Dallas may get a little greener

A while back I wrote about how Dallas likes to consider itself a "green city," which, in reality, it is, but only lima bean green, not forest green. However, the city is proposing what, for Dallas, can be considered an ambitious plan to get a little greener. (Cities like Austin, San Francisco and Los Angeles would call this plan less than "ambitious," but there you have it.)

Mary Nix at McCommas Bluff

Tomorrow, Dallas Sanitation Services Director Mary Nix will present to the City Council’s Transportation and Environment Committee something that is being billed as a "Local Solid Waste Management Plan."

Sounds simple enough and it’s main goal is particularly worthwhile: Eliminating buried waste (i.e., taking trash to landfills) by the year 2040, which seems too far in the future for me. But then I’ll be lucky to be around in 2020 when the goal of the plan is to divert 40 percent of our trash, which is where I would have wanted us to be today. But, like I said, Dallas is only lima bean green.

There is an interesting strategy at work here. Around this time last year, the big argument was over "flow control," a perfectly legal plan in which all the garbage collected within the city had to be taken to a municipal waste disposal facility, either the McCommas Bluff Landfill or the Bachman Transfer Station. That plan narrowly passed, but then private waste haulers, notably Waste Management Inc. (which, incidentally is solidly in favor of flow control, but only after its own landfill is filled), filed suit and a pro-business judge directly disavowed Supreme Court precedents and granted Waste Management an injunction.

With this new "Local Solid Waste Management Plan," the city is not making flow control (now the politically correct term is "resource recovery), a goal, but merely an unmentioned strategy needed to achieve a 100 percent diversion rate three decades from now. The way it’s being phrased now (on Page 15 of Nix’s presentation) is zero waste can be achieved through, among other things, "maximum resource recovery," which will require (although the presentation doesn’t specifically say so) flow control. Then on the next page of the presentation, labled "10 steps recommended in plan to achieve ‘Zero Waste’ status," steps nine and 10 call for the construction of a "Materials Recovery Facility" and to "develop a Resource Recovery Park to convert waste products to energy." We’ve already been told that the only way these two ideals are economically viable is through the implementation of flow control. So even though the words are explicitly mentioned, it’s still the elephant in the room.

But an even larger elephant is directly presented. On Page 17 of her presentation, Nix is going to call for banning the use of plastic bags and Styrofoam cups within the next five years. Why she’s stopping at plastic bags and not all non-reuseable bags as the real green cities have done is hard to figure out. Perhaps she just doesn’t want to push her luck with our obviously reactionary City Council. But it is definitely a step — a major step — in the right direction. The idea was floated not that long ago and was not warmly embraced by those council members.

I’ll be interested to see and hear how the discussion goes in tomorrow’s committee meeting. But perhaps we may begin to color Dallas a slightly deeper shade of green soon.