What’s next for city’s Solid Waste Plan

"I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment."

President John F. Kennedy uttered those words in a memorable speech delivered May 25, 1961, during which he also said this: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."

At the time, everyone applauded his determination while, at the same time, thinking such a goal was impossible. Yet, a little more than eight years after he laid down the gauntlet, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, and, of course, returned safely to earth.

The Dallas City Council on Wednesday passed a Solid Waste Management Plan designed to achieve zero waste going to the city’s landfill. Originally the plan called for this goal to be achieved by the year 2040, but Council member Linda Koop successfully added an amendment to the plan that removed this and all other "timelines" contained in the plan. Basically, this gives the city a "do-over."

So where should the city do next?

The city should establish the goals of having a 75 percent diversion rate by the year 2020 and a 100 percent diversion rate by the year 2030.

Too ambitious? Not nearly as ambitious as Kennedy’s "man on the moon" before the end of the 1960s. I know, many of you weren’t alive in 1961. But I was. Television shows were still broadcast in black and white. (1965 was the first year in which more than half of all television shows were broadcast in color.) Not only were there no personal computers in1961, that was the year the IBM Selectric typewriter was introduced. (For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, that was a revolutionary electric typewriter that replaced typing bars with a small sphere). However, most of us continued to use manual, non-electric typewriters. It wasn’t until 1970, a year after man landed on the moon, that Japan introduced the first pocket calculator.

So if President Kennedy could set less than a 10-year timeline for putting a man on the moon in that era, then achieving zero waste in 18years now should be a walk in the park.

The city must also lead by example.

The solid waste plan outlines things all of us must do to achieve zero waste. By all of us I not only mean us as individuals, but us as business owners, apartment owners, manufacturers, etc. If the city really wants "all of us" to follow its plan, it should take some actions to make it accountable.

The first thing the city can and should do immediately is to prohibit all city departments from using public funds to purchase bottled water.

Bottled water costs anywhere from 240 to 10,000 times as much as tap water and tastes no better than Dallas’s pristine tap water. An ounce of bottled water costs more than an ounce of gasoline and everyone these days is complaining about the high cost of gas. According to the Container Recyling Institute, only 20 percent of plastic water bottles are actually recycled; the rest end up in landfills where they take 1,000 years to biodegrade. In addition, large amounts of other resources, like energy, oil and even water are depleted in the bottle manufacturing process and transporting these bottles long distances burns enormous amounts of fossil fuels.

Require all city departments to purchase products that maximize postconsumer recycled content and recyclable or compostable materials, and that favor durability, repairability, and reuse.

Appoint a Zero Waste Coordinator to oversee the city’s diversion efforts and assistant coordinators for each city department. This coordinator should regularly update the City Council on how the city is "leading by example."

Actions the City Council should take immediately are:

An ordinance requiring the entire city to separate recyclables, compostables, and landfill trash.  The city now "asks" residents to separate recyclables, but doesn’t make it mandatory. The time for "asking" has passed and the city should provide composting containers in the same manner it provided the blue recycling containers.

An ordinance requiring the use of compostable plastic, recyclable paper and/or reusable checkout bags by all retail establishments starting October 1, 2015 and requiring these establishments charge a minimum of ten cents per bag. This ordinance should also apply to restaurants starting October 1, 2016.

An ordinance prohibiting restaurants and food vendors from using styrofoam food service ware and instead to use food ware that is compostable or recyclable.

Establish a cigarette litter abatement fee of 20 cents per pack of cigarettes sold in Dallas to recover the cost of abating cigarette litter from city streets, sidewalks, and other public property.

Require Yellow Pages distributors to get the approval, or opt-in agreement of all Dallas residents before delivering phone book directories.

If we could put a man on the moon in the 1960s, surely we can accomplish these aforementioned recommendations now.

