RECYCLING
UPDATE
Speaker List and Presentations from the RU '08 Conference:
At this, the 13th running of NCRA's RECYCLING UPDATE, twenty-five speakers again told what was "new and different" in their piece of the waste reduction, reuse, recycling and composting industry. RECYCLING UPDATE is widely acknowledged as the most outstanding USA conference program on "innovations" in the waste reduction industry. Arthur Boone (NCRA's coordinator for this program since its inception in 1995) made these introductory remarks:
"We're not going to learn about recycling from the academics; we're not going to learn from state or federal agencies; we're going to learn from each other. It will be those of us funded with local public revenues, supported by higher-than-necessary waste disposal charges, that will invent the future. Right here in the Bay Area of California, we will invent the systems and the procedures that will ultimately enable 300 million Americans to do the right thing with their discarded materials in a cost-effective and efficient manner. I'm not quite sure how it came to be us who are on the cutting edge but, for better or worse, we are the ones that the country looks to for program innovation and improvements. As some world-traveled consultants have said, 'Elsewhere there are tales of no money or no political support; here in the Bay Area there are constant program changes, continual process improvement. It's always a joy to be here.' We are grateful for being acknowledged as leaders; let's hope we can keep it up."
The following were Mr. Boone's remarks in introducing the speakers (in their order of appearance):
Heidi Sanborn is the newly appointed Executive Director of the California Product Stewardship Council. She has worked for the CIWMB as well as for consulting firms in the Sacramento area. Many proponents of zero waste strategies see product stewardship as a key part of any effort to reduce the financial burden of discards management on local governments. I heard Heidi present at a Sierra Club meeting several weeks ago and knew you should hear her message.
Heidi’s Presentation
Bob Hollis is known to us best as a long-time member of the CRRA board but he also operates an executive search firm in the hills east of Sacramento. Last summer as a volunteer he coordinated the composting program at the High Sierra Music Festival in Plumas County. Ten thousand people in a small town for a long weekend. Matt Cotton told me he was good and here he is now.
Bob’s Presentation
Randy Magee is the Chief Financial Officer at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton. Last year the fair decided to upgrade its recycling program from cardboard only to multi-materials, including compost, and Randy volunteered to be the staff lead; I was the consultant and on-site, fair-time supervisor. We tried to follow some of the work from Lowell, Massachusetts but found problems that led to higher costs and less recovery than we'd planned. Randy was a real trooper, getting his hands dirty everyday and taking ownership of the program.
Randy’s Presentation
Jean Koch supervises a small program on the grounds of the San Francisco Presidio where they process for their own use all the yard debris materials from the large, mostly-open space. They also operate a community garden on the property; Matt Cotton recommended her to us.
Jean’s Presentation
Tim Dewey-Mattia is the Public Education Manager for the private firm that operates the City of Napa's transfer station and curbside processing facility. After selling three color mix for several years, they studied the problem of doing their own color sorting and, blessed by some state fees available for higher quality cullet, have created a money-winning, on-site, pre-sort system. Kevin Miller nominated him to us.
Tim’s Presentation
Ellen Raynor is the President of the newly-formed San Francisco Carpet Recycling Company. They are aggregating and shipping qualified materials to carpet reprocessors in California and Georgia. I heard her speak at a meeting of the Hotel-Non-Profits Collaborative in San Francisco and wanted you to hear her too.
Steven Joseph is an environmental activist based in San Francisco with some new ideas about enabling plastic film bag recycling.
Steven’s Presentation
Tamar Hurwitz works for the SF Department of the Environment and is responsible for the public schools education programs called Food2Flowers. They now have 100 schools up and running and are starting to infiltrate the middle schools with kids who know how.
Tamar’s Presentation
Timonie Hood is an environmental specialist with the US EPA, based in SF. She will talk briefly about their Lifecycle Building Challenge and invites you to watch the 12 minute film in the lobby during lunch and breaks.
Timonie’s Presentation
Rich Flammer is a composting expert from San Diego County where he worked diligently on the task of getting urban green materials into on-farm applications where farmers co-compost urban green debris with their own manures, spoils, culls, etc. His firm is called Hidden Resources and he had an article in a recent issue of BIOCYCLE.
Rich’s Presentation
Debbie Raphael is the Toxics Reduction expert at the SFDoE. She has spoken on the precautionary principle at previous RU conferences and always gives a good talk. This year she will speak about new state initiatives on toxics reductions.
Debbie’s Presentation
Christine Flowers-Ewing is a former CIWMB employee who has been appointed within the last year to be the Executive Director of Keep California Beautiful. Many progressive recyclers have seen KCB as predominantly an anti-litter, mostly PR, group but I believe Christine will be bringing a new dimension to her work. I heard her speak at a meeting in Sacramento and I admired her energy and organization.
