Greening Austin Daily

City Ideas to Reduce Austin’s Trash and Expand Recycling

8th November, 2011 - Posted by katherine - No Comments

The Statesman had a really detailed article recently in which Austin Resource Recovery Director Bob Gedert was interviewed.  Gedert talked about plans to expand recycling in Austin, and I thought these were exciting ideas to get Austin to zero waste by 2040.  Here’s an excerpt from the article (I’ve highlighted some interesting suggestions):

The city started a program in 2008 that allows owners or renters of single-family homes to put all their recyclables, unsorted, in big curbside carts. Gedert recently signed deals with two local firms to sort and process those goods well into the future.

In the next few years, Gedert wants to add more goods — such as durable plastics, aluminum foil and small scrap metal items — to the recyclables accepted at the curb.

Austin already collects yard trimmings at the curb and turns them into Dillo Dirt at a city facility. But the plan calls for starting a program in 2015 to collect more organic goods — food scraps, yard trimmings and untreated wood — at the curb in a cart separate from recyclables. The city would compost those goods or hire a company to do so.

Currently, organic materials make up more than 40 percent of the trash Austin sends to landfills. That means a lot of material that could have another life as rich soil is going to waste, Gedert said.

The city collects recyclables every two weeks and trash carts once a week, but Gedert wants to swap those schedules about 2016 — in the hope that if Austinites are recycling and composting more, they’ll have less trash that can be hauled away less often.

The city also plans to add a second location, in North Austin , where residents can drop off hazardous items such as paint, cleaners, batteries and pesticides for the department to dispose of properly. The current location is in South Austin .

Aiming to make reuse simpler, Gedert wants to set up four “eco-depots” run by nonprofits where residents could drop off or take items that could be reused or repaired, such as furniture and toys, and creating a resource center where people could bring goods suitable for classrooms that teachers could retrieve for free.

These are all really great ideas I think.  Adding durable plastics to the list of things that could be recyclable would be great, and I’ll admit, I thought aluminum foil was already accepted so adding that would be great too.  Making it easier to get rid of hazardous materials correctly would also be a huge improvement.  The eco-depots sounds like a great idea although some aspects of them may duplicate the efforts of Goodwill, but I think other cities have similar programs despite also having Goodwill/the Salvation Army.

Gedert also talks about possibly implementing a per-gallon trash fee, rather than the current rate configuration which is  a base rate plus a rate for whatever size trash cart you use.  I think getting rid of the base rate and more directly assigning costs based on causation  also makes a lot of sense. Check out the whole article!