In another blog, Marie Neubrander, an intern working with Sustainable House, offers suggestions for empowering we citizens to reduce our waste - thank you, Marie.
It is essential that society comes together to reduce climate pollution to zero in the remaining 8 years until the ‘use by’ date Earth has been given by her scientists - by 2030.
The last few hundred years have delivered, controlled, approved, regulated, and promoted the pollution that’s destroying Earth’s climate, banishing her seasons and flooding and disaster-proning her cities, towns and countrysides.
Activists protesting for climate change action; image from [1].
In approaching this issue, local authorities can choose between two roads: policies that control or policies that motivate and empower their citizens.
The idea of controlling citizens to get to nil pollution is fanciful. In the context of environmental protection, it is essential that we instead encourage policies promoting long-term and enthusiastic changes. One potential way of doing so is by providing financial incentives for waste reductions.
MOTIVATION: PAY-AS-YOU-THROW PRICING
According to research by the World Bank, each year, the world generates roughly 2 billion tons of municipal solid waste. These researchers estimate that at least 33% of this waste is handled in an environmentally harmful way - the number is likely much higher [2]. Evidently, it is essential that we re-evaluate our mindsets towards and handling of waste. Increasing financial incentives is one promising method.
In most municipalities, residents pay fixed costs for their garbage pickup services, whether that be as a component of their taxes or as a separate monthly fee. In such a system, no matter how much you toss in the bin, you pay the same amount; as payasyouthrow.org describes it, this is an “all-you-can-eat” approach to waste disposal and provides little incentive to produce less waste. This is different from many other utilities including water, electricity, and gas - for those, costs are often tied directly to the quantity of consumption [4].
Pay As You Throw (PAYT) waste pricing systems - also known by names including Unit-Based Pricing (UBP) and Save Money and Reduce Trash (SMART) - offer a different approach. In PAYT systems, instead of paying fixed fees, residents pay for waste removal based on quantity: the less food or other waste a resident tosses in the bin, the less money they spend on garbage pickups.
The infographic below, developed by Ecube Labs, highlights the multiple ways PAYT systems can be implemented. For instance, in one of the most common methods, residents must purchase special trash bags - only waste in those bags will be collected. Pricing is municipality-dependent, but reasonable estimates are approximately $1 per 15-gallon bag or $2 per 30-gallon bag. Alternatively, for more precision (with added logistical complexity), pricing may be based on weight post-pickup.
Methods of implementing PAYT waste management; image from Ecube Labs [6].
Regardless of specific implementation practice, the bottom line remains the same: the less you throw, the less you pay. This heavily incentives waste avoidance: when we are paying for our waste, we are more likely to attempt to generate lest of it (e.g. buying in more appropriate quantities, using safe-to-eat food we might otherwise throw out, etc.). For waste that cannot be avoided, PAYT encourages recycling and/or composting.
These benefits of PAYT are not just theoretical: PAYT has already been implemented in numerous cities and towns across the world, including over 7,000 in the United States. Estimates of the actual quantities of waste reduced by PAYT systems are promising. A 2006 EPA report found that as a whole, PAYT reduced residential trash disposal by 17%. However, this number may be notably higher dependent on community. For instance, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection estimated that communities implementing PAYT reduced waste by 40 to 55%.
For a deeper dive, one interesting state to examine is New Hampshire, where over 75% of communities participate in PAYT programs. As a case study, we can examine New Hampshire’s capital Concord (population roughly 42,000).
Over the first five years of Concord’s PAYT system, the city experienced a 43% decrease in solid waste tonnage, as shown in the chart below. Additionally, the recycling rate went up from 13% to 36% - nearly a three-fold increase.
Waste tonnage before and after PAYT in Concord, NH; image from [8].
Another state with abundant PAYT systems is New Hampshire’s neighbor to the west: Vermont. In 2012, Vermont’s legislature passed the multi-faceted Universal Recycling Law. As a component, the state instated that by July 1, 2015, statewide unit-based pricing would take effect; this has since been successfully implemented.
This law included a multitude of other regulations, including banning recyclables from landfills, requiring free recycling collection, and requiring the diversion of food scraps away from landfills. As such, it is difficult to entangle which benefits have come from specifically PAYT pricing - rather, each facet works cohesively towards long-term waste reduction.
