One Bin Or Not One Bin: Is That the Question?

JAMES A. BAKER III INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RICE UNIVERSITY

ONE BIN OR NOT ONE BIN: IS THAT THE QUESTION?

RONALD L. SASS, PH.D.

FELLOW IN GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE JAMES A. BAKER III INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RICE UNIVERSITY

JUNE 5, 2015 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question?

THIS PAPER WAS WRITTEN BY A RESEARCHER (OR RESEARCHERS) WHO PARTICIPATED IN A BAKER INSTITUTE RESEARCH PROJECT. WHEREVER FEASIBLE, PAPERS ARE REVIEWED BY OUTSIDE EXPERTS BEFORE THEY ARE RELEASED. HOWEVER, THE RESEARCH AND VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS PAPER ARE THOSE OF THE INDIVIDUAL RESEARCHER(S) AND DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE JAMES A. BAKER III INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY.

THIS MATERIAL MAY BE QUOTED OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION, PROVIDED APPROPRIATE CREDIT IS GIVEN TO THE AUTHOR AND THE JAMES A. BAKER III INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY

2 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question?

Introduction

On March 13, 2013, Houston was awarded one of five inaugural Mayor’s Challenge Prizes from Bloomberg Philanthropies for its innovative proposal “One Bin for All.” Contesting cities were to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life. A $1 million prize was given to Houston to be used to implement a workable process utilizing cutting-edge technology to separate trash from recyclables, allowing residents to discard all materials— including kitchen garbage and other organics—in one bin and accomplish all separation and processing at a mechanical biological treatment with advanced resource recovery facility (MBTARR) (City of Houston 2013b). Two years later, the city has in hand a select group of short-listed finalist proposals to do just that. Houston’s challenge is now to choose which finalist, if any, should be awarded to accomplish the creation and operation of the city’s waste handling and recycling for the next 20 years.

Houston’s current level of waste diversion at 19 percent is not impressive. This rate lags far behind the national average of approximately 34 percent in most of the major metropolitan areas across the country. Of the 19 percent waste that is diverted from landfills, only 6 percent comes from recycling, the remainder results from the city’s mandatory yard waste compostable bag program (Capps 2014). Under the proposed One Bin plan, the city has set an initial goal of diverting 55 percent of municipal waste away from landfills, eventually increasing that to 75 percent (City of Houston 2013b). If Houston can succeed in pulling off this project, it will set a new standard in waste disposal that will revolutionize the industry for years to come and hopefully save the city some money.

History of Waste Management Recycling

Every society since the beginning of civilization has dealt with the byproducts of their consumption by disposal, at first in any convenient location and later in communal waste pits. Scholars who study prehistoric human settlements have found the contents of these ancient middens and tells to be treasure houses of artifactual information about otherwise extinct inhabitants. However, until a few years ago, most civilizations continued to view these piles of

3 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question? refuge as necessary but useless eyesores. As raw materials become scarcer and more expensive, and as we become more aware of how we are adversely affecting our environment, what was once waste now, through recycling, becomes a treasure to be mined and reused. Unfortunately, it is the nature of this garbage to be a jumbled mixture of materials—cans, bottles, food scraps, soiled diapers, paper, etc.—that must be separated and processed (at a cost) before it can be profitably reused to manufacture new products. We are slowly beginning to realize that our waste is a potential asset that can be mined using evolving technology and eventually turned into new and valuable products rather than continuing to bury it in rapidly filling dump sites.

Houston, the fourth largest city in the United States, generates approximately 650,000 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) each year from 377,000 households (City of Houston 2013c). The total amount is equivalent to a per capita MSW production of 7.2 pounds per person per day. Moving our focus out a bit, in 2013 the Houston-Galveston Area Council of Governments reported that its represented population of 6,480,535 individuals accounted for 8,301,839 tons of MSW or 27.2 percent of all the MSW produced in Texas (TCEQ 2013). This is truly a problem of major proportions.

