State unveils plan to curb solid waste disposal
By Geoff SpillanePosted Sep 27, 2019
BOSTON — The state Department of Environmental Protection has issued a draft of an aggressive 10-year Solid Waste Master Plan.
Public comment and input will be sought on the draft over the next two months.
The draft plan, developed for the 10-year period between 2020 and 2030, proposes a reduction of the current annual total of 5.7 million tons of solid waste disposal in the state by 1.7 million tons, or 30%, by 2030.
Longer term, the agency envisions a 90% reduction in trash disposal by 2050, and eventually a zero waste level further in the future.
“This is a wide-ranging, multifaceted plan with a lot of solutions and options to move these goals forward,” Stephanie Cooper, the agency’s deputy commissioner for policy and planning, told the Times on Friday.
To achieve the proposed reductions of statewide solid waste disposal, the agency’s plan emphasizes an increase in the diversion of food material, textiles and bulky waste items. There will also be financial and technical assistance for municipal waste and recycling programs, combined with enhanced enforcement of waste disposal bans.
A major initiative outlined in the plan involves increased requirements to stop unnecessary disposal of commercial food material.
In 2014, the state instituted the Commercial Food Material Disposal Ban. The ban prohibited disposal of commercial organic wastes by businesses and institutions, such as hospitals and universities, that get rid of a ton or more of these materials per week. Under the new plan, the threshold would be reduced to a ½-ton per week by 2022, likely affecting midsize restaurants.
Other programs highlighted in the plan include providing financial support to municipalities to develop new pay-as-you-throw programs; establishing regulations to ban the disposal of mattresses and textiles to drive recycling and reuse of the items; increasing the amount and frequency of inspections for waste haulers to ensure they are in compliance with state regulations; and increasing programs to promote recycling and reuse of construction and demolition waste.
There are also plans to improve the availability of household hazardous waste collection programs, such as for paints and household chemicals, to reduce toxicity in the waste stream.
“There is a misconception of the range of textiles that can be recycled – they all have value,” said John Fischer, the agency’s branch chief for commercial waste reduction, referencing one of the proposed initiatives. “We are trying to get more textiles out of the trash. If it can’t be reused as clothing, it can be used as rags or insulation or remade into a product that has some market value.”
A public comment period on the draft plan, found online at mass.gov/guides/solid-waste-master-plan, runs through 5 p.m. on Dec. 6.
There will also be five public hearings held throughout the state to discuss the plan. The public hearing closest to the Cape and Islands will be held at 5 p.m. Nov. 19 at the MassDEP Southeast Regional Office, 20 Riverside Dr., Lakeville.
Comments also can be submitted via email to dep.swmp@mass.gov, or by mail to John Fischer, MassDEP, 1 Winter St., Boston, MA 02108.
“We are hoping for a lot of input on the plan to help us refine it and have an even better plan,” Cooper said. “We expect to get a lot of input.”
AMERICA HAS A TRASH PROBLEM
A new report by U.S. PIRG Education Fund finds it’s time to make our waste process visible, and to transform it, because its effects are too dire to ignore—resource depletion, climate change, environmental degradation and public health threats.
According to a study by Columbia University, Americans trash seven pounds of material per person every single day—that’s 2,555 pounds of material per American every year.
A staggering 90 percent of all raw materials extracted in the U.S. are ultimately dumped into landfills or burned in incinerators. Those materials should be reused to make new products, but because they’re destroyed, more and more natural resources are extracted every day.
This one-way system of destructive extraction, consumption and disposal is polluting our air, contaminating our drinking water, choking our oceans, and wasting our natural resources.
A Shift In Thinking
A solution to America’s trash problem requires a paradigm shift in how we, as a country, think about waste. For that shift to happen, we need to examine the parts of the system that we don’t see every day.
We can start by looking at what the system incentivizes. Producers make more money when consumers buy new goods instead of fixing old ones. Some consumers pay the same amount for trash pick-up no matter how much garbage they leave on the curb. And profits for waste haulers and landfill operators increase when the amount of garbage they collect goes up.
The alternative to this costly, wasteful and destructive linear system is a circular material economy—one that produces zero waste, conserves natural resources and limits pollution and global warming emissions.
The U.S. already has the tools it needs to make this urgent transition. We can make recycling and composting easier than throwing things in the garbage, and ban the sale of single-use items that aren’t easily recyclable. We can encourage producers to make products built to last, and use recycled materials in production. We can price goods to reflect the environmental and public health impacts of their production.
These strategies work. The city of San Francisco, for example, now diverts 80 percent of materials from landfills and incinerators thanks to its “Zero Waste by 2020” program. In Germany, because of policies like the ones outlined above, residents now recycle or compost 87 percent of discarded materials.
For this necessary and overdue shift to occur here in the U.S., change can start at the state and local levels. It can even start on your street, with the barrels you drag to the curb on trash day. It’s time to reduce, to reuse, to recycle—and to cement this aspirational slogan into policy.
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