Waste produced in Adelaide will be banned from landfill from September 2012 unless it is first subjected to resource recovery “in accordance with the waste management hierarchy and to the extent reasonably achievable”.

It must be processed “at an appropriate licensed material recovery facility or composting depot” or some other EPA-approved facility.

Councils with three-bin collection services will, however, still be able to dump their residual waste material.

Industry has a two-year reprieve

Some specific materials will be exempt from the requirement, including hazardous waste, medical waste, quarantine waste and wastewater.

Banned from landfill disposal altogether is hazardous and medical waste, lead acid batteries and whole tyres.

Also banned are materials that have been “aggregated for resource recovery,” including glass, cardboard and paper, organics, a range of metals and PET or HDPE plastic packaging.

Other materials to be progressively banned over the next 2-3 years, include mercury-containing fluorescent light tubes, computers and TVs, white goods and other electronic wastes.

It will be interesting to know what people are suposed to do with fluoro light globes because I bet most households will be much too confused to dispose of them properly unless there is a publicity campaign and easy disposal.

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There is an ever growing “mountain” of e-waste with western countries exporting the problem to third world countries.  80 per cent of devices like computers and televisions imported to Nigeria, Pakistan and Ghana classified for reuse are simply scrapped – they are nothing more than waste.

According to a UN Environment Program report, between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of obsolete electronic goods collected for recycling in the US each year is being exported.

Even China which produces 2.3 million tonnes of its own domestic e-waste a year and has banned e-waste imports, still finds it is a dumping ground for the world’s e-waste.

There does need to be international agreement to prevent this exporting of obsolete electronic equipment needs to be recycled to yield valuable materials, such as precious metals and not simply incinerated to recover metals, which emits heavy metals and toxic chemicals including dioxins, which is often the case in third world countries.

Otherwise these waste exporters are simply exploiting a loophole in the Basel Convention which is supposed to prevent rich countries from sending their toxic waste to poor countries.
In Australia, environment ministers are planning a national e-waste scheme for November this year.  Environment and industry groups say they will support a scheme that would legally require all companies importing televisions and computers into the country to recycle them at the end of the products’ life.

This scheme proposes a financial incentive to companies to make computers more easily upgradeable, less disposable and at the very least, easier to recycle.
T
his recycling responsibility is nothing new!  It has been the norm in countries like Germany for many years so we are only doing catch up.  Green design only comes when the company that produces the product has to deal with the waste phase.

In Australia we are about to have a real spike in waste TVs are the analogue signal is turned off and everyone rushes out to buy the new energy hungry flat screen TVs.  It would be good to see the waste addressed at source with longer lasting, more energy efficient equipment designed to be easily recycled.

Green design only comes when the company that makes a product also deals with the waste phase.  Exporting waste is not acceptable.  E-waste is a serious problem

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The South Australian EPA is looking at standards for capturing energy from waste or Refuse Derived Fuel.  The standard has been through an extensive consultation phase.  They want to be sure that this is effectively managed.

They are also looking at waste recovery or in their words Waste to Resource issues.

This has got to be addressed.  We generate enormous tonnages of waste  and the main word is actually WASTE.  What we are tossing is made from the resources that we are so busy digging up and chopping down at an ever increasing rate.  This is all part of both environmental management and good energy management.

One really interesting article I read was about the number of mattresses we toss out each year. On the Sunshine Coast in Queensland 18,000 mattresses go to landfill each year.  These are mainly organic material that will emit methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

There are some opportunities for recycling mattresses.  Some can be reconditioned and carefully cleaned for distribution to charity organisations and a number of resources can be recovered for re-use in industry such as wood and coconut fibres, latex, wadding and foam, metal springs and some fabrics.

These are all examples of the things we need to take into account when we buy, use and dispose of all the STUFF we consume if we are to achieve environmental sustainability.

This is what needs to be addressed when we reduce our carbon footprint both at home and at work  and also when we do it properly in our businesses with environmental management systems.