GPS got me green again

A little over a month ago, I wrote about my frustrating attempts to recycle. Those frustrations found their way to the City of Dallas and, lo and behold, the city dispatched the great John Barlow to solve the problem. Barlow was one of the principal activists in getting the city's recycling program up and running and now I am fortunate enough to reside in the Sanitation District of which he was recently appointed supervisor.

Barlow looked into why my recycling wasn't being picked up and discovered, by examining the Sanitation Department's recently installed GPS system, that (1) my regular recycling truck driver had been dismissed, (2) his replacement was absent several weeks because of illness and (3) when that driver returned to active duty he neglected to service my alley. Barlow asked me to give recycling another chance.

So right before Christmas I drove back out to that section of the Brazos River where I had dumped "Old  Blue:" and was fortunate enough to find it washed ashore only about 1,000 yards downstream from where I had hurled it. Since then, I have only had enough recycling to place Blue in the alley once, but that one time it was picked up.

I'm not sure that one time constitutes a successful resolution of my problem or even a trend, but I'm bringing it up today because in an hour or so Sanitation Director Mary Nix is going to brief the Dallas City Council on the success of the GPS system she convinced the council to let her install. She originally told the council it would pay for itself in three years. As it turns out, it has almost repaid its cost in its first year of operation.

What the council probably won't hear is that this GPS system also restored me to my place on the recycling bandwagon.

I tried to be a green citizen, but the City of Dallas wouldn't let me

I really wanted to be a heavy-duty recycler. Back in the days before we had roll carts in my hood, we would dutifully place black bags containing the ordinary trash and the blue bags (when we could find them) containing the recycling out in the alley every Tuesday. I normally had three blue bags for every black bag.

Then, earlier this year we got word that we were going to be issued the gray garbage roll carts and the blue recycling roll carts as our hood switched to what was being billed as "One Day Dallas." Since then, the collection service has gone into the pits. Oh, not the garbage. Although I still don't have that much garbage, it does seem that my cart gets emptied every Tuesday.

But not my recycling cart. It started out OK, but has disintegrated into non-existent. Each Monday night, I place my recycling cart in the alleyway. Each Tuesday night, for the last six consecutive weeks, I come home to find it still filled. So I dutifully trot inside to the computer, go to the City of Dallas' Web page and file one of those clumsy 3-1-1 reports. I will say this -- usually within two to three days of filing the report, someone does come by mysteriously and empties the cart. So it is getting picked up, just never on the day it's supposed to be and not without my going to the trouble of filing through 3-1-1. I don't get it. Why can't the recycling crews pick it up when it's scheduled to be picked up?

But I don't care about that anymore, because you really can't -- and I know from years of experience inside and out -- fight City Hall. Sometimes a graceful surrender is in order. So here's my white flag, I'm finished recycling. In my last 3-1-1 report, I instructed whoever reads these things (but knowing City Hall as I do, that's no human being with more than a third-grade intelligence) to please take the blue recycling cart with them when they pick up the recycling sometime this week.

And if they don't take the cart -- if I come home from work to simply find a empty blue cart again -- I'm taking the damn thing to one of my favorite isolated bridges over the Brazos River and casting it over the side. Then, again, I might see if I can just feed it to this thing. Perhaps my one final act of recycling defiance can at least benefit some school kid in Arlington.

San Francisco ups the recycling ante

Within days after a newly elected member of the Dallas City Council wanted to know what the effects would be on raising rates to the McCommas Bluff Landfill, the city of San Francisco is adopting measures to divert all waste from its landfills.

San Francisco is going to be giving its residents three mandatory garbage bins, one for trash, another for recylables (like many [I'm an exception, much to my chagrin] residents in Dallas receive) and a third for compost. Not only that, if residents don't separate correctly, they could be fined, although fines are being suspended until 2011 until residents learn how to separate.

San Francisco's Board of Supervisors (its city council) passed this new ordinance Tuesday night on a 9-2 vote. The goal is to be sending zero waste to landfills by the year 2020. The city already diverts an amazing 72 percent of its residential waste away from landfills and into recycling and composting programs.