Council member Dex Ellison tag-teamed with Chief of Staff Jerry Hendrix at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting to unveil a proposed plan to extend the city’s recycling collection services from strictly single-family residential to apartment complexes. It’s a small step in the right direction but, sadly, it appears to be the only step the City is willing to take right now to protect the environment.
“Our purpose here is to allow Kyle residents living in apartments to have the same opportunity to recycle as residents in single family homes,” Ellison told the council.
Hendrix noted that the number of individuals in Kyle living in apartments has doubled during the last five years. “Currently we have over 3,000 apartment units in the city,” with an estimated 7,000 individuals in Kyle who are apartment dwellers, he said. He added another 600 apartment units will open by the end of the year with another 822 units planned for 2022.
“Currently, only half the apartment units in Kyle offer recycling,” Hendrix said.
Ellison and Hendrix engaged all 14 of the current multi-family property managers by telephone, in-person visits and, in many instances, both “to get a feeling where their recycling services were at,” the council member said — “their desire to either, if they didn’t have (recycling), bring that to their complex; or, if they did, how they felt about the service being provided and perhaps if capacity could be increased.”
Hendrix said it’s possible recycling services can be provided to apartment dwellers at no additional cost. “If we’re going to divert recycling into the garbage stream, the rate in the TDS (the City’s sanitation services provider) contract for a recycling dumpster is the same as the rate for a garbage dumpster. So, if we’re able to divert one dumpster of garbage into a dumpster of recycling, the net cost to the apartment complex should be zero.”
The City sponsored an on-line survey of apartment dwellers which attracted only 250 respondents, meaning the results are not statistically valid. Of those respondents, 200 said they lived in a complex that does not offer recycling services.
The next step, Ellison told the council, is a pilot recycling program in four apartment complexes, two of which already offer recycling of some sort and two that don’t.
“For those who do not have it, figuring out the spacing of where to put the containers, getting that program started, various different things like that,” Ellison said. “For those that do have recycling, we’ll be heavier on the education to make sure they are recycling properly, as well as making sure they have the right amount of capacity.”
Ellison said TDS is working with the City’s staff to develop the pilot program and Hendrix described TDS “as engaged and committed to making this work.”
“No specific timetable is set at this time” for the kickoff of the pilot program, Hendrix said today. “The specifics of the pilot program are still being worked out. The goal will be to develop service delivery models for providing recycling service in the apartment communities. This may require a mix of dumpsters and carts, or just one of the two. Valet services are also part of the discussion.”
He said the four apartment complexes that will participate in the pilot program have not been selected.
Hendrix also said today a number of objectives for the pilot program are currently under discussion.
“For properties that currently offer recycling: Education opportunities and delivery methods to increase diversion and decrease contamination; ‘rightsizing’ the garbage and recycling receptacles for each property; reviewing collection area placements to see if there may be a better place for them; and controlling litter from the collection areas.
“For properties that do not currently offer recycling: How to introduce the service to residents in a manner that will maximize their ‘buy-in’ and participation; optimum placement of dumpsters/carts; education messages and opportunities; and tracking diversion rates and impact on garbage waste stream.”
At the conclusion of the pilot program, Ellison said he hopes to bring before council a multi-family recycling ordinance that would require multi-family property managers to offer recycling services to their tenants.
“Through the ordinance we will be able to create some economies of scale, a standardized process across the board and a level playing field for all apartment complexes and the people who live there — making sure they’re all getting the same service,” Hendrix said.
Recycling is important not only for environmental reasons, but financial ones as well (and it has nothing to do with income derived by selling recyclables and everything to do with the negative impacts on municipal budgets and, as a direct result, the amount of increased taxes residents pay if recycling is not instituted).
Admittedly, this is a gross over-simplification, but a landfill is basically a huge hole in the ground into which trash is dumped. And, as soon as that hole fills to capacity, the landfill operator seals it up and looks for another place to locate another huge hole in the ground. The problem for municipalities and their tax-payers is finding that next location. Plus, digging another huge hole in the ground is an expensive operation. Not only are land costs a factor, but so is location. A new site for a landfill is almost always going to be at a distance that is significantly greater from the city that uses it than the current one. Thus, daily transportation costs are going to increase dramatically along with vehicle maintenance expenses. So it behooves a community to take whatever steps possible to prevent a landfill from reaching capacity.
