Waste: Behind the Word
By John Leahy
Up late one night several weeks ago trying to take a break between marathon university assignments, I came across a news article about how the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority (RSWA), the local waste management organization for my neighborhood in Charlottesville, VA, has narrowed the types of recyclable plastics accepted at their facilities on the grounds that it is no longer financially nor environmentally viable. That latter reason really stopped me in my tracks. Years of hearing about the importance of the “Three R’s” had left me with the impression that recycling was good for our planet—how could it be that limiting the kinds of material that can be recycled in Charlottesville would actually help the environment?
Asking myself this question, an uncomfortable realization dawned on me and hot, prickly embarrassment crept up my neck. Despite having been told since elementary school that recycling was an environmental solution that could save the planet, I essentially had no idea how those benefits manifested, nor did I know what specifically was happening to my recycling and trash after it was picked up and hauled away. I had been allowed until the ripe old age of 21 to live in total disconnection from the waste I was producing; when I throw something away, it is truly ‘away’—out of sight, mind, smell. This felt wrong somehow. Unnatural. The effective invisibility of my waste was allowing me to live with a total lack of accountability for how I consume and generate waste.
Motivated by the discomfort of this realization, I got to reading more about this change in the RSWA’s policy. I learned that it was indeed no longer environmentally logical to accept the kinds of recyclables excluded by the new policy changes, which includes plastics like “PVC piping, sandwich bags, vehicular plastics, Styrofoam, and acrylic” (Robinson). Domestically, there is simply no infrastructure in place to actually process and repurpose these materials, so they must travel approximately 7,000 miles to China, incurring economic and environmental costs associated with that journey along the way before they can actually be recycled. Prompted by changing foreign markets for recyclable materials and a desire to cut those costs, the RSWA is now simply dealing with these plastics ‘in house’ by landfilling them. Although this presents the different and equally concerning problem of adding to the volume of garbage flowing into already crowded Virginia landfills, the RSWA’s recent change in policy has two very important silver linings.
The first unexpected benefit is that the increasing rate of landfills reaching their maximum capacity lights a fire under U.S. and Virginia policymakers to avoid the costs associated with opening new landfills. This should prompt them to lay groundwork for developing domestic infrastructure for recycling plastics and, more critically, reducing the amount of plastics being manufactured in the first place. The second is that it has prompted the RSWA to find creative and innovative ways to extend the ‘life-cycle’ of as much waste as possible. This means reevaluating their definition of all waste to emphasize its potential to act as a pool of resources, commodities, and nourishment for the future, rather than something that must simply be dealt with. Project Drawdown, a high-octane research initiative powered by the pens, data, and brainpower of some 61 scientists and 9 essayists, supplies a name to this ideal in a powerful section on industrial recycling: “trash cannot always become treasure, but a growing body of evidence suggests significant environmental and economic gains can be realized when [...] circularity is embedded into industry” (Hawken 161).
Aside from introducing me to this idea of ‘circularity’, Project Drawdown also contains some hard data and figures that gave me irrefutable evidence of the intimate connection between my personal relationship with ‘waste’ and its impact on climate change. The book’s full title is Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. While this seems like an impossibly ambitious promise to make, the book does in fact live up to its billing: it catalogs 100 solutions to the issue of anthropogenic climate change, or the process of rising atmospheric concentrations of ‘greenhouse’ gases like CO2 and CH4 resulting from human activities like fossil fuel combustion and widespread land use changes. The word ‘drawdown’ refers to the end-goal of all of these solutions: reaching past the point of carbon neutrality and continuing towards sequestration—when there is less CO2 going into the atmosphere than there is being ‘drawn down’ back to the earth through natural processes. Drawdown ranks its 100 solutions according to painstaking research calculating not only the environmental benefits but also the economic benefits we stand to gain from each solution’s implementation.
