## Zero waste in the Lone Star state
_By Jake Thomas, Resource Recycling_
You might think the middle of Texas is unusual place for an ambitious zero waste program, but Austin is an unusual place -- for Texas.
In 2009, the capital city passed a resolution that set Austin on a course to produce virtually no waste by 2040. However, getting there won't be easy in a state where tipping fees are cheap and there is little support from state officials. Bob Gedert, the director of Austin Resource Recovery, spoke with _Resource Recycling_ about success and challenges ahead during the 2012 Resource Recycling Conference in Austin, Texas.
Gedert got his start in recycling by helping organize a recycling program at the University of Cincinnati in 1975. Since then, he's worked in Indiana, Ohio and California helping develop zero waste programs. Gedert hopes that Austin's plan will result in green jobs by creating a regional network of companies of that manufacture goods from material recovered locally.
**_Resource Recycling_: When Austin hired you on for a zero waste program, what was one of the first things you did?**
Bob Gedert: The first thing I did was stakeholder meetings to start to gather what the city is doing right and what the city is doing wrong. This was more of a citizen initiative for the City Council, and it felt comfortable adopting zero waste in 2009 because there was enough citizen input and desire for it. What they really needed was how to move the diversion rate from 35 percent to 50 percent to 75 percent diversion.
The second step was committing to writing a master plan. We originally called it a zero waste master plan, but it turned out to be a city department master plan to redesign the department to match the zero waste goals. It's become a strategic plan for the department.
**_RR_: Was there any low-hanging fruit? **
BG: Real simple, the city moved to single-stream recycling before I came in, and the low-hanging fruit was basically getting every container and every site with the proper container sizing for the recyclables. Part of the low-hanging fruit we're still going through is making sure people are effectively using the blue cart. That's the basic building block right there. You have 85 percent of the residents using the blue cart, but are they effectively putting their recyclables in the blue cart?
**_RR_: Are you thinking of doing any incentive program? **
BG: We looked at Recyclebank, and there are a few alternatives out there. Although I like those programs, they don't seem to fit Austin.
Austin is doing recycling not for economic reasons, not to save money, not to have a store coupon. That incentive base is kind of like an externalized incentive base. Austinites have an internal incentive of doing the right thing for the environment, and it translates into water conservation and solid waste and recycling and composting. So, what Austinites need is not an economic incentive; what they need are instructions and services to do the right thing. They have the desire but not the mechanical infrastructure or the knowledge of what to do. The master plan that we have right now is more of an instruction manual.
**_RR_: You have a pilot program for hard to recycle materials like mattresses. How's that coming along? **
BG: We're developing the contracts right now. We hear what stakeholders want, then we start the development of the planning, like in the master plan, then we go back and we kind of announce to the public that this program is up-and-coming.
We are getting close to signing contracts with the management of that program. It would likely go to nonprofit, like Goodwill. We are setting up our routes so that we can collect the mattresses on a separate route and deliver it to the facility. This would be a disassembly facility where they disassemble the parts and recycle it. So far, we've done the due diligence that the program is a legitimate diversion program. I'm always cautious about developing a program and then finding that the material goes to the landfill. So, we're probably going to deploy that program in two months.
**_RR_: You mentioned nonprofits organizations will run the program. Is there a reason? **
BG: In our master plan, and this came up in the stakeholder meetings, there is a certain amount of private sector interest and we believe in public-private partnerships there. There is also a protected nonprofit sector, and they have their service network and we don't want to disrupt it, we want to augment it.
One of the things that we were missing in most of our recycling programs was waste-reduction and reuse elements. The nonprofits have really taken off on the second-hand reuse of material. I want to get more material into the reuse sector, so I'm talking to and negotiating contracts with the nonprofit sector.
**_RR_: You've worked in the Midwest and California and now Texas. How is Texas different from these other places? **
BG: Well, you've got Austin, and you've got Texas. They're two different animals. Texas does not have a state infrastructure for recycling. It doesn't have within its state government any incentives or technical assistance for recycling. It's defaulted to the local community.
So Austin, being a different city than the rest of Texas, the residents take pride in the green image of the city. The residents don't necessarily live a green lifestyle as much as they project it. So, the leadership question is how to get the residents to live the values that they are promoting. You're not pushing the residents to do something they don't want to do; you aren't pushing the residents to do something they want to do.