Recycling of waste has been with us as long as we have had waste itself. The reprocessing of waste has always been driven by economics and steered by supply and demand. What was one person’s trash was another person’s treasure. In times of war, jewelry and coins, as well as statues, were melted to provide weapons and other war goods. Before the age of industrialization, it was more often than not easier and cheaper to reuse items rather than buy new ones. With industrialization came mass production, and many times it became easier and even cheaper to buy new items and throw used items away rather than repair them.

World War II was a high point in the history of recycling. Financial constraints and material shortages due to the war effort made it necessary for the civilian population to reuse goods and recycle materials. Recycling stood as a matter of national interest—the patriotic thing to do. When the war ended, though, recycling was largely forgotten. Landfilling was viewed as an inexpensive and expedient way of dealing with waste, and recycling lost its popularity (All Recycling Facts 2013).

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The current environmental movement began in the late 1960s. Congress passed the Clean Air Act and later the Clean Water Act. The year 1970 brought the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, created for the purpose of protecting human health and the environment. Recycling became popular again through a renewed concern for the sustainability of the environment, as well as the increasing cost of energy. Cities established recycling centers and curbside pickup that made recycling easier for people to participate in. Woodbury, New Jersey, became the first city in the United States to mandate recycling (All Recycling Facts 2013). Today many cities make recycling a requirement with penalties for noncompliance.

Why Recycle

It is safe to say, I believe, that virtually every community that has a collective obligation to handle municipal solid waste also has some form of recycling. Reasons for recycling are diverse but may be divided into four categories (All Recycling Facts 2014):

1. Environmental: Everyone who values the environment wishes to do his or her part in keeping it clean and healthy. Recycling is important to the environment because it minimizes the extent of landfills and/or incineration. Newer landfills are fairly environmentally friendly in that they are lined, so as not to leach contaminants into any underlying aquifer. Still they may leak, and older landfills plus others that are not constructed according to EPA specifications may contaminate nearby groundwater and thus be a hazard to the environment. Landfills, as well as incinerators, are significant sources of carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are major greenhouse gases.

2. Nationalistic: During World War II scrap metal and paper, along with other materials in short supply, were actively collected for the war effort. Children were urged to organize paper drives through their schools. Through rationing and recycling, people were able to see themselves as valuable parts of the war effort. Recycling became a form of patriotism. That feeling of nationalism persists even today, and recycling can be argued as helping our country by reducing dependence on foreign governments for raw materials such as oil or strategic metals.

5 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question?

3. Ethical: There are ethical reasons why recycling is important. Any individual, commercial enterprise, or government acts ethically by acting sustainably. A sustainable enterprise is one that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs equally. Sustainable management of municipal solid waste must include maximum recycling. Optimization of recycling is simply the right thing to do.

4. Economic: Recycling conserves resources and saves money, creates jobs and generates revenue. It can be practical for the individual and profitable for government and industry. The economist Daniel K. Benjamin put it this way, “Recycling is a long- practiced, productive, indeed essential, element of the market system. Informed, voluntary recycling conserves resources and raises our wealth, enabling us to achieve valued ends that would otherwise be impossible.”

Ideally, the optimal handling of municipal solid waste will strive to satisfy as many of these four categories as possible. Such a solid waste treatment should satisfy the necessary individual and community demands of social equality, economic development, and the protection of the environment.

Houston on the Cusp

Houston now has the opportunity to choose the future path it will take in waste management. It has a mayor who is willing to propose a plan to improve our present waste management operations, the endorsement of her concept by the Bloomberg Philanthropies, five companies that have bid and been short-listed to build and operate the necessary infrastructure, and a community that has demonstrated many times that it knows how to enable the future. What is to stop us from moving forward?

In her sixth and final State of the City address, delivered April 16, 2015, Mayor Annise Parker acknowledged Houston’s current use of single-stream municipal waste recycling technology to recover waste and expressed a future commitment to the newer technology in her One Bin for

6 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question?