And that’s especially true of the landfill at Creedmoor, owned and operated by TDS. For most landfills, after the huge hole is dug in the ground, an expensive liner — a sort of impenetrable bowl — but be placed inside that hole to prevent the waste from seeping into adjacent soils (often farmlands) and contaminating them. Eventually this contamination migrates to and poisons rivers and streams. The Creedmoor landfill is unique because the land in which it is located is encased with a natural rock formation that prevents any and all seepage into adjacent properties. Finding and securing another location with an identical geological profile is going to be … well, actually, it’s going to be impossible.
One way to keep landfills from reaching capacity is through natural decomposition. A banana peel will decompose completely within two to 10 days. However, a disposable diaper will take between 250 and 500 years to decompose in a landfill. That plastic water bottle you love to drink from will take up to a 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill. Those plastic bags we use to take home our groceries will take between a decade and a 1,000 years to decompose. According to statistics from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, every three months in the United States, enough aluminum cans and packaging are deposited in landfills to completely rebuild the entire American commercial air fleet and those aluminum cans can take between 80 and 100 years to decompose.
Another way to keep landfills from reaching capacity is by accelerating the decomposition process by employing biotechnology techniques; i.e., basically constantly recirculating leachtate along with surface/storm water, through a series of underground pipes. This technology can add between 50 to 100 years onto the life of a typical landfill.
The problem with this, however, is landfill decomposition produces methane gas and unless the landfill has a system to send this methane to a gas processing plant that will convert it into a commercial energy source, the methane escapes into the air. This escaped methane absorbs the sun’s heat and thus accelerates global warming. For this reason, methane is labeled a greenhouse gas.
European landfill operators, particularly those in Germany, have developed technologies that convert landfills into recycling operations in which all trash collected — everything that someone throws away — is converted into energy that powers homes and businesses. Instead of holes in the ground with birds constantly circling above them, these European landfills look from the outside like a typical office building at best, a scaled-down electrical power plant at worst. This waste-to-energy technology is available in the United States, but it has been blocked by a coalition of mega-landfill operators, organized crime cartels that still control a lot of landfill operations, especially in the Northeast, and federal judges who do what the first two instruct them to do. These operators are interested only in making money from their landfill operations, not investing money in them. The European-styled recycling landfills require a lot of garbage to make them economically viable, and the courts have repeatedly blocked flow control measures which would force trash to these recycling landfills and away from those operated by the large private operators.
Which means the only viable alternative is diversion — finding other ways to dispose of trash other than sending it to landfills. And recycling is the most popular of these diversion methods. Others include thermal and biological treatments, reuse and return and implementing waste reduction methods.
Which returns me to my original thesis that Kyle’s plan to try to implement recycling in multi-family units is a nice step, but in the overall scheme of things is a rather insignificant one if the goal is environmental protection. The city needs to broaden its scope. It needs to broaden its thinking and planning. But then, I’ve been making this complaint about the City of Kyle ever since I came here seven years ago. Kyle thinks small. If it plans at all, it plans five-years out. Geez, My Hero, who once operated the largest landfill in the state of Texas and the sixth largest in the country, who was the former president of the Texas branch of the Solid Waste Association of North America, spearheaded the development of a 50-year master plan – planning 5-0 YEARS in the future – for sanitation services for one of the largest cities in Texas. And that was 15 years ago!!! The City of San Francisco now diverts 80 percent of all waste generated in that city away from landfill disposal through source reduction, reuse, and recycling and composting programs. How did San Francisco accomplish that? The same way other cities have. They set a timetable for achieving zero waste, like My Hero developed in her 50-year master plan, and then outlined a step-by-step, long-range plan for reaching that goal.
Here in Kyle?
“A ‘zero waste’ plan is not currently being discussed,” Hendrix confessed today.
So the obvious question is “Why not?” Why hasn’t the City appointed a blue-ribbon committee composed of environmental scientists, educators and practioners to develop a long-range plan aimed at achieving zero waste? Of course, you could argue that Kyle is only one of the 180 cities in 45 counties served by the Creedmoor landfill, but that misses the larger point of leadership and innovation.
Another question I believe demands an answer from city officials — either elected or staff — is why, when manufacturers such as General Motors have formally announced the date when they will cease manufacturing autos that run on fossil fuels, has the City of Kyle failed to initiate a plan to transition its fleet to environmentally friendly vehicles? And, of course, why does the City continue to ask taxpayers to waste money on buildings that are not LEEDS certified?
In short, why does the City of Kyle consistently brag about the baby steps it takes, while at the same time it utterly fails at the task of long-range planning for a sustainable future for its citizens?