It's really different than my work and career elsewhere in that these are residents that want to do the right thing, but need the help to get there. In Fresno, California, we moved the diversion rate up from 29 percent to 75 percent, but it was a tug of war to get residents to value that need.
**_RR_: What's been the most difficult thing with trying to Austin to zero waste? **
BG: The most difficult thing is shifting gears between a wasting economy and a resource-management economy. All infrastructure, the working relationships between the private and the public sector, have been based on waste-management techniques. You're managing waste, you're managing waste contracts, and you're managing which facility that material goes to for final disposal. We're shifting to a materials management program that changes the relationships with the players and the economics of who's receiving the contracts. You're diverting material away from the landfill, so you're robbing monetary resources from the landfill to other programs. I'm reshuffling and reprioritizing expenses to a materials management platform. The hardest part of my job is changing that working relationship with the business community.
**_RR_: How big of an obstacle is Texas' lack of infrastructure? **
BG: In a sense, you have no hope of financial assistance or technical assistance from the state, so you build your programs on a self-help basis. You basically build your program from the ground up knowing that it's a local value with local resources and local revenue. So, you have to build your revenue base and you're entire economic base locally. I don't view it as an obstacle; I just view it as a point of reality.
**_RR_: Money is tight. So how do you do this? **
BG: I don't have an external revenue source, no grants. It's all internalized. I have a city budget, and I have to reprioritize the expenses of the city budget. With litter collection, I pay 25 workers each morning to pick up litter, and we send that litter to the landfill. Now we can do an assessment of that litter and find that it's 65 percent recyclable. We move that 65 percent to a recycling service instead of a disposal service and there's an economic savings. The way we have structured our recycling and waste hauling contracts, the city earns money off the recyclables, and therefore we save money by moving that material to a recycling contract and then the money saved allows me to use that for litter abatement.
Another example is I've challenged my routing staff to route our trucks better. We send 200 trucks out on the road every day. The way we do our routes in a smarter way reduces the mileage and reduce the gas and reduces the fuel expense, and the economic savings for this next fiscal year is about a million dollars in fuel savings. From that effort operational efficiency, I saved a million dollars that I dedicated to the reuse program. It seems to be working.
**_RR_: To what extent did you base the zero waste plan on West Coast cities? **
BG: I think very little, actually. West Coast cities get a good push from their state governments. In California, if you're not at 50 percent, you're being charged a fee per day, and the state is pretty serious about it. Oregon and Washington have similar financial mechanisms.
Here in Texas, we don't have any of that guidance from state government, so Austin is doing zero waste in a different way based on what the citizens want. It's a citizen initiative. The citizens brought it to the City Council in 2009, and I meet monthly with the citizens' group. We have stakeholder meetings with specific groups, like the hauler or with restaurants on food collection. We listen to the businesses and the citizens in the area with the mission of diverting as much from incineration and landfill as possible. The structure is really home-grown. It's really a different structure than what you might see in San Jose or the Bay Area.
**_RR_: Do you see any signals that any other Texas or southern cities want to do what you're doing? **
BG: Absolutely. We're planting the seeds. San Antonio is getting very aggressive. They're moving toward zero waste. Fort Worth and Dallas have been discussing it. Dallas, just last week, passed a resolution on zero waste. Fort Worth has been quietly working toward zero waste. Denton is working on it. Brownsville, Corpus Christi. Houston is struggling. But what I'm seeing is a little speckle here and there in interest, and it's not about avoiding cost in a landfill, which is a very low cost in Texas. They're seeing a citizen base that's interested in sustainable living.
**_RR_: Everything's bigger in Texas. Is this true for anything in your job?**
BG: Our citizens tend to not like small pilot projects. I like the pilot projects to learn lessons, but the general working philosophy is to do it city-wide. That's what they did with single-stream. Instead of testing it in a few neighborhoods, they just went city-wide. This is a city that has grown dramatically. We'll hit a million pretty soon. The number one question from new residents is "where is my recycling cart?"
I'm looking at a different type of education campaign where I'm looking at low areas and high areas of education and sort of adjusting education, and the city expressed concern about that I'm not doing it across the city. Everything has to be city-wide.
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