Most of the methods that the RSWA is using to enact circularity and affect climate change can be found in the pages of Drawdown. As a casual gardener and part-time transcendentalist, the most exciting of these methods to me personally is the way that the RSWA is repurposing the organic materials that come to their dump stations. By Drawdown’s calculations, organic waste represents almost half of the solid waste produced around the world. That’s a huge quantity of material that doesn’t need to end up in landfills. Not only does landfilled organic material take up valuable space, but as it decomposes it also releases methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas that is responsible for as much as “a quarter of anthropogenic global warming” (Hawken 62). Drawdown calculates that if countries around the globe increased composting of food waste by 20-40% of their 2015 levels, it would result in the climate change-mitigation-equivalent of a 2.28 gigaton reduction in atmospheric CO2.
The RSWA has seized this opportunity that organic material offers for increasing circularity. In 2019, they diverted 11,155,000 pounds of materials from the landfill to be reused or recycled (Wood III et al. 20). Almost six million pounds of that was vegetative waste, most of which went to Black Bear Composting, a local organics recycling center located in the Shenandoah Valley. This partnership between Black Bear and the RSWA generates revenue for the RSWA—Black Bear was the fourth-most prominent customer of the RSWA in 2019— but more importantly, it radiates ecological health throughout the entire Central Virginia area. Black Bear converts the organic ‘waste’ from the RSWA into nitrogen-rich compost and sells it to local farmers and landscapers, who use it as a natural substitute for the synthetic fertilizers so commonly used today. Providing alternatives to these industrially-produced fertilizers is incredibly important: in addition to the energy intensive process involved in manufacturing them, the nitrogen levels of these fertilizers are so unnaturally high that the soil simply can’t absorb it all, and about 40% of that nitrogen gets washed away in runoff and ends up in our local estuaries. This contributes to algal blooms and eutrophication that worsens the health of our local aquatic ecosystem, like the Rivanna and James River systems and the Chesapeake Bay. By providing the raw materials for Black Bear’s compost, the RSWA helps provide an ecologically healthier alternative to local farmers and landscapers, whose plants, as they grow, will sequester carbon from the CO2 that resides in our atmosphere as a greenhouse gas, without disrupting the natural nitrogen cycle. This local partnership between waste management and farmers explicitly demonstrates the ideal vision of circularity: what might once have been wasted instead becomes the raw materials for stimulating food and plant growth across Central Virginia.
As amazing as it may seem, the potency of the RSWA’s activity with organic materials only comprises about half of the RSWA’s work in diverting materials from landfills. An almost equal amount of material—around five million pounds of primarily glass, metal cans, plastic types 1 and 2, and paper materials—is sold to recycling plants, where it is converted from ‘waste’ to raw material that manufacturers can repurpose. The ‘paper cycle’ in particular offers huge potential for a sizable and visible climate solution and also showed me how exactly the process of recycling reduces atmospheric CO2. Data collected in Drawdown calculates the CO2 emissions involved in producing one ton of recycled paper to be 70% lower than the emissions involved in producing the same amount of ‘virgin-fiber’ paper. Making and using recycled paper also reduces the paper industry’s demand for lumber, thereby reducing the strain that that industry puts on the environment and leaving more trees to continue sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Finally, the used paper that would become waste instead becomes a commodity for the RSWA that can be sold to recycling plants, saving space in their landfills and generating revenue for them. Learning about how much potential still exists in old paper transformed my old notebook scraps before my eyes from trash into another year of life for a tree or a concrete amount of revenue for the RSWA.
The ‘paper cycle’ demonstrates the healing power of all forms of recycling for our environment: it functions to preserve the environment by reducing the amount of natural resources needed to manufacture new products as well as mitigating the damage done to the environment through the extraction of those natural resources. The manufacturing of new products from fresh material is also almost always more energy-expensive from start to finish than converting recyclable material into a new product. To even further mitigate the energy costs and environmental impact associated with recycling, the RSWA maintains partnerships with reasonably local recycling plants such as Gerdau Metals in Roanoke, Sonoco Paper outside of Waynesboro, and Strategic Materials in North Carolina.
