Earth Day Part 1: DC isn't achieving its sustainability goals wrt waste diversion

According to the Washington Informer article, "DC's new plan to slash its trash," DC is adding ten years, one decade more, to its waste diversion goal, from 2030 to 2040  That's 16 years!!!!!!!!!!

From the article:

The Sustainable DC Plan, which came out in 2013, said the District should begin diverting 80% of its waste away from landfills and incinerators by 2032. Two decades later, the city has made some progress, particularly when it comes to composting and recycling—but it’s not likely to achieve the original goal. 

A long-awaited Zero Waste DC Plan, which the D.C. Department of Public Works (DPW) released earlier this year, pushed the target date back eight years. To reach 80% waste diversion by 2040, the plan lays out 43 actions aimed at seven overarching goals, which include reducing how much waste we generate, increasing how much we reuse and expanding access to recycling and composting services.

Ironically when the plan was introduced in 2013, I wrote that the city wasn't likely to achieve these goals especially wrt "waste," that it wasn't adopting best practice goals and examples from the best performing cities, but was watering the goals down ("Realizing all aspects of Sustainable DC: it all comes down to chickens...").

One problem is responding to "politics and interest" rather than best practice, like diverting food waste from households.  It's important, but hard to do at scale when you only focus on food waste. It's boutique, not substantive.

I've written about DC's waste practices for years ("More on zero waste practice and DC," 2015).  There's a lot more that can be diverted than recycling and yard waste.  But yard waste is a huge component of the waste stream.

The solution, which I wrote in 2013 ("Urban composting redux," "A way for DC to begin adding yard waste collection as a separate element of waste collection and reduction programming") is to divide the city into two: (1) rowhouse neighborhoods and (2) detached housing neighborhoods.

Salt Lake brands their waste program slcgreen,  They assign 3 cans to households: brown for yard waste and food scraps, green for trash, blue for recycling.  

They send waste inspectors through neighborhoods a few times per year to check for contamination and will post information on cans, and/or forbid their pick up, when there is a high rate of contamination.  

Separately Momentum has gray cans for glass and purple for food waste, which people pay for separately.  (Salt Lake also charges for waste pick up separately.)  Momentum also offers glass drop off recycling in various locations around the city, which is what we use.

Why so long, so obtuse, about developing a yard waste diversion program?  Detached housing neighborhoods tend to generate a lot more yard waste than rowhouse neighborhoods.  But unlike neighboring jurisdictions, DC has never developed a yard waste diversion program for these neighborhoods.  That's the major reason why DC lags so much.

Salt Lake City puts pro-recycling, pro-zero waste messaging on its garbage trucks ("Every year Salt Lake City puts new pro-environmental messages on its sanitation trucks," 2018)

If DC had a regular yard waste diversion program, like Salt Lake, people could put their compostable food in the same can, not wasting money on the very small artisan diversion program at present. 

Start a yard waste diversion program with the Outer City and the detached houses, figure it out, and then introduce a more specialized program to the rowhouse neighborhoods.  

Alternatively, simultaneously with the launch of an Outer City focused diversion program, the city could also do a pilot program in one rowhouse neighborhood, and work from there.  But it's obvious they lack the capacity to do two different programs at once.

(Separately, in Salt Lake, Momentum Recycling, which is contracted to do the glass recycling, has started a boutique composting program too, but it takes everything, meat etc., and then does bio-digestion to produce natural gas. So it expands the range of what's offered towards zero waste, but I don't think the latter program could work at scale.)

Other DC area jurisdictions have done yard waste diversion for decades.  Montgomery County also promotes on-site yard waste composting in many ways.  That's what we did, although it's an issue with tree branches.  Having portable chippers go through neighborhoods every so often would help.  

Maryland even makes compost (Leafgro) and sells it based on getting yard waste from Montgomery and Prince George's Counties.

Um, paying attention to me 11 years ago, probably means that DC would have achieved its waste diversion goals by 2030...