material is recycled or composted,” said Flower. “Customers, both waste districts and commercial customers, have changed.”
Al Lynch of the solid waste department in North Vancouver, B.C., Canada, says his district has reached a 60 percent diversion goal, and he would not be surprised if that rate goes even higher with the advent of extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws in Canada. Canadian EPR laws often impose municipal recycling and collection costs onto consumer products and packaging companies. “The goal of EPR is so the products will be designed better [for recycling] by producers,” Lynch commented.
Although SWANA has the word “waste” in its name, moderator Tom Parker of consulting company CDM asked panelists whether the word could appropriately be replaced by the word “resources.”
Panelist Tom Hadden of the Metro Waste Authority in Des Moines, Iowa, said in Iowa when diverting waste into the recycling stream or energy grid, “we’ve got to do things on a voluntary basis. It has to be economically driven and you have to get there that way—which is possible.”
Carroll of Palm Beach County was more accepting of the terminology change. “We’re using even non-recyclables to generate power,” said Carroll. “Absolutely it’s a resource.”
Wastecon 2011 was Aug. 23-25 at the Gaylord Opryland Resort in Nashville, Tenn.