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Recycling Update 2017 was a smashing success – thank you!

Thank you to All who attended the 22nd annual recycling update conference!

We had 24 industry-leading presenters that inspired and educated, and a crowd of 350 attendees from many fields!  7 Gold Sponsors, 5 Silver Sponsors, and 10 Bronze Sponsors made scholarships and discounted tickets available to those who needed assistance.  Thank you for making the Conference such a success!

Linked here is the program for the day; we will be posting pdfs of the presentations here as well, so keep checking back.  And in mid-April, we will have videos of each presentation available on our YouTube Channel.

Thank you again to our Sponsors!

GOLD : City of Fremont, City of Vallejo, StopWaste, SF Department of the Environment, City of Napa, Mt. Diablo Resource Recovery, Napa Recycling & Waste Services

SILVER : City of Livermore, R3 Consulting Group, HF&H Consultants, Ecology Center, Gigantic Idea Studio

BRONZE : Marin Sanitary Service, City of Stockton, CRRC Northern District, Stanford Recycling Center, CRRA, City of Palo Alto, City of Sunnyvale, SCS Engineers, Amador Valley Industries, Berkeley Recycling

Download: San Diego Zero Waste Symposium

By Arthur R. Boone, Center For Recycling Research and Total Recycling Associates
The only other one-day, recycling-centered, educational event in California besides ours is the Zero Waste Symposium held in San Diego, this year at the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation in SE San Diego. Laura Anthony, daughter to Rick, is the program coordinator and 20 people each get 15-20 minutes to tell what’s “new and different” in their work; over 100 in attendance with a good lunch provided by Kitchens for Good.  I missed six of the speakers but there were a few gems worth noting. All of the presentations are now on line and retrievable. Definitely an upbeat day.

The US Business Council for Sustainable Development, headquartered in Austin, Texas, has started a “Materials Marketplace,” with its proprietary database making 176 transactions in two years between sending and receiving firms. State agencies in Ohio and TN are trying to start local versions of what sounds like what Bert Ball has done with LA Shares but has not yet been replicated elsewhere.

Darcy Shiber-Knowles from Dr. Bonner’s Company in Vista that makes soaps with imported materials (like coconut oil) gave a detailed explication of the virtue of fair trade principles and practices that assure the money gets to the little people in the sending countries.

Marina Kasa with Sony Electronics in Rancho Bernardo discussed the company’s goal of zero waste by 2050 with five year plans. Excellent talk; shrinking packaging is a big item for them. In response to a question about how Amazon seems to put the smallest item in the  biggest box, she said there have been meetings and that concern is on Amazon’s agenda now.

Briefer Notes: A small brew-pub gets spent grains to a pig farmer for animal feed. Powdered concrete from sawing operations can be fed into new concrete batches at a 1-2% of volume rate (similar to using fine grind old tires in retread making  mixes). Sustainable Surplus Exchange in Vista (about to change their name to REUSE4GOOD) mirrors the work of the Bay Area reuse depots but is open only on a few fixed days per year for teachers and others to come. J. Michael Huls, now an adjunct prof at Santa Monica City College, reminded us that the USA with 3% of the world’s population consumes 30% of the world’s resources. Reina Pereira from City of LA told of their new seven contracts for commercial collections ending the reign of 30 independent haulers; still waiting to see how this plays out – 65,000 accounts in America’s second largest city.

Subsidy Or Disposal Service Fee?

Subsidy Or Disposal Service Fee? That Is The Question.
By Daniel Knapp, Ph.D., CEO, Urban Ore, Inc., a Material Recovery Enterprise in Berkeley, California since 1980.

Hello Annie Sciacca and Sophie Mattson:

In response to your July 27, 2016 article in the Mercury News, “Why Are Bay Area Recycling Centers Closing — and Can Anything Save Them?”

I am a professional reuser and recycler with 35 years experience in California. The company I work for and with, Urban Ore, Inc., has survived many market fluctuations. Our primary business is reuse, but we also do lots of recycling. In 2015 we sent just 70 tons to landfill, less than 1% of the materials we accepted, upgraded, and returned to commerce.

Your article throws into sharp relief the extreme underlying unfairness that shackles our industry and prevents it from realizing highest recycling goals that are overwhelmingly popular both with voters and with elected politicians. This unfairness stems from dominance within the materials recovery industry by solid waste management ideology, despite this managerial elite’s having lost as much as 50% market share to recyclers in some areas (like Alameda County) in the last several decades.

“…the system is rigged to make sure wasters get theirs, no matter what. And recyclers are left to beg, or close their doors.”

To see how this unfairness works and is baked into our language, consider this sentence from your article:  “Recycling centers are increasingly dependent on the state’s subsidy program, but critics say the payouts are too slow to arrive and the subsidies aren’t adjusted quickly enough to reflect changing market conditions.”

I recognize that neither you nor your newspaper are responsible for this usage. But here’s the thing:

All recyclers compete with wasting industries for the same supply of materials. Wasting industries are, however, never paid with funds that are called subsidies. Instead, they are paid with funds derived from disposal service fees. What’s the difference?

The difference couldn’t be bigger or more consequential. Subsidies are mere handouts, temporary grants, while disposal service fees are monies paid to pay for the costs of making unwanted things go away, legally, plus a minimum 15% profit. But wasting industries accomplish this task by destroying value and creating pollution. Don’t recyclers make unwanted things go away legally too, and don’t they do it in a way that produces jobs and environmental benefits far beyond what wasters can provide?  Of course they do. Then why call monies paid to recyclers subsidies?  Why not call them disposal service fees instead?

There is no good reason at all for this imbalance, other than inertia, waste industry protectionism, and public confusion.

My dictionary tells me that a subsidy is “money granted to a charity…held to be in the public interest.”  The same dictionary says a fee is “…money regularly paid for continuing services.”  Grants can be withdrawn or at least not adjusted upward when money is tight, and that’s what’s behind all these recycling center closures and all the entrepreneurial pain that your article describes so well. But fees have to be paid and even increased as costs go up, regardless. So the system is rigged to make sure wasters get theirs, no matter what. And recyclers are left to beg, or close their doors. Could anything be more unfair, even dangerous to public health and safety?

With few exceptions, the solid waste profession controls both wasting and recycling all over California at the present time. I believe we need to “feel the Bern” in our field, and create a new management structure for recycling that recognizes that we recyclers are now the centerpiece of the disposal service industry, not an expensive add-on fueled by subsidies, and therefore that we deserve full payment for our work with the coin of the realm, disposal service fees.

Waste management is a sunset industry. The fact is that we recyclers have products to sell, and wasters have only liabilities to give future generations. Enacting this needed change will make the recycling industry even more of a formidable competitor than it has been since we hands-on recyclers started our revolution on or about Earth Day, 1970.

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