Composting and recycling are the core staples of productive waste management operations like the RSWA because that comprises the majority of material that is easy to find new uses for. However, it is the unlikely places that the RSWA seeks to create circularity that fully demonstrates their commitment to positively impact the environment. One endeavor of theirs that I found particularly creative was their work in collaboration with the VCU Rice Rivers Center in Richmond, VA. At the McIntire Recycling Center, one of their dump sites in Charlottesville, the RSWA keeps an “oyster dumpster”—a collection bin for oyster shells. Once the dumpster fills, the shells are taken to the Rice River Center where they ‘season’ for about a year before being mixed with oyster spawn, allowing new oysters to grow in the old shells. As they reach an appropriate stage of development, these oysters are introduced into the Chesapeake Bay to repopulate oyster beds, improving biodiversity and functioning as a natural water filtration system for the ecosystem. It made me smile to think that oyster shells—a particularly smelly and unsightly item that might otherwise end up in landfills—could create such a beautiful impact when employed in a creative and ecologically-minded fashion.
Another more ‘cutting-edge’ way that the RSWA is using waste to enact a positive climate impact has to do with the groundwater contamination that occurred in hazardous waste sites during the 1960s and ’70s as a result of uninformed and irresponsible waste management practices. The RSWA has not abandoned these sites; instead, they are using them as microbial research facilities, exploring the ways that new technology such as enhanced bioremediation can work to reclaim land for healthy future use. The innovation and creativity demonstrated by these unique strategies is crucial for the continual progression of extending the lifespan of all of our waste.
I learned about a lot of the RSWA’s ventures into climate protection while talking with Phil McKalips, the organization’s Director of Solid Waste. McKalips was clearly passionate about the importance of circularity at both the local and global scales, and the majority of our conversation was spent optimistically swapping ideas for embedding circularity into our own lives. When I mentioned the change in accepted plastics policy that began this entire journey for me, though, he grimaced. He cited plastics as being among the biggest sources of frustration for waste management centers like the RSWA. They stream into dumps in high volumes, take a very long time to degrade, and have essentially no monetary value without healthy domestic markets for plastics recycling.
Plastics demonstrate a limitation of the RSWA for making an even larger impact on climate change. The issue with recycling as a climate solution, he explained, is trying to solve a problem with materials at the end of the process rather than the beginning. As much work as the RSWA does in vacating their landfills of materials that still have life left, there isn’t much they can do about the sheer volume of plastics that are being produced by manufacturers, distributed to retailers, purchased by consumers and businesses, and then thrown “away.” The image that haunts him: an entire grocery store aisle at the local Harris Teeter, filled solely with plastic water bottles. The issue with the current state of affairs in waste production is that most of us generally aren’t being prompted to think about the end of a product’s life when it is being created or purchased. The burden of that information falls on the shoulders of waste management organizations like the RSWA who can only do so much.
This multi-tiered flow of actors in the journey of materials from creation to disposal— government, manufacturers, distributors, individual consumers, waste management—seems so complex that it makes any action on a single level feel like it isn’t enough. In reality, though, it allows for more entry points and opportunities at various levels and through various methods to make a difference. Each tier, each rung on the ladder necessarily has a unique relationship to materials at their various stages, so their opportunities for solutions are correspondingly unique and specialized for maximum impact.
The governmental level in particular has shown a lot of promise for creating positive change in our approach to climate change in radical ways because their actions trickle down and encourage change at other levels—either by the carrot or the stick. One of the most promising and current manifestations of this top-down approach is through a genre of environmental stewardship law known as Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR)—put simply, policies under this umbrella acknowledge that “those who design and sell the product and packaging have the greatest ability and responsibility to reduce these impacts” (Virginia Recycling Association), and thus are held accountable, whether economically, legally, or publicly for the environmental cost of their product as well as its manufacturing cost. This addresses the issue with the current state of material flow in the United States that is the “significant disconnect between the manufacturers of products and those involved in the recovery, recycling, and/or disposal of these products” (Virginia Recycling Association).
Virginia, like 31 other U.S. states, already has at least one EPR law in effect. The Commonwealth’s EPR law focuses on computer collection and recycling and was enacted in 2008 (Nash and Bosso). Currently, most of the 70 or so existing laws regarding EPR in the United States focus on products like electronics, batteries, or mercury-containing car parts that have an immediate hazardous potential for the environment. However, any legal movement in this direction is exciting primarily because of the precedent it sets. EPR law will continue to evolve as it begins addressing subtler (and thus more insidious) environmentally costly choices being made at the manufacturer level.