All plan. She stated, “We are looking at innovative ways to further increase waste diversion with our One Bin for All proposal” (Parker 2015). Some others are not so convinced. Houston will recycle. The question is which technology will best fit our needs: single-stream, source-separated recyclables or one bin combined waste.

Less than a month prior to the mayor’s speech, the Houston Chronicle ran an article by Katherine Driessen, the paper’s city hall reporter, that raised financial and technical concerns with the One Bin proposal (Driessen 2015).

Negative reactions to the adoption of a One Bin proposal come from a group known as the Zero Waste Houston Coalition that states in their online publication: “It’s smarter to separate.” Their position is that a community starting on a path to divert waste from landfills in order to achieve cost savings, reduction in greenhouse gases, job creation, and environmental justice should avoid dirty material recovery facilities (MRFs) and incineration technologies. Real recycling, landfill diversion, job creation, and other benefits will be the result of long-term planning to achieve zero waste through comprehensive programs based on separating at the source (Zero Waste Houston 2014).

Houston’s Current Recycling Program

Everyone appears to support the idea of recycling. How that recycling is accomplished does, however, lead to differences in opinion. Houston currently recycles by having individual households place designated recyclables in a separate container to be picked up at scheduled intervals. Reservations about how future recycling will be done in Houston fall into two categories: financial and technological. These areas of concern are not independent, but are quite strongly coupled. A good place to start a discussion of how Houston might recycle its waste in the future is to review how it is currently accomplished.

Houston has a good waste management and recycling system, although it does not inspire Houstonians to recycle at the level of average urban Americans. The city does have a successful program for recycling yard clippings. Citizens are required to use compostable pickup bags for

7 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question? yard waste. This directive has been in effect since April 2010. Because it is required, the program works well. When the program was initiated, then-Mayor Bill White stated, “Each year tons of leaves, grass clippings, and small branches are needlessly tossed into landfills. Diverting an anticipated 60,000 tons of organic material per year from area landfills will result in disposal savings of up to $2.0 million.” This material is now composted along with heavier tree limbs and trunks collected in a separate heavy pickup service (Guthrie 2009). In addition, the entire city has just recently been brought into the Automated Recycling Program (ARP). The city began implementation of this program in 2007. According to Mayor Parker, “It took close to six years and eight phases, but slowly and strategically, we built upon the success of each rollout and reinvested the dollars saved into the next expansion, fulfilling a promise I made to bring citywide automated curbside recycling collection to Houston residents” (City of Houston 2015b). This program is effectively a two bin recycling plan that was not fully implemented over the entire city until February 2015. The plan calls for all recyclable materials to be separated from non- recyclable waste at their source (individual households) and placed in a green bin that is picked up every other week at the curbside for further separation and recycling. The remaining household wet waste and non-recyclables are picked up separately and taken to a traditional landfill for burial.

The city has individual programs it operates with private companies to recycle yard waste, as well as concrete, mattresses, electronics, and other larger items. The total waste program relies on the use of privately owned and operated landfills. Currently the city’s Solid Waste Management Department has put in place a complex system to handle waste materials, recycling, and composting materials. This program is a successful public-private partnership that incorporates a two bin waste management system, saves the city money, creates jobs, and provides separated, ready-to-use recyclable materials to a variety of industries that use them to manufacture new marketable articles. However, the level of recycling in Houston remains significantly below that of other comparable communities. More needs to be done if Houston is serious about a sustainable waste management program.

8 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question?

