WasteExpo 2017: Beyond data collection

Recording data is one thing, but deriving meaningful information from it to provide direction is quite another. Speakers during a session titled Smart Cities with a Solid (Waste) Plan, during WasteExpo 2017 in New Orleans shared how their communities are doing just that.  

Susan Fife-Ferris, director, solid waste planning and program management, at Seattle Public Utlities, shared what the city of 700,000 people is doing with its data. She said data doesn’t just come from one source; it is collected by contractors, collectors, processors and an assortment of entities.

Within Seattle, private recyclers, composters and transfer stations operate. The city has two transfer stations, including one new one.

The city conducts research and studies and uses focus groups and stakeholders in its data gathering.

One of the struggles Fife-Ferris said Seattle faces is that many people live in the suburbs and come into Seattle for work as well as many people live in Seattle and go to the suburbs to work at places such as Microsoft. This creates a difficulty with consistency across the region, she said.

The city has 155,000 residential carts, 4,000 residential dumpsters and 6,000 commercial dumpsters. Recyclables and organics are banned from the dumpsters. Garbage collected from the city is long hauled to Arlington, Oregon, by rail about 320 miles away.

“We only pay for what we ship,” Fife-Ferris said. “The less we ship the less we have to pay so huge economic benefit by not having to ship it.”

She defined a “smart city” as one where you “gather data and you use that data to make decisions and drive your policies.”

Seattle residents pay $110 for weekly garbage collection, $12 for weekly organics collection and every-other-week recycling collection is free. Fife-Ferris explained, “If you put stuff in your garbage, you are going to pay a lot more.”

This rationalization seems to work on residents. Only 2 percent have a 96-gallon container for their trash. Most have smaller containers. Enforcement of correct recycling is another component of the program. Residents who don’t recycle correctly are given an “Ooops!” tag on their bin to help correct the behavior.

“Education and outreach are of huge importance,” Fife-Ferris emphasized. She added that disposal bans also drive programs.

“There is a difference between data collection and performance metrics,” she said. “You can learn a lot by mining that data for information.”

Phil Bresee, chief of the environmental management office for the Arlington County, Virginia, Solid Waste Bureau, is unique in that almost as many people work in Arlington as live there. He said it also is the smallest county in the country at 26 square miles. Its proximity to the District of Columbia, which it was part of until the 1800s, gives it a highly educated, affluent population. It also has a high ratio of multifamily to single family homes. About three-fifths of the population live in multifamily dwellings, which has added challenges since the city does not handle the multifamily collection, said Bresee; it only regulates it.

The county has to rely on regulations to ensure recycling in multifamily dwellings, he said. A recent code change in 2015 forced closer inspection of commercial and multifamily properties which required inspection of individual tenants. The number of audits increased from 1,400 to 4,000. “The inspection didn’t just tell them if they were in compliance or not, but provided key takeaways.”

The county realized only 39 percent of tenants were in compliance with the regulations. The most common deficiencies, he said, were not enough bins and employee education and outreach.

The county of Arlington does quarterly waste audits of its residential waste streams. During these audits, the county noticed its diversion hovered at around 48.8 percent over the last 10 years. While that number remained consistent, the amount of municipal solid waste generated has declined by 34 percent.

The residential waste stream is about 60,000 tons per year. It also began collecting yard trimmings year round instead of seasonally, which added about 200 tons more yard trimmings to the stream per year. The county switched from producing paper copies of its solid waste and recycling plan to a cloud-based system called Re-TRAC.

“We are pretty data driven in Arlington,” said Bresee. “We use all of our data to inform stakeholders.” He said the county surveys its residents and receives about 1,000 surveys per month providing real data to be able to “mine and make program adjustments as we need to.”

Jim McKay, general manager, solid waste management services, city of Toronto, said, though the two aforementioned areas are different in size from each other and Toronto, many of the challenges are similar.

Toronto has a population of 3 million and it is made up of about 50/50 multi- and single-family homes. Commercial and industrial recycling are managed through the private sector. Before recycling diversion was measured by weight, but that does not give an accurate picture, according to McKay. “We are looking at changing how we measure diversion,” said McKay. “We won’t measure it by weight anymore. We are handling more material that weighs less. We are looking at a different set of metrics.”

Toronto has a three-cart program and 1.3 million carts are in use. It has transfers stations and drop-off locations, which McKay said don’t make sense anymore because fewer people are driving and more are relying on public transportation.

Toronto is paying to landfill materials so it wasn’t to put as little in the landfill as possible. It is also managing and monitoring about 160 closed landfills. “We are paying $12 million a year just to maintain those sites,” said McKay.

Canada operates a little bit differently than the U.S. because it has extended producer responsibility, where the manufacturers and distributers are responsible for a portion of the costs of recycling. It provides an extra revenue stream to the city.

The city has a curbside green bin and does biweekly garbage pickups. The list of organics the city accepts is quite extensive because of the flexibility of the two anaerobic digestion systems it has. “When you switch to biweeky pickups it is that much more incentive to divert more material,” he said.  

The biggest change coming down the pipe for Canada is in provincial policy. Over the next several years EPR will go from paying 50 percent of the cost of recycling to 100 percent of the cost. The consumer goods companies have agreed to this plan as long as they can take control of the recycling system. It will be run by an organization made up of companies like Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola.

McKay said Toronto has an aspirational goal of zero waste. “We are trying to shift away from zero-waste and more toward a circular economy concept,” he said.

The city is also moving to mobile depots for recycling and bringing services to a high rise complex, for example. Textile recycling is another area the city is looking at as with its robust organics recycling program, textiles are a larger part of the waste stream.

One of the challenges of Toronto is its urban density and it is looking at a “more condensed solution than all these bins,” said McKay.

It also wants to reap the benefits of the two digesters that’s gas is being flared currently in what McKay called an “unbelievable waste of a resource.”

WasteExpo 2017 was May 8-11 at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.