While there are clearly exciting examples of climate swerve being made through both top-down governmental approaches like EPR and bottom-up initiatives like the RSWA’s actions, the most powerful potential for swerve actually exists at the individual level. I know what you’re thinking, and trust me: before diving into my research on what the state of ‘waste’ looks like in Central Virginia, I too was skeptical that a single person could create as much of a difference in the materials sector as, say, the RSWA can. But when I compared the facts and figures confronting me in my research to my own experiences as an individual waste-producer, I was forced to change my mind. Let me tell you a story about myself to show just how potent our decisions as individuals can be.
It was the August before my second year of college and I had just moved into an apartment with a friend of mine. After about a week, we had churned out a bag of trash and a pile of recyclables that needed to be disposed of. The two of us hauled everything down the stairs to the dumpsters and quickly found where the trash belonged, but neither of us could figure out where the recycling unit for our building was. After a few minutes of looking to no avail, we hauled our flattened moving boxes and empty bottles of booze back up to our apartment, figuring we would ask a neighbor or our landlord if we still weren’t able to find it by next week.
As it turned out, our building didn’t have a recycling unit—if we wanted to recycle, we’d have to drive our stuff ten minutes down the road to the McIntyre Recycling Center and dispose of it there. My roommate and I had to ask ourselves each week whether it was worth it to spend the time and energy recycling when, really, we were hardly producing enough waste to make a difference.
Luckily, my roommate and I didn’t have to make any big sacrifices to recycle that year; neither of us were particularly busy and we had access to a car, so we were able to make the trip out every week or two and do our part. But say we were producing an average of three pounds of recyclables per week that we dropped off at the McIntire Recycling Center. For the 40 weeks we lived at that apartment, that’s about 120 pounds that our apartment helped divert from the landfill by recycling properly. And in our building, there were about 60 apartments. If we assume that all of these apartments are producing about the same amounts of recyclables per week, and everyone was diverting their weekly three pounds, our apartment building—a single building in Charlottesville—would have helped re-direct about 7,200 pounds of recyclable materials. That’s about the weight of two cars and a significant amount of rescued materials that I had a part in saving.
This story demonstrates that even individual efforts and personal actions have a meaningful impact on the state of the materials sector. I was shocked to learn from Phil McKalips that the vast majority of the garbage coming into the RSWA’s source-separated facilities is produced by households and not industry. McKalips’ experience corroborates another revelation I had while doing research on the efficacy of individual action: Drawdown actually ranks household recycling ahead of industrial recycling in their potential for mitigating climate change. This insight empowered me as an individual consumer and made me feel the responsibility of that power keenly.
While my story is specifically about recycling, I want to emphasize that making an effort to separate your garbage is only one part of the solution at the individual level. As we all know, recycling is only one of the three “R’s”—the other two, reducing and reusing, represent even more potent ways that we can lessen our individual environmental impacts, while often saving us money as well. Habitat for Humanity’s ReStores are a wonderful resource for people looking to donate or buy used furniture and other household items; this allows for less furniture to end up in landfills before they actually belong there and is a fantastic resource for college students, whose movements in and out of the Charlottesville area leads to high turnover of lightly used furniture. Thrift stores like Goodwill and Salvation Army are another great resource for reducing and reusing materials, particularly clothing. Both of these companies have multiple locations in the Charlottesville area.
As I went through the process of researching, interviewing, and self-reflecting to gain some understanding on the state of affairs of ‘waste’ in Central Virginia, I was surprised to find as much cause for hopefulness as I did; not only are there tremendous actions taking place in the materials sector from top-down and bottom-up perspectives, but also the materials sector is so inherently individualized that any person has the power to create hope through changing habits in their own homes. As a parting thought, I want to point your attention to the word ‘waste’, which has been used about 30 times over the course of this paper so far and finds a home in the name of the RSWA. The dual meaning of the word—the noun ‘waste’ and the verb ‘waste’—implies that we are missing out on some potential left in these materials as they reach the end of their journeys in landfills—that we are ‘wasting’ an opportunity. Let’s make sure not to allow that to happen anymore. Let’s “suck out all the marrow of life”, as Henry David Thoreau so wisely recommends in Walden, and use what we have fully and deeply.