Moving into the Future

What can be done to increase the percentage of municipal solid waste that is recycled in Houston? The proposed one bin system may be the answer since it takes the choice to recycle out of the hands of the individual citizens and centralizes the process in what can be a state of the art facility. The one bin waste management system differs from the current two bin or single-stream system in several ways, but in essence allows for all municipal solid waste, including recyclables and wet waste such as food, to be collected using a single 96-gallon waste cart. Since a key element of recycling is to be able to separate the various materials into more or less pure components, the additional presence of wet organic material adds increased difficulty to obtaining clean separations. Paper and cardboard, for example, make up the bulk of the non- organic waste and are also the materials that are most affected by the presence of wet organic waste.

Valuable insights to help Houstonians implement the One Bin for All program in an optimal way can be gained by studying the experiences gleaned from one new program in Montgomery, Alabama, and an older program in San Jose, California.

Much of the pushback with the one bin concept comes from companies, particularly in China, that depend on recyclable paper goods as feedstock for its manufacturing processes. This is particularly true of those companies that make food packaging from feedstock derived from recycled cardboard and paper. This feedstock is required to pass stringent cleanliness requirements. It is this requirement that prompted the label of “dirty material recovery facilities” (dirty MRFs) to mixed waste processing facilities (MWPFs)—facilities that used the one bin system. This is not necessarily a true characterization. Earlier attempts at a MWPF were dirty and had high levels of residue and odor issues from highly contaminating organics. Today’s MWPF can yield much cleaner products (Gershman 2014). In Montgomery, Alabama, an Infinitus MWPF has been successful in marketing all forms of its recovered materials. Several different grades of paper/cardboard are sold for uses that require varying degrees of cleanliness. It is certainly possible to structure material sales around more than one commodity or single sales value. In addition, new separation technology may be developed that will better clean all

9 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question? paper/cardboard during the separation process. Doing either will require a very well thought out business plan, a waste management company that is innovative, and a process for the development of new dedicated markets. Innovation should allow for constant improvement of the separation train. The company must ensure that a continuing process of research and development of technology will take place throughout the lifetime of the waste management contract.

Another important question is what to do with the organic waste material left over after separating all of the other recyclable products. Currently, the MWPF in Montgomery is composting the recovered organic waste using traditional windrows. But that is only until the second and third phases of the project are complete. The second phase will feature an anaerobic digester that will be built by a partner company called Zero Waste Energy and operated by Infinitus staff. The anaerobic digester will produce both compost and compressed natural gas (methane) that will be used as fuel for the facilities collection trucks. The third phase may include a facility to produce biofuel from the nonrecoverable materials from phase one (BHS 2015; Infinitus Energy 2015).

The Montgomery plan considers multiple uses for the organic waste: compost formation, natural gas production, or the manufacture of biofuels or oil (Infinitus Energy 2015). By developing multiple products, they have the competitive advantage of a diversity of markets, virtually guaranteeing that they will be able to sell all of the organic waste products.

Some have criticized the recycling of organic waste in the Houston One Bin for All plan as a code phrase for incineration. Although in the past, organic waste has been either buried in a landfill or incinerated, incineration is only sparingly used in the United States because of the pollution it generates. By recycling organic wastes, such as in the One Bin for All plan, proven technologies can convert these former wastes into useful and moneymaking products. For example, wet organic waste can be composted very quickly or subjected to anaerobic digestion to produce biogas (methane) and soil amendments. Dry organics, including contaminated paper, can be reclaimed and manufactured into new paper products utilizing technology created by GreenBox, an innovative food packaging company. Their technology allows the creation of 100

10 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question? percent post-consumer tissue products from food-contaminated paper product waste made with FDA approval.

The separation of the variety of waste materials found in both single-stream and One Bin for All type municipal solid waste facilities is fairly straightforward and the technology to do it is available and well-engineered. Separation is accomplished by using a series of sensors and diverters. The sensors, separation, and conveyor equipment is generally specifically designed for a particular facility and assembled in a modular fashion. Because the technology is still evolving, periodic improvements or changes in the flow stream are desirable, and a modular design will allow them to be made with minimum disruption. For example, the Montgomery plant currently disposes of the wet organic component, but will be modified to compost it and/or produce biogas in an anaerobic digester at a later stage in the plant’s development.