It is worth noting that the two states used as examples - Vermont and New Hampshire - are two of the smallest states in the U.S. However, PAYT is not exlusive to small cities: research shows that 62 of the 100 largest cities in the U.S. have PAYT systems.
Another potential concern surrounding PAYT systems is that they will cause illegal dumping to increase. Thankfully, the general consensus among communities with existing PAYT systems is that this has been shown false.
Of course, no matter how beneficial PAYT may appear, the idea may remain initially unnerving: it may feel like just another fee you have to pay to exist. However, paying for garbage disposal is nothing new. It has always been happening; PAYT seeks to make the process more equitable. Notably, a report by the EPA found that following implementation, over 95% of households prefer PAYT to traditional tax-based systems.
As a society, the cost that we will face if waste generation continues at its current rate is more than financial: we are risking Earth as we know it. We hope the the financial incentives found in PAYT serve as strong motivation for environmental good.
EMPOWERMENT: APPROVAL-FREE DEVELOPMENT
Aside from financial incentives to reward behaviour and development changes which reduce or end Earth-killing pollution, local authorities can also ‘empower’ their residents by making clear the development that will decrease pollution and, in turn, either fast-tracking approvals for it or making it possible to do such developments without approval.
A proven example of development that’s possible without approval, and which stops pollution, is found in Sydney City Council, NSW, Australia.
There, since 2013, the council has pre-approved road gardens across the city of Sydney in the several dozen suburbs surrounding the central business district.
The street gardens of Chippendale are a form of social ‘glue’ where residents and businesses share, talk about, and enjoy the company and availability of over 1,000 fruit trees, herbs, and plants.
Sustainable Chippendale footpath gardens; image from [16].
People say they buy or rent there because of the street gardens and the pleasure of looking at and walking down the footpaths. This aligns with prominent research that trees have been shown to increase property values.
For the last decade, dozens of compost and planter beds have been built and maintenance by the locals both on the footpaths and the verges beside them.
Furthermore there is a local active gardeners facebook page where problems, solutions and ideas are shared; this is yet another way the gardens serve as community-building with a shared vision of a healthy Earth.
These days, the Chippendale community is composting over 350kg of food waste a week in the footpath garden composting options. The compost is used to improve the poor verge soils, to retain stormwater, and to grow trees and plant canopy, all of which cools the area in summer by up to 10 degrees.
Going forwards, we hope more communities will empower residents to take the lead in reducing pollution and waste. Together, we have the power to make a difference.
Sources:
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/campaigners-stage-climate-protests-across-the-world
[2] https://datatopics.worldbank.org/what-a-waste/trends_in_solid_waste_management.html
[3] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_New_Plastics_Economy.pdf
[4] http://payasyouthrow.org/the-trash-problem/
[5] https://nerc.org/news-and-updates/blog/nerc-blog/2018/04/03/the-pay-as-you-throw-solution
[6] https://www.ecubelabs.com/pay-as-you-throw-what-it-is-and-why-it-should-be-implemented/
[7] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/11/new-hampshires-pay-as-you-throw-programs-are-reducing-waste-by-50-percent/)
[8] http://paytorg.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Concord-NH-Case-Study.pdf
[9] https://nerc.org/news-and-updates/blog/nerc-blog/2018/04/03/the-pay-as-you-throw-solution
[10] https://dec.vermont.gov/sites/dec/files/wmp/SolidWaste/Documents/Universal-Recycling/Timeline-factsheet_CURRENT.pdf
[11] https://dec.vermont.gov/sites/dec/files/wmp/SolidWaste/Documents/Universal-Recycling/2019.Universal.Recycling.Status.Report.pdf
[12] https://www.arborday.org/trees/benefits.cfm
[13] https://ilsr.org/world-soil-day-2016/
[14] https://archive.epa.gov/wastes/conserve/tools/payt/web/pdf/sera06.pdf
[15] https://portal.ct.gov/DEEP/Reduce-Reuse-Recycle/Payt/Save-Money-and-Reduce-Trash
[16] https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/community-gardens/sustainable-chippendale-footpath-gardens