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I took 30 mins while I ate my lunch and I watched Oprah.   She was discussing earth Day and had a variety of guests.  None was new to me but it was very graphic and great exposure to a hidden problem

For centuries man has washed his waste down the rivers into the sea.  Ships toss their garbage into the sea.  Now every ocean has a central gyre which is effectively a giant rubbish dump.  This is all types of waste but it had huge amounts of household waste.

In the centre of the Pacific Ocean there is a floating rubbish dump that is larger in area than Texas and in places it is 90 metres deep.  The majority of the floating debris is plastic – bags, bottles, cigarette lighters etc.  Huge quantities of plastic bags.   The seabed had the heavier waste.

In Adelaide where I live the government has banned the use of plastic shopping bags which I think is a great idea.  I use fabric shopping bags anyway and have done for years.

The show went on to show the tons of waste going to landfill daily and the largest problem was paper.  This is one of the organic materials that break down to in landfill giving off methane emissions.

One thing I really liked was the US concept of a recycle bank where people get credits than can be used like cash for their recycled materials.  We don’t get that here although we do have deposits on all beverage containers and have done for many years with the noticabale result that beverage containers are not found as litter.  They are all collected and cashed in.

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Emissions from legacy waste are not included in the Australian Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, but it still needs to be managed and preferably harnessed.

The Waste Management Association of Australia’s president Dr Ron Wainberg said that while it was good emissions from legacy waste has been excluded from the government’s scheme because it would have been “unfair” to make the sector pay for “sins of the past” – “There now needs to be some sort of incentive to capture those [legacy waste] emissions, otherwise you ruin the integrity of the whole idea of Australia having a carbon trading scheme to reduce our emissions.

At present only about 26% of the landfill gas is captured across the country.  Tony Wright, a partner in Wright Corporate Strategy, said it was “ridiculous” that there isn’t already some kind of mandatory gas capture initiative in place.  And he went on to say that “We should also look at closing down all those little unattended landfills” across the country.
This gas capture is also a matter of public safety.  Paper and organics have to come out of landfills.  We should be aiming to prevent the generation of methane in landfills, not merely capturing it.

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Americans throw out more than 250 million tons of garbage each year and the waste industry manages this waste.  The industry has invested tens of millions of dollars,  to modernize landfills, boost recycling rates and to cut greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants, plus they have been finding renewable sources of energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
87 waste-to-energy facilities operated by the industry generate enough electricity to power 1.7 million homes and 470 landfill-gas-to-energy projects provide electricity and heat for corporate and government users in 44 states. An additional 520 landfills across the USA have been identified by the EPA for similar energy projects.  Landfill-gas-to-energy projects capture methane.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has noted that landfill-gas recovery directly reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

Other industry initiatives include working with truck manufacturers to develop more fuel-efficient vehicles and those using alternative fuels.  Some landfill sites are also using renewable sources of energy such as solar to power compacting equipment, and placing solar panels and wind turbines on landfills to produce even more energy.

More than one third of all municipal solid wastes in 2007 went into recycling and composting.

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Believe it or not compost is a really good way to reduce methane emissions.. Perth’s Southern Metropolitan Regional Council’s organic waste composting facility has been rated one of Australia’s few “outstanding” carbon offset providers.  It was one of only five providers to get the top rating Australia wide

The composting facility takes household waste from over 380,000 residents and produces high quality compost and avoids the methane emissions that would have otherwise been generated by placing organic material into landfill.

I find it fascinating the way we keep finding that discarded practices from the past are rediscovered as being sensible.  Having had either a compost heap or a worm farm all my life it is actually nice to find these being rediscovered.

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The initial Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS or ETS) legislation was set up so that landfill operators would be paying for emission from old waste which is simply retrospective legislation and intrinsically unfair..   It suggests now that the way to calculate the land fill emissions would be based on weighbridge data. This makes a lot of sense provided that there is some incentive for the organic content to be reduced.  It certainly makes the calculations far easier and more cost effective.