A typical separation stream starts with the waste-loaded truck dumping its charge on the tipping floor. The separation facility is then fed an optimized quantity of waste onto the first of several conveyor belts where, generally, items such as engine blocks or concrete that are too large or otherwise unsuitable for the machinery are removed by hand. The remaining heterogeneous stream of waste, wood, plastic containers, metals, paper, cardboard, etc., then begins its journey through various separators. Sorting is done by taking advantage of the different chemical and physical properties of each type of material: density, magnetic properties, induction and induced magnetism, visible light X-rays, and near infrared reflectivity, as well as size and shape.

Separation of cardboard and paper as well as other similar materials by density and shape is achieved by float or sink characteristics or various types of air interactions, including wind sifters, aspiration, and elutriation techniques. Removing metals from the aggregate is accomplished by the use of various types of magnetic separators for ferrous metals and a selection of eddy current separators for non-ferrous metals (primarily aluminum cans) and stainless steel materials. Optical separation technologies, including near infrared separation (NIRS), is required for other materials, such as plastics and glass. In all cases attention is paid to initial size (Capel 2008).

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To summarize, facilities generally sort materials by one or more of five methods:

1. Trommel separators/drum screens: These devices separate materials according to their particle size. The waste stream is fed into a large rotating drum that is perforated with holes of a certain size or an inclined set of oscillating or rotating teeth. Materials smaller than the diameter of the holes will be able to drop through, but larger particles will remain in the drum whereas larger materials will climb up the inclined set of teeth.

2. Eddy current separator: This method is specifically for the separation of non- ferrous metals. An “eddy current” is generated when a conductor is subject to a changing magnetic field. The induced repulsive magnetic field causes the metals to essentially fly off the conveyor into a separate bin.

3. Induction sorting: Material moves along a conveyor belt with a series of sensors underneath. These sensors locate different types of metal that are then separated by a system of fast air jets linked to the sensors.

4. Near infrared sensors (NIR): When materials are illuminated they mostly reflect light in the near infrared wavelength spectrum. NIR sensors distinguish between different materials, such as plastics, based on the way they reflect light.

5. X-ray technology: This technology is used to distinguish between different types of waste based on their ability to adsorb X-rays.

Different recovery facilities, through the use of a particular combination of separators and conveyors, are able to separate materials in a way that is optimal for both the waste feedstock provided by the community and the requirements of different potential end users. As the future develops and waste management and materials recovery become more and more important, new and more revolutionary technological advances will be made in methods of separation, and new materials will be derived from the end products. A truly innovative facility will be one that is designed to be capable of accommodating these changes in technology, changes in both the

12 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question? quality and quantity of feedstock, and the constant changing requirements of the end product marketplace. The success of the process will be defined by the extent to which the waste-stream is diverted from the landfill and returned to the marketplace.

Economic Considerations

If Houston adopts a new solid waste management program such as One Bin for All, it must be economically sound. In other words, it should not cost the taxpayers more than what they consider it is worth to them. No plan can survive unless the majority of Houstonians desire it and it is at least as economical as the one it replaces. There are three components to any large city’s solid waste management program: transportation of waste from residence, separation and disposal of the waste, and/or brokerage of usable recyclables.

Currently the city transports the majority of residentially generated solid wastes, although some neighborhoods contract with private companies for waste pickup. Over the years, by renegotiating waste contracts, the Department of Solid Waste Management has realized substantial savings. One advantage of the One Bin for All plan would be to continue to stabilize or reduce costs by alleviating the need to have two or three different kinds of waste picked up from the same household. Additional savings could be realized if the One Bin program produces biofuel or natural gas that can be used to operate the trucks.

At the present time, household garbage is taken to a landfill for disposal. Houston utilizes several different privately operated landfills that are located in various parts of the city. In the Houston- Galveston area, 23 individual landfill facilities were recorded by the TCEQ in 2007. They were purported to have 2,300 acres of allocated landfill space and a lifetime of 20 years (TCEQ 2007).

