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Old Posted Dec 30, 2008, 6:01 PM
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S.A. is in the slow lane to recycling

For those who think it's not important to recycle, cities rely on it as a source of income. San Antonio gets almost $4 million a year from its recycling program, and it only recycles 12 percent of its waste.

From the San Antonio Express-News
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/loc...ecycling_.html

S.A. is in the slow lane to recycling

Hanging off the back of a garbage truck, Hector Villanueva and Juan Aguirre scramble down block after block to collect San Antonio’s trash. In a nonstop 10-hour workday, the two will hit 1,300 homes and heft 16 tons of garbage into the back of their truck.

Some homeowners put out one garbage can. Others leave up to six at the curb, plus garbage bags that break open when the men pick them up.

Villanueva didn’t think about recycling until he started hoisting trash cans filled with cardboard, plastic bottles and newspapers that could have been recycled.

“After a while of seeing this, you get motivated,” he said as the truck compactor crushed a load of soda pop cans and paper.

In 1995, San Antonio was the first city in Texas to offer citywide curbside recycling. The city began an automated system two years ago and now is halfway through switching from 18-gallon green recycling bins to 96-gallon blue carts. The move has doubled the amount of household trash city residents recycle, from 6 percent to 12 percent.

But that’s less than half the national average of 32 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. And it’s a fraction of San Francisco’s 70 percent recycling rate, the highest in the country.

The difference translates to millions x lost in potential revenue. Even at its low recycling rate, San Antonio has earned more than $3.8 million this year. The check for September alone was $453,659, or $85 per ton of recyclables.

The return per ton dropped by more than 30 percent in October because of a declining market for recyclables. But city officials said the recycling program is designed to accommodate fluctuating prices.

The benefits of recycling are more than financial. Recycling reduces the need for more landfills and protects natural resources. A ton of recycled paper saves 17 trees, 7,000 gallons of water and the equivalent of 185 gallons of gas, according to the EPA.

Recycling a ton of aluminum cans saves the equivalent of 1,655 gallons of gasoline. With less trash to bury, landfills produce less methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, according to the EPA.

But the economic and environmental benefits of recycling have to compete against decades of habits formed around cheap city-run trash collection. It’s a transition San Antonio has been slow to accept.

“That’s what we are here to change,” said Stephen Haney, the city’s assistant solid-waste manager. “The behavior and attitude to just throw everything away.” Haney sets out a 30-gallon garbage can just once a month and holds himself as an example for others. He recycles everything he can and tends to a robust compost pile that breaks down his yard waste, food scraps and paper.

He’s far from the norm.

Edwin Davis, who lives in an East Side area that has yet to receive automated recycling, puts out three to four garbage cans a week for his five-person household. He doesn’t know where the green, city-issued recycling bin has gone. “What difference does it make?” he asked about the point of recycling. “Regardless, we are still going to get charged for it.”

His neighbor Mattie Brewer hasn’t used a recycling bin in 10 years. Having lived in California, where garbage is tightly regulated, she said she understood the importance of recycling. Sometimes she will save cans and bottles for her neighbors to sell. But overall, she finds recycling not convenient enough in San Antonio and puts everything in the trash instead.

“For the most part, we get very good service as far as garbage is concerned,” she said.

Even City Hall is slow to start recycling. More than a decade after curbside recycling was introduced, most city facilities still don’t have access to the green bins, and everything from printouts to lunches ends up in the trash.

The city’s slow conversion to a greener waste stream means it will be years, if ever, before it joins San Francisco and other leaders in recycling or reusing their garbage.

Austin, with a recycling rate of 18 percent, which includes the yard waste that it composts, is following San Francisco’s lead. It is considering a zero-waste plan and already charges residents based on the amount of garbage they put on the curb.

San Francisco city planners say their city has the capacity and capability to recycle or reuse 90 percent of its waste. The city has banned nonbiodegradable plastic shopping bags at large grocery stores and pharmacies. Restaurants no longer can provide foam carryout containers.

