Zero Waste

E: The Environmental Magazine, March, 2001 by Jim Motavalli

No Longer Content to Just Recycle Waste, Environmentalists Want Us to Reduce it to Nothing

On October 18, the nation's most colorful governor, Jesse Venture of Minnesota, took the podium at the Riverfront Radisson in St. Paul and announced a radical new program to reduce the state's waste stream. For the next five years, he said, Sony Electronics had agreed to fund a program that will take back for recycling any and all outdated Sony products currently in the hands of state consumers.

Though Minnesota has not, like Massachusetts, banned TV and computer cathode ray tubes (CRTs) from its landfills, Tony Hainault of the state Office of Environmental Assistance says there has long been sentiment there to get old electronics out of the waste stream. "CRTs are the largest source of lead in the municipal waste stream" he says, "and printed circuit boards are the second." In a one-year program ending last year, Minnesota collected and recycled nearly 600 tons of used electronics.

Sony's program, which will spread to five other states in 2001, is the first of its kind in the United States. But such examples of Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) are business-as-usual throughout Europe, where the concept of legislatively mandating manufacturers to take responsibility for the waste they create has taken firm root. For a determined group of environmentalists, Sony's voluntary initiative was the first success of many in what they see as a developing national movement toward zero waste. The phrase is not to be taken literally, but as a goal that emphasizes source reduction ahead of managing waste.

Recycling is America's favorite environmental activity--100 million of us do it every day--but while there have been dramatic successes in many areas, overall recycling rates have declined slightly. An impressive 53 percent of plastic soda bottles were recycled in 1994, but only 35.6 percent in 1998. So why are these environmentalists so confident? Because, they believe, reducing the waste stream to a mere trickle is in everybody's interests, even benefiting the very corporations that have been screaming the loudest about the burden of recycling. Sony's president and chief operating officer, Fujio Nishida, showed considerable foresight when he declared, "Taking back and recycling products helps Sony design future devices that cost less to manufacture and help save our precious natural resources. It's a win-win situation."

"Where should we aim after 2000?" asks Gary Liss, a California-based zero waste consultant. "Do we stop at 35 percent or 50 percent recycling and build landfills and incinerators to handle the rest of our waste? Or do we continue to build on the tremendous success of the past decade and work to eliminate waste at the source?"

A Powerful Push

As a concept, zero waste has come a long way in a very short time. Eric Lombardi, executive director of Boulder, Colorado's very successful Eco-Cycle recycling program, says that the current U.S. movement grew out of heated board discussions in the early 1990s at the mainstream National Recycling Coalition (which has corporate membership). "Half the group saw the value of the European EPR model and half did not," Lombardi said. "We'd say that corporations should use 25 percent recycled content in their products, and they'd reply that it wasn't economically feasible. Ultimately, we decided that coalitions are not a great place for getting anything done."

That experience led directly to the formation in 1996 of the GrassRoots Recycling Network (GRRN) as the U.S. advocate for zero waste. "We needed a group that wouldn't get bogged down, that was free to push the envelope" Lombardi says. And pushing the envelope is exactly what GRRN does. The group's national coordinator, Bill Sheehan, has led the network in a protracted and effective campaign directed at Coca-Cola, which made--and failed to keep--a 1990 promise to use 25 percent post-consumer waste in its plastic beverage bottles. While Coke has not capitulated, it has agreed to use 10 percent recycled content in a quarter of its bottles, making 2.5 percent total content.

Further pressure on both Coke and Pepsi is coming from a group of socially responsible investors, including Walden Asset Management and the As You Sow Foundation. The shareholders filed a resolution in late November asking the companies to not only use 25 percent recycled content in their bottles, but also to put their weight behind recycling programs to achieve an 80 percent recycling rate for their beverage containers (two out of three of which are now landfilled).

"Zero waste is about challenging the ruling paradigm that says we can manage waste safely in landfills and incinerators" Sheehan says. "All the elements of a zero waste system are there, and it's a question of bringing them together. We believe that some public officials will get the vision and start piecing it together."

One city that seems to be "getting it" is Seattle, which in 1998 adopted zero waste as a guiding principle in its solid waste plan. "This principle entails managing resources instead of waste" the city said in a resolution, "conserving natural resources through waste prevention and recycling; turning discarded resources into jobs and new products instead of trash; promoting products and materials that are durable; and discouraging products and materials that can only become trash after their use" Two California counties have also adopted zero waste goals, as has Carrboro, North Carolina.