If they were to be somehow measuring the actual methane emissions, separation of emissions from old waste and new waste would be very tricky and expensive process.  Provided that the out come is fair and takes account of the waste involved, I am always in favour of a simple and practical solution.

The calculation could be as simple as multiplying tonnes of waste received from July 2011 by the government’s agreed emissions profile for that type of waste

This is a more transparent system and would make it easier to pass cost to customers, and eliminate the risks associated with fluctuating cost of carbon permits.  The total lifetime emissions for each load will be “paid for” as it comes across the weighbridge and this system also eliminates the problem of sites being left with an unfunded liability after they stop charging to accept waste.
The one potentially complicated aspect of this proxy system, is determining the gas capture discount applied to each site and the question of gas capture efficiency has sparked much debate in industry circles over recent years.

It has been suggested that state regulators could assess each individual site on a regular basis – say every 3-5 years – to determine its gas capture efficiency. The rating could potentially be broken into several categories, such as 75% for ‘best practice’, 50% for average sites, 25% for sub-par sites and 0% for sites with no gas capture systems.

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The Federal Government has announced a voluntary scheme for recycling scheme mercury-containing lamps.  The voluntary scheme aims to develop a ‘fluoro-cycle’ scheme to target key generators of waste lamps through an outreach program to recruit them to the scheme and establish suitable recycling arrangements. It is anticipated that this scheme will be extended to compact fluorescent lamps from households, subject to the outcomes of this commercial trial.

They are also claiming a breakthrough on computer, tv waste and finalising product stewardship arrangements for used tyres.  They have renewed their support for the development of a national waste policy by the end of 2009 and welcomed a decision by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) to close a significant gap in environmental protection by giving the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC) a single decision making role on the environmental management of chemicals.

Earlier this year four ships containing computers and electronic materials were stopped on their way to Asia, and forced to turn back to Australia.

The $100 billion IT industry is likely to be upset about any changes, with many groups pushing for voluntary codes of practice rather than established taxes.

Computer manufacturers such as Apple, IBM, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have voluntarily joined a recycling program, organised by Sustainability Victoria known as Byte-Back, but they are only some of less than a dozen companies to do so.

Many companies are concerned that any new charges would force them to raise prices on electronic hardware products.  However the Byte-Back program has demonstrated that price increases were a lot less than thought,  averaging about $5 per item.”

They welcomed other decisions to look further at a container deposit legislation scheme to do the choice modeling, to see if there is a willingness in the community to pay for a container deposit legislation scheme and to come back and have a further look at that issue into the future.

Why they need to do choice modeling, to get a better understanding of the community’s willingness to pay and how much they are willing to pay if there was to be a container deposit legislation scheme, when there has been a container deposit scheme in South Australia for over 20 years that has already successfully done this modeling for them is a complete mystery.  What is obvious when you travel is the great difference in litter and broken glass in most states while South Australia is significantly cleaner.

Technorati Tags: compact fluorescent lamps, computer waste, container deposit legislation, mercury-containing lamps, recycling, used tires, used tyres, waste

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The Concord City Council (USA) is considering a pay-as-you-throw system for solid waste collection.  Residents would pay by the bag for trash, but recyclables (plastic, metal cans, paper, cardboard and yard waste) would still be collected free of charge.

They believe this will increase recycling rates, save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Personally I think it is a great idea BUT I know very well that when I lived on Yorke Peninsula lazy weekenders who could not be bothered either asking neighbours to put and retrieve the rubbish bin or take it home with them, just dumped it at roadside picnic spots.  There is a perception by many that waste removal is right and should be available free in unlimited qualities.  I truly believe that Concord Council is on the right track but am wary of the illegal dumpers and don’t know how to deal with them.  Several hours community service hand sorting other peoples rubbish as a punishment comes to mind but perhaps that is a bit “Mikadoish”

The collection of solid waste is a time-intensive and costly enterprise, and it is not free – it is time to change course and reflect the true cost of this essential service.

Technorati Tags: solid waste, recyclable, trash, waste 

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