With the goal of zero waste by 2020, the city offers curbside composting pickup that can handle meat and dairy waste and is considering fining people who do not sort their trash properly.

City Manager Sheryl Sculley said San Antonio is committed to environmental sustainability but is planning smaller changes than Austin or San Francisco. She wants to increase recycling at city buildings and start a composting program.

“We feel the next logical step is to increase our diversion rates and move toward a green waste collection program,” she wrote in response to a question about the city’s recycling program. “It is estimated that 10 (percent) to 20 percent of San Antonio’s waste stream consists of green waste, which includes food waste and yard waste.”

The end of landfills

Cheap dumping fees and abundant space for large landfills for years made San Antonio complacent about garbage disposal and recycling. Even today, the city has contracts with some of the cheapest landfills in the country and pays a tipping fee of $22 to $25 a ton, less than half of the $60 to $80 a ton fee paid in San Francisco.

But land near San Antonio is becoming scarcer and more expensive.

In 1993, the city went shopping for a new landfill. The closest property was 80 miles away, Haney said. Instead of building its own landfill, the city signed contracts with private landfills and started a recycling program to reduce waste.


That decision created a whole new business in San Antonio. “The future is no more landfills,” said Zachary Walter, an account executive at Greenstar North America, which processes all of the recycling from Austin, San Antonio and other South Texas cities.

Because Greenstar can process all paper, plastic with the recycling logo, plastic grocery bags, glass and metal containers, Haney estimates residents could recycle 50 percent to 80 percent of what they now throw away.

And his job is dedicated to getting residents to recycle more. To encourage more recycling, the city today also provides a small recycling bin for use inside the house when it distributes the larger outdoor containers for automated pickup.

Haney said his next step would be to literally have one person in each household remind the others to recycle.

To meet the expected demand, Greenstar is building the largest recycling sorting plant in Texas near Northeast Loop 410 and Interstate 10 on the East Side. Garbage trucks will be able to drive inside and dump their loads. Set to begin operation this winter or early spring, the plant will be able to process 20,000 tons a month. San Antonio now collects about 5,000 tons a month of recyclable trash.

By comparison, the 800-acre Covel Gardens Landfill run by Waste Management receives an average of 12,000 tons of garbage a month from San Antonio, about a third of what the city produces.


“Much of what comes into this landfill could be recycled,” Covel Gardens Manager Sal Rivera said.

The huge dump itself is becoming greener. Decomposing garbage at the site produces tons of methane gas. Previously released into the atmosphere, the gas is now piped to generators that produce 9 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 6,000 homes. Bob Gregory embraces that idea. He and his brother, Jim Gregory, own Texas Disposal Systems, a competitor of Waste Management in Creedmoor, a town south of Austin, that also handles a portion of San Antonio’s garbage.

They have a slightly different business model that aims to bury as little garbage as possible.

Bob Gregory prides himself on finding ways to divert garbage from his landfill and sell it back to producers. The brothers have a composting operation, run a continuous flea market, sort large metal trash bins of construction debris and are building a 300-acre industrial park on site to use the methane gas from their landfill.

Their next plan is to start sorting additional recyclables from the garbage sent to them by San Antonio and Austin.

The Gregorys’ simplest moneymaking operation is bagged mulch they sell under the Garden-Ville biodegradable brand from brush they compost at the site.

Sitting in the leather interior of his Chevy Suburban parked between two-story piles of compost, Bob Gregory beamed as he watched heavy machinery load trucks with topsoil that has been mixed with his compost. The earthy smell of decomposing biomass swirled in the air. He breathed deeply.

“Smells like money to me,” he said and laughed.

A greener future

The ability to make money from trash is bringing more local businesses into the fold and ultimately could increase San Antonio’s recycling rates.

Walter uses this argument to persuade clients to recycle.

One of his proudest achievements is a cardboard box he keeps next to his desk. To Walter, it represents the demand for recycling going all the way back to the producer.