Those data are probably quite comparable to today’s numbers except for the lifetime left. By dumping waste in a landfill, we are paying money rather than receiving money through recycling. By eventually closing these landfills, we will see an upgrade in nearby neighborhoods, reducing heavy truck traffic and increasing property values for homeowners.

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The One Bin for All program has been criticized as being ecologically unjust because it will invariably be located in a poor and/or minority neighborhood. The same can be said for landfills located within the city limits. They are not only ugly, full of vermin, and smelly, but they are also visited daily by a multitude of garbage trucks that often need to go through residential areas to get to and from the landfill. A One Bin facility will likely be located in an industrial area, possibly along the same corridor as an existing landfill, for the sake of convenience in dealing with any part of the waste that is found to be non-recyclable. The number of landfill sites can be reduced over time and more and more material from the recycling facility will be recyclable as new techniques are developed and new uses are found for the recovered products.

Because of Houston’s single-stream program, source segregated recyclables can be taken directly to modern recycling facilities. For example, a privately operated single-stream recycling facility was launched in southwest Houston in late summer 2011. This 40,000 square-foot facility sorts metals, newspaper, mixed paper and cardboard, plastic containers, polyethylene terephthalate (PET), tetrapak food and drink cartons, and glass using state-of-the-art technology (Waste Management 2011). It is one of the companies that operate several recycling and landfill facilities serving Houston’s single-stream residential collection, as well as commercial customers and other communities in the region. A subsidiary of the company that operates this facility acts as a brokerage house for it and other recycling facilities the company owns in several communities in North America. As such it seeks out markets for recycling products and attempts to get top dollar for them. This function is a necessary part of any profitable venture. The only missing segment in my mind is that the company has not ventured beyond the present state of recycling, in which they have established a market for only a fraction of the materials that enter the facility as potentially recyclable. In its own press release from August 8, 2011, the company states, “Single-stream recycling streamlines and simplifies the process of collecting and processing recyclable materials, increasing recycling rates by up to 50 percent.” The question then becomes: Is it possible to reach close to a recycling rate of 100 percent with current technology? Or, if we choose to do so, is it possible to take the entire waste-stream, including wet organic wastes, and process it completely into reusable materials? I believe that it is technically possible and the City of Houston is on the right path in actively trying to implement

14 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question? this innovation for Houston. The choice is dependent on whether it is economically feasible and whether the economics of the project are also being vetted.

Whatever choice is made—single-stream, One Bin for All, or something in between—it must be based on all of the available facts. To explore those facts, the process leading to a decision must be absolutely transparent. By its very nature, it is my opinion that the handling of waste materials—from production to resurrection—must be accomplished by a public-private- partnership or PPP. In a PPP government and private companies agree upon co-responsibility and co-ownership for the solid waste collection, treatment, and product marketing service. The public sector has a responsibility to its constituents, a stewardship attitude toward the local environment, access to local culture, concerns over providing jobs, and officials who are publically held accountable for their actions. The private sector provides technical know-how, access to financing, an entrepreneurial spirit, a drive to a successful and a profitable product, managerial expertise, and access to business experience. However, a successful PPP with all partners acting together to reach a common goal is not guaranteed (Lindell 2012). Somehow all must share a commitment to work for a common goal even though the public sector is interested in saving money, whereas the private sector has an imperative need to make money. These differences along with others can make a commitment to common goals more than somewhat problematic. A poorly constructed PPP without transparency, fairness, and accountability can easily result in failure to produce the desired end product or an unacceptably expensive process. To avoid this end result, both sectors—public and private—must be strong. The private sector must be dedicated to creating an acceptable product and the public sector must be constituted to be a fair but firm regulator.

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18 One Bin or Not One Bin: Is that the Question?

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