Christine’s Presentation
Jill Boone was for many years a solid waste planner for San Mateo County and recently as a consultant prepared a Climate Action Plan for the City of San Mateo and will discuss the role of recycling in climate action plans.
Jill’s Presentation
Brad Benson is a project manager for the Port of San Francisco and is trying to make sure that some recycling-based businesses have a place in the sun on the south side of Islais Creek in the City.
Brad’s Presentation
Conrad MacKerron is a senior staffer with the As You Sow Foundation in San Francisco that works to develop more corporate accountability on environmental issues. He will talk to us about recent developments on the beverage container recycling front.
Ted Smith is a legend in our times; when the early days of Silicon Valley led to serious groundwater pollution in the South Bay, he founded the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition to push for corporate accountability. Since discovering the massive health and safety abuses of exported electronics in China, documented in the Basel Action Network film, EXPORTING HARM, he has formed the Electronics Take-Back Coalition which he heads. He has spoken here before and it's a great treat to welcome him to our podium.
Ted’s Presentation
Lisa Skumatz heads SERA, Inc., a Boulder, Colorado firm with resource economics skills and will speak on factors affecting recycling program successes. Lisa, by the way, has attended all of the last nine RU programs at her own expense and will be giving us a review of the day at the end of the regular program.
Lisa’s Presentation
We've all been troubled lately by the number of different uses of the term "zero waste," so I asked Ruth Abbe and Linda Christopher to try to straighten this out. Ruth is a senior consultant with HDR here in San Francisco and Linda is the Executive Director to the GrassRoots Recycling Network, a progressive organization founded in 1991 by a group of people discouraged by the lack of national leadership in recycling.
Ruth and Linda’s Presentation
The cities of Oakland and San Francisco have had some varying fortunes connected to their common goal of controlling plastic food packaging wastes and plastic bag wastes; reporting on Oakland will be Becky Dowdakin, solid waste and recycling program supervisor for that city, and for San Francisco, Robin Schidlowski of the SFDoE.
Peter Slote is a staff member of Team Zero, a unit of the City of Oakland's recycling staff that is planning the near-demise of garbage in Oakland by 2020.
Peter’s Presentation
James M. Madden is a staff scientist with SAIC in Oakland; he has worked on setting up commercial collections programs in multi-tenant buildings and will present an overview of the key points of a successful program.
James’ Presentation
Ted Reiff is the founder and director of The Reuse People, a non-profit with building dismantling and construction materials reuse sales operations in San Diego, Oakland, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boulder and Kansas City. He will describe their multi-faceted program.
Jennifer Wang is a recent graduate of UC Berkeley where she wrote her senior thesis in the College of Natural Resources on evaluating the impacts of shifting from two bin to single stream collections. Today she will talk about some of the difficulties she had in her analytical work with the inadequate data provided by local governments. She is now a staff consultant at Energy Solutions in Oakland.
Greg Balzer is a landscape architect in the Roadside Management Office of CALTRANS. He was responsible for developing the new compost specs for CALTRANS that can be used by local governments in acquiring materials for their own work. Matt Cotton referred us to him.
Greg’s Presentation
Connie Cloak is, with her husband, owner of C2: Alternative Services in Santa Rosa. They have done some wonderful work on getting used oil recycling education materials introduced in ESL programs; she told us about that last year. This year she will present her observations on the interplay of city, hauler, and consulting staff on projects. She also, she says, has some recently released news about styrofoam recycling that she will present at the end of her planned remarks.
Connie’s Presentation
Richard Gertman is a thirty year veteran of the recycling industry, now an owner of Environmental Planning Consultants in San Jose. Our sister organization, the California Resource Recovery Association, has, with funding assistance from USEPA Region 9, recently started up a certificated course in zero waste planning and implementation. Richard will describe the program.
Justin Lehrer is a Program Manager with the Alameda County Waste Management Authority, known as StopWaste.Org, and has developed an expertise in reusable packaging for which the agency has been working to develop seminars, training, and innovations adoption among Alameda County businesses as a tool of waste reduction.
Justin’s Presentation
Mary Lou Van Deventer is the operations manager of Urban Ore in Berkeley and is concerned about recycling industry facilities getting priced out of the older urban spaces in the Bay Area where land costs continue to climb faster than the CPI or any other index. She will present her ideas on Resource Development Authorities.
Mary Lou’s Presentation
Dan Knapp is the President of Urban Ore and, in 1985, returned from Canberra, Australia where the term zero waste first gained concurrence and brought it to America. He reports on the recent negative developments in Canberra and offers a cautionary tale for us all.
Dan’s Presentation
Lisa Skumatz – Overview of RU13
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