By Mark Howell Keys News January 31 2010
Whoops and hollers from a cheerful citizenry greeted the "zero waste" workshop at a packed Old City Hall on Tuesday. Five times we estimate the applause was so raucous it could be heard on the street outside. It will serve to track those moments as this account unfolds.
At the urging of Green Living and Energy Education (the local group known as GLEE), the mayor and city commissioners invited Eric Lombardi, an eco-guru from Boulder, Colo., to explain to Key West the idea of zero waste.
The phrase means, ideally, that no waste whatever would leave this island. Our trash will become something else, either kept here (composting) or shipped out for profit (recycling). None of it will be buried, none of it burned.
The first big cheer came when Lombardi proclaimed from the podium, "Your public wants more recycling!" The roar at this took even him by surprise. "There, right there," he told commissioners, his open palm sweeping the hall, "is why politicians should move on zero waste."
Bearded and big chested, Lombardi has already yanked recycling out of the closet in places as far away as Wales and Samoa. Most recently he's been doing it in the Rockies, home of Eco-Cycle, a company created back in 1976 (how quickly we have risen to the bottom) in order to develop the kind of recycling and composting systems we most urgently need now.
Lombardi spent 35 minutes on Tuesday to talk the crowd and commissioners through a 10-year bridge strategy to build a zero-waste Key West (actually a rate of about 70-percent recycling, to be realistic).
"Key West is a special place," he began. "You live in Paradise. You clearly want to protect your air and water." This remark -- "you clearly" -- was met with appalled silence due to the yawning gap between want and fact.
"Boulder, too, is a special place," he continued, on safer ground. To date, Eco-Cycle has collected 900,000 tons of its waste and sold it all. They have something called a CHARM (Center for Hard to Recycle Materials), which receives 150 car-loads a day of Boulder's electronic scrap, tossed-out tennis shoes and so on.
The audience was rapt at this point. "People are taking out the trash very differently in the United States today," he said. "We look at what we throw away. We think about it." Composting and recycling are "on the right side of history, despite recent dips due to the economy," he added.
If America recycled just one percent more, we could close down 20 percent of the coal-powered plants whose fuel suppliers steal our mountaintops and whose discharges poison the world's oceans with mercury.
The recycling industry in America accounts for 3.1 million jobs today. At this very moment the demolition industry is retooling in order to sell as much as it once buried or burned or tossed.
"Zero is for millionaires," declared Lombardi. "This is a $50 billion industry." Don't forget, he said, 30 percent of Florida's spending is government spending, representing "a huge opportunity" for job creation.
Planned obsolescence, which has always made manufacturers so rich, is so over. "Durable design and the teaching of repair skills" are back on the table. Extended producer responsibility is the new term covering a product's "end of life."
As a matter of fact, said the man from Boulder, "We will never build landfills or incinerators in America again."
That is a fact. "Instead," he said, "we will make resource recovery parks."
Let's back up a bit. Some communities in the country are now recycling at least 70 percent of their recyclable waste, including San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Ore. Some communities are at 10 percent. Key West is at between 6 and 7 percent. (In the 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency said 30 percent would be fine.)
The state of Florida is committed, says the official literature, to achieve 75 percent recycling by 2020 -- although that would still allow burning, a huge no-no in most other state plans.
Any such movement must start locally. And local governments must "create a level playing field to ensure that green companies win."
Speaking of local, there is one collateral side-effect on your neighborhood that will be unavoidable. "We need to go from one trash can to three," said the guru. "The mixed-waste trash can is the enemy and will be eliminated within 10 years. Then all things will be possible." If we cannot manage that cultural change, he said, "We deserve what's coming down."
Another side-effect that is easier to take will be a reduction in trash-collection frequency to once every other week. Much of the organic matter that today helps fill multiple trash cans more than once a week will instead be composted by homeowners and by local produce growers. This is what Lombardi calls "the smelly stuff" once known as "spilth," defined as "that which is spilled or poured out profusely." Kitchen, bathroom and most other household waste will be the responsibility of the household to reduce by conservation, by composting and buying biodegradable products.
If, then, it is the conserver who expends all this personal energy just to reduce the impact of individual waste, why are businesses not doing even more? Or, as Lombardi put it, "Why not make the polluter pay more than the conserver?"
The question gave rise to the second round of rapturous applause, with a few radical whoops. "California," he went on, "is about to pass mandatory recycling for businesses." More yelling and cheering. That was the third round of rapture. Hardly able to make himself heard, Lombardi added that "resource management," no longer bureaucratese for the very opposite, is now -- and he had to speak up to be heard -- "a matter of opportunity!"
At which the crowd erupted again, some even stood. People waved.
Here we were, giving sustained, unrestrained, heartfelt and affectionate applause to a complete stranger.
The subject must be right. That was the fourth round of the night.
Let's back up a bit more. Landfills and incinerators constitute what is now seen to be pollution abatement. They are not pollution prevention. "Waste to energy is a waste of energy," said Lombardi, referring to trash-burning devices such as the incinerator that was once installed on Stock Island and has since been demolished.
"They were a false fix," he said. "There have been no new such plants in 15 years." Burning trash produces three to five times more emissions than energy. Lake County has had to import trash in order to meet its contractual obligation to feed a certain amount of trash into its incinerator.
Landfills are no good either. Ten percent of Boulder's greenhouse-gas emissions consists of methane rising out of local landfills.
The alternative is what's called resource recovery, said Lombardi, "and that is what the public wants."
Waste has become "a social issue first, a market issue second." The practice known for past decades as "integrated solid waste management" (i.e. bury it or burn it en masse) "is dead. Zero waste is in."
Speaking as a member of the public, calendar girl Shirley Freeman, a former county mayor and commissioner, said she had "never seen a city commission initiate a meeting like this."
Then it was Commissioner Mark Rossi's turn. The proprietor of Rick's on Duval is known for not quite knowing how to handle the recycling issue in public discussion (Rick's no longer recycles its cans and bottles). So he made himself clear, sort of.
"I tried to recycle as much as I could," said Rossi. "I was the biggest returner of bottles in Florida ... We've forgotten our values here in America, we're a throwaway society -- You should come to my house, I can't throw anything away." He then called for a resolution to push for a new container law in Florida, which would unilaterally legislate a price on returns. Applause at this, not raucous but at least warm.
Mayor Craig Cates congratulated GLEE for pulling off the evening, concluding: "We here are the best commission to bring the city into the 21st century." Then it was raucous indeed, the air alive with gleeful hoots and whistles, the fifth and final such statement of the night.
Now about those three young men on the cover. Tyler Lee, Ricky Hatch and Clay Wagner are the Help Our Precious Earth Club. They believe in job creation at every step of the way in dealing with trash, from the composting stage to the complex infrastructure they see coming. The whole subject "should be an elective at high school," insisted Clay. Such an elective, they all agreed, would be popular.
"We could do it ourselves," chimed in Ricky and Tyler. "We would have a completely self-sustainable school in 20 years."
The voice of the future, here now.