CRRA 2013 ANNUAL CONFERENCE
ARTICLE 1: RU at CRRA a Big Hit and Oakland’s New Path
By Jordan Figueiredo, Solid Waste Specialist, Castro Valley Sanitary District (CVSan)
First off, I want to thank our excellent Recycling Update (RU) at CRRA Pasadena session speakers: Jack Macy of San Francisco Department of the Environment, Terry McDonald of Saint Vincent DePaul of Lane County Oregon, Todd Sutton of WasteSleuth.com, Timonie Hood of EPA Region 9, Will Bakx of Sonoma Compost, Hillary Near of Cascadia Consulting, and newcomer and late replacement Matt Hirota of UC Merced (shown in the image above). It was a packed room of over 100 attendees and the presentations were just as great as at RU18 in Berkeley with strong applause throughout. For those of you who didn’t get to see newcomer Matt’s presentation at CRRA, you missed out on quite an informative and entertaining show and Matt really ended the session with a bang and laugh as it were. We hope to have Matt reprise his presentation at Recycling Update 19 in the spring since we know you’ll love it. For a sample of Matt’s recent work, please click here or here.
For sessions, I’ll start with Monday and “The Many Roads to Zero Waste” which had several important lessons and insights on agreements and contracts with franchise haulers. Still in negotiations and limited on what he could share Peter Slote of the City of Oakland gave us a peek of “Oakland’s New Path”. In case you didn’t know, Oakland sent 400,000 tons per year (TPY) to landfill in 2006 and they are down to 300,000 TPY now. The goal for the new contract is 40,000 TPY to landfill and they believe the data shows them reaching the 100,000 TPY by 2035 (although Peter thinks it could very well be sooner). They worked with energyjustice.net on the environmental hierarchy used to guide the process/plan and highly recommend their work. And as for the mixed material processing to capture significantly more organics in the multi-family dwelling sector in the upcoming contract, Peter said it best when he pointed out that “compost isn’t just for growing Chardonnay.” More coming soon…..
Thank you for reading this article, please stay tuned to next month’s In Search of Recycling Updates when I’ll share the conclusion to my CRRA Pasadena sessions and the vast differences in hauler diversion and calculated diversion equivalency. I’ll also share some interesting facts we learned from Anna Cummins of 5 Gyres, for example did you know that there are actually 11 gyres? As always, if you want to share recycling updates, let me know anytime at: recyclingupdate@yahoo.com.