On Walter’s advice, Boeing asked Rolls-Royce to change the packaging of replacement blades for its jet engines. Rolls-Royce shipped each 2-foot-long blade to Boeing’s plant at Port San Antonio inside a layered cardboard box with a sprayed-in foam interior. The foam stuck to the cardboard, making the boxes impossible to recycle. But by adding a plastic liner to keep the foam and cardboard separate, the boxes could easily be broken apart and tossed into a compactor, where the cardboard then became a revenue stream instead of an additional cost.

At the San Antonio Kelly Aviation jet overhaul and maintenance building, the company has started to send custom packaging back to its suppliers to reuse. Its wood pallets now are being turned into mulch that’s sold at Home Depot and H-E-B.

With those efforts, the recycling rate now is at 40 percent, said Amy Pena, Kelly Aviation’s environment and health manager. Her goal is to reach 85 percent.

It costs Kelly about $61 a ton for garbage to be taken to a landfill, Pena said. The company earns an average of $21 per ton for its recyclables, after paying for fuel surcharges and trash bin rentals.


Pena uses another tactic to get employees to recycle more. She tells them to look in their wallets at the photos of their kids and grandkids. She tells them that whatever they send to a landfill now will have to be dealt with by that generation.

“Grandkids trump everything, pretty much,” she said.

It’s the same message Haney uses when he talks to residents about why they should recycle.

“They will not fill up in our lifetime,” he said of San Antonio’s landfills. “But I guarantee you, they will fill up in our children’s.”
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  #2  
Old Posted Dec 31, 2008, 3:20 AM
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I can't wait to receive that blue container, we already have two green containers, and the over flow every pickup. This is good news and I hope more people become aware that we actually get money from recycling.
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  #3  
Old Posted Dec 31, 2008, 3:39 AM
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We've gotten our's and it's really great. They only have to pick up the recycling twice a month. I would imagine someone who lived alone or had little recycling/waste could get away with putting their recycling out once a month. These cans are quite large. We keep a smaller bin in the house to fill it, mostly with paper. Once it gets full or something gross like a milk jug goes in, I take it out and dump it in the big cart. It's so easy to do. And we've cut down on our household trash big time. We've been recycling steadily for over a decade now, but they added more material to the list of what could be recycled. With two people, we usually have less than a full bag of trash every week now. We're recycling two to three times or more material than we're throwing away.

Once that new recycling plant (single stream) is finished in San Antonio, Austin will be sending its recycling there, at least until some point when we get our own. Right now our's is being sent to Garland to be recycled up there. Even with the fuel cost and the pollution it creates to ship it that far, it's still less because of the amount of stuff that gets recycled, plus it only gets picked up twice a month. And the City of Austin doesn't pay for the extra mileage, the company that manages the recycling materials does.
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Old Posted Dec 31, 2008, 9:27 PM
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We started using the 18 gallon bins last year in Norman and it has been a big success with participation around 50%. I would like to see the big blue bins here eventually.
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Old Posted Jan 2, 2009, 4:37 PM
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That title is just so misleading and unsurprisingly ultra-negative.

yES, if you're comparing SA's recycling rate to SF's, well, yeah, it looks slow but even then that's a city of less than 800,000 people versus a city of 1.4 million. It's gonna take some time to get to a SF like level.

Another thing, this is just how... I wanna say cynical, the Express-News is they're comparing a 70 percent SF rate that not only includes household recycling but composting, and re-use. yet the 12 percent figure for SA only takes into account household recycling.

Way to get the stories and opinions of a couple of east siders who haven't been phased into the new program yet to drive home your one sided crap of a story EXPRESS-News. Wouldn't expect nothing else from such a rag.
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  #6  
Old Posted Jan 2, 2009, 7:37 PM
kornbread kornbread is offline
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I dont' think the title is misleading. Texas in general is behind in recycling (as in most other things), and the newspaper is focusing on the local story.

The city hasn't done much to discourage setting everything on the curb to be thrown in the landfill.

There was a thread on the Express-News forum about banning plastic bags. The number of responses that felt this was a bad thing was really sad.

Last edited by kornbread; Jan 4, 2009 at 8